Warning: Mailchimp Ahead

Discussions
#1

I’ve been seeing this more and more lately with Mailchimp.

I like an article, decide to subscribe to the author. And then bam! I’m hit with a captcha.

I find this quite insulting. I’m joining your email list so you can sell to me, and you treat me like a spammer? Fine then, I’ll just leave.

And it’s always with Mailchimp. Mailchimp has this idiotic policy where stopping any potential spammers is more important than anything else, even if you are turning away honest people. Far as I can see from their docs, there is no way to turn it off.

I dumped Mailchimp a year ago and haven’t looked back. It’s sad to see other people losing subscribers and not even knowing about it.

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#2

Who do you use now? I’m currently looking for a better mailing list provider.

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#3

MailerLite is simple and affordable.

#4

I moved to Aweber. After Mailchimp’s horrible customer service (I was on their paid plan, and it still sucked), Aweber is a breath of fresh air. They answer any queries very quickly, and are willing to make changes for you.

Mailchimp has a My Way or the Highway approach.

For the cool kids, the new players are Convertkit and Drip. Both’s main selling point is that they are focussed on drip campaigns. I never understood the use of drip emails (as compared to a normal autoresponder sequence) (yes, I know the theory, you can segment your customers blah blah blah. Still dont see how it helps me). Both of these services are also more expensive than others.

Like @pjc said, I’ve seen many people recommend Mailerlite, though I havent used them.

For me, great customer service was the killer feature, and no one beats Aweber there.

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#5

Are they treating you as a spammer, or protecting your email address from spam? Isn’t preventing your email address being entered into signup forms by robots a good thing for you?

#6

In the 20 years I’ve been using the Internet, no one has ever entered my email into a signup form.

And even if they did- Mailchimp has double opt in (another useless feature you can’t turn off).

And even if a kind robot clicked the subscribe button for me, I can always unsubscribe.

The main point still hasn’t changed: When I sign up on Your email list, I expect you will sell to me. Giving someone your email is a special privilege- I dont signup for 90% of the sites I visit. So treating me like a spammer is a good way to piss me off.

Mailchimp have already decided that stopping spammers is more important than good customer service for them. They would rather turn away a 100 good people than let one bot through. If you are okay with those odds, good for you.

As for me, I’m done with Mailchimp. And I will absolutely not signup to your list if you make me answer a captcha.

#7

Is there any good mailing list provider that charges for amount of emails sent?

Our list is too big for free plans (over 2500) but we are going to send one email in 2-3 months, so a monthly fee would be wasteful.

#8

MailChimp offers a Pay As You Go plan:

#9

Thank you, I completely missed this switch in their pricing. Unfortunately it’s too expensive like everything at MailChimp.

Price per email is $0.02-0.03, so 5,000 emails will cost $100.00. I can get Sendinblue Micro for $7.37/m for 40,000 emails and it will be considerably cheaper even with a single newsletter in 3 months.

Probably it’s also possible to downgrade for not active months.

UPD: oh, I just found the same switch in Sendinblue. It’s $27 for 5,000.

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#10

So I tried SendinBlue. They made me confirm my email, my phone, my signup pages etc.

Then I sent out a campaign, and they sent an email saying my statistics were too low, and accused me of buying my list. This was after I had shown them my signup page.

And then they kindly gave me an option: They would allow me to use their system if I upgraded to a much more expensive tier.

Man, I feel insulted. First you accuse me of being a spammer, then you want me to give you more money?

I just realised something. The reason Mailchimp and companies like Sendiblue are cheap because no one would pay to be treated like that. (Except Mailchimp isn’t even cheap when you move to their paid tiers).

Im sticking to Aweber for now. Evidently, treating your customers with respect is a rare thing nowadays, something not covered in all those growth hacking manuals.

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#11

If you have the time and/or inclination, Sendy.co may be an option. You have to purchase a license ($59), install it on your own server and tie it to your Amazon AWS SES account (if you have one). It will use SMTP but that’s an afterthought etc. I do use Drip for automating stuff but I use my Sendy install for other stuff that gets periodic email blasts. It does have simple auto responser stuff etc.

The downside is you install it, look after it and back it up etc. So YMMV etc.

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#12

Thanks for the tip, I decided not to wait until Sendinblue will burn me and switched to https://moosend.com

They have a very nice UI and decent pay-as-you-go plans. Got a “small business” feeling overall and automatically trusted them (yes, I’m biased!).

#13

Thanks for your recommendation. I’ve been testing MailerLite for a couple of days and it’s so much better than MailChimp.

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#14

I’d recommend MailGun and your own mail list app - there are plenty scripts and WP plugins for mail sending that will work well with any SMTP provider - see MailPoet, Arigato and so on.

#15

Thank you but I can’t use non-turnkey solutions because of the amount of time consumed by DevOps and the site in general… I’m an app and game developer after all – everything around backend is hard for me.