Chris is not alone. For one, free trials can be addictive. Second, email marketing is probably worth spending on. It’s no wonder Mailchimp is valued at north of 10 Billion dollars!
Now any content marketer worth their salt has heard of the Campaign Monitor study opined that every dollar spent on the right email marketing campaign realized a $44 return (or 4400% ROI). It’s one of those most quoted (or misquoted?) stats.
Marketing genius or otherwise, Businesses of all sizes today know the immense impact of email marketing on their bottom line. And effective email marketing is impossible without good email marketing software. Enter Mailchimp.
Mailchimp is excellent for creating and sending out email campaigns. It’s straightforward to use, saves valuable time, and handles contact lists and campaign analyses well. Its transparent campaigns feature email tracking, click-through tracking, custom reports, and subscriber and un-subscriber management that users love. You can also use built-in templates or create your own to meet your needs.
In addition to helping bring it more revenue, Mailchimp helps brands achieve other goals, including improving brand positioning and enhancing customer relationships.
The more subscribers you have on MarTech stack tools like Mailchimp, the higher your spending. The cheap-on-the-surface pricing masks the fact that the subscription cost of Mailchimp can quickly exceed projections. This guide will help you save Mailchimp license costs while enjoying the unique marketing experience it offers.
Key Points (Ergo, the tldr)
- Mailchimp offers a free plan and three paid licenses. Mailchimp’s free subscription restricts users to 500 contacts and 2,500 monthly emails. Customers can’t access most analytics features, optimization, research tools, and have limited customer support.
- For improved features and services, you’ll need to purchase one of Mailchimp’s paid plans: Essentials, Standard, or Premium.
- Since Mailchimp charges on a per-subscriber basis, your license costs could rise significantly as your subscribers grow.
- To save costs, you’ll want to leverage Quolum’s SaaS procurement platform to use data to right-size your spend on mailchimp.
Mailchimp Pricing Guide
You likely found this article by searching “how much is Mailchimp?” or “how much does Mailchimp cost?”. You need to know first that there are four distinct Mailchimp pricing tiers.
The basic Free plan is available for $0 per month. Yes! You pay nothing to reach an audience of no more than 500 contacts. But besides Mailchimp’s free plan, there are three premium payment plans: Essentials, Standard, and Premium.
The following is a visual summary of Mailchimp’s price structure:
| Mailchimp Plan | Price (per month) |
| Free | $0 |
| Essentials | $13 |
| Standard | $20 |
| Premium | $350 |
While this tells you what you’ll pay for each monthly plan, you’ll still need details to decide if a plan suits your needs. The paid plans are generally preferable, but to quote that timeless line from George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, “some are more equal than others.”
There’s a trial period of 30 days for all three paid plans if you prefer to have a test ride first. We’ll now explore in detail each class of email marketing service from Mailchimp.
Mailchimp Free Plan
Free is good, yet many times free comes with a snag. At $0 per month, Mailchimp’s Free plan sounds like a great bargain, and it is if you’re checking out the service to see if it works for you or if you need no more than basic tools and features.
Mailchimp’s limit on free emails kicks in at 500 subscribers. To service an audience that’s larger than this, you need to upgrade to one of the premium service tiers because once you cross this threshold, you’ll lose access to test emails and live campaigns.
Besides the 500-contact ceiling, the Free plan also limits users to a maximum monthly email count of 2,500. Even then, there’s a daily email cap of 500. In other words, a user is limited to sending only 500 emails per day. It works out to only being able to send emails to your contacts five days a month (5 x 500 = 2,500). It’s a bargain if that’s all you need!
However, every business owner knows it’s wise to anticipate growth. Mailchimp’s paid plans guarantee that if it becomes necessary to communicate more campaigns to your contacts during the month or your contact database grows beyond your projections, your email SaaS is prepared to handle it.
One other area where the Mailchimp Free plan provides limited service is email support. A customer on this plan can only access the platform’s support system for the first 30 days. Besides limited email support, Mailchimp’s Free plan does not offer phone or chat support.
Modern email marketing tools offer all kinds of experiences in users’ inboxes. They make campaigns more intuitive and competitive, and themes are central to this. But, a free user of the Mailchimp service only has access to the basic templates necessary for an effective campaign. However, you’ll still enjoy 1-click automation on the plan.
Mailchimp’s 1-click automation feature allows users to quickly create automated emails and targeted campaigns based on responses from customers.
One other feature of Mailchimp’s Free plan, although still limited, is access to the Essentials analytic and reporting tools. These are necessary to measure and track campaign effectiveness. However, opting for a paid license to implement these tools is better for business goals and growth.
Mailchimp Essentials Plan
Contact count often determines what a customer will pay with Mailchimp. Yet, while Mailchimp’s Essentials license costs $13 monthly, its offering is a gulf apart from the Free plan. It offers significant capacity enhancement to service up to 50,000 contacts, a decent maximum for many small businesses.
This ability to email several contacts simultaneously means you can send out 500,000 emails monthly. It works out to a potential ten emails to every subscriber that may result in a sale, download, or other conversions. The Essentials plan allows you to segment subscribers into three unique lists.
Signing up for an Essentials license means a company may assign a group of three – an owner and two other admins – to oversee campaigns and newsletter duties. Each person could be primarily responsible for one of the lists.
This plan also enables users to schedule email campaigns and allows access to all of Mailchimp’s email templates.
Besides robust analytics features, the Essentials plan offers A/B testing – an integral component of meaningful email marketing.
Having more campaigns means a user is likely to experience more technical challenges. However, there’s nothing to worry about if you’re on the Essentials plan. You’ll receive full and prompt email and chat support whenever needed.
Mailchimp Standard Plan
The plan above Essentials on the Mailchimp rung is called Standard.
This plan’s $20 flat rate allows users to send a whopping 1.2 million emails monthly. This high count is to serve a maximum contact limit of 100,000 and is suitable for anticipated business growth.
The Standard plan affords user list segmentation for up to five audiences, with Viewer, Author, Admin, or Owner designations.
It includes ad retargeting, an essential tool in lead generation and conversion. There’s more, though. Besides a full-feature campaign manager to help design and implement campaigns that work, you can optimize email send time in this Mailchimp plan.
The actual business value of the Mailchimp Standard plan is that it provides a vivid outline of the customer or buyer journey in contrast to the Essentials and Free plans. There are at least 100 journey points with adequate complementary if-else branching logic to help qualify leads with greater precision.
Every email template in the Essentials plan is available in Standard. But again, the latter gives users more control by letting them define and tweak custom templates that work better for their marketing.
Naturally, the same level of email and chat support available to Essentials customers is available to those on the Standard plan. However, Essentials subscribers can’t phone in to resolve any issues.
Customers on the Standard plan also enjoy comparative reporting and multivariate testing.
Mailchimp Premium Plan
The peak tier of paid Mailchimp offerings is the $350/month Premium plan. For this sum, your business can send a whopping three million emails to up to 200,000 contacts. It translates to 15 emails per contact per month if you have that many subscribers. If you’re someone like me and you receive that many emails, here’s how I would react:
Unlike other plans Premium provides advanced segmentation, A/B testing, and multivariate testing to ensure campaigns have a higher chance of succeeding.
To leverage such detailed segmentation, customers can create unlimited lists and curate marketing messages for each audience. It usually depends on where customers are on the buyer journey.
In terms of who can access and work within a Premium account, nearly everyone in your organization can participate because the plan offers an unlimited number of seats along with appropriate role designations.
Comprehensive chat, email, and phone support are exclusively available to Premium plan customers. There’s even more support available via the Glances app. Depending on your billing and compliance profile, priority support is always available to you as a Premium plan customer.
How to Save Money on Mailchimp Subscriptions
Now that you know what all three paid Mailchimp plans offer, you’re probably wondering if there’s any way to access those premium features for less. You will be happy to know that there is! While Mailchimp’s premium plans might seem like a strain on your budget, they are a no-brainer investment for many startups.
There are account security and non-profit discounts for qualifying accounts. For for-profit organizations, it’s advisable to tailor your subscription plans to the current subscriber count. In other words, regardless of your subscriber projections, it’s best to pay for the number of contacts you have now.
The challenge in this approach is that you may be dealing with a smaller number of high-quality leads than you might be aware of. The reason is that inactive and low-quality contacts may exaggerate your subscriber count and value. Thankfully, you can track subscriber engagement using time series analysis to more accurately measure who’s inactive daily, weekly, or monthly.
The Quolum SaaS management dashboard helps you weed out unqualified contacts on your list(s) and enables you to provide high-quality marketing only to contacts who care about your messaging.
Save Money on Mailchimp Licenses With Quolum
Choosing Quolum for your Mailchimp SaaS management means you’ll get:
- A team that helps you buy just the subscription you need, saving you upwards of 30 percent on Mailchimp licensing and ample time you would have spent on procurement.
- Automatic SaaS purchasing invoicing that makes your accounting easier.
Since Quolum uses detailed data analysis to determine the best Mailchimp subscription plan to renew, you spend just what you need for the current month and save funds to support other aspects of your business.
Quolum uses state-of-the-art analytical tools to assess your real-time MailChimp usage. We track your email subscriber list and inactive accounts, ensuring you pay the right amount on every renewal. The best part? This analysis can be done with just one click via Quolum’s unique integrations.
Quolum also examines duplicates within your firm’s SaaS tech stack, preventing overlaps on other email marketing tools. So today if you’re engaging in a SaaSacre (or that’s what we hear in these bad times), you may opt for alternatives like Sendinblue, Elasticemail, Mailjet or many more!
If you’re looking for a comprehensive yet intuitive SaaS purchase management solution that saves you money and optimizes your marketing for scale, Quolum is the solution you need. It’s a data-driven solution that lowers marketing SaaS spending. You can significantly improve returns on your long-term Mailchimp subscription spending by choosing Quolum today. Talk to one of our savings experts here to find out more.
FAQs
How many emails can I send with Mailchimp for free?
The Mailchimp Free account limits you to only 500 emails per day and no more than 2,500 per month.
How does Mailchimp billing work?
Mailchimp bills paying subscribers on a monthly cycle. The Mailchimp Essentials plan costs $13, whereas the Mailchimp Standard and Premium plans cost $20 and $350, respectively, per month.
How can I save money on Mailchimp paid plans?
Saving money on Mailchimp is easy if you track qualified contacts on your list and only sign up for a plan that caters to that many contacts. You should also sign up for a paid plan with features you’ll need and use. Quolum is a nifty service that helps customers make the most of their paid Mailchimp subscriptions.