Why I switched from MailChimp to Mad Mimi

A couple of days ago I switched from MailChimp to Mad Mimi for my email list.

MailChimp is likely to be more well known than the smaller Mad Mimi and may seem more professional for a Very Serious Business Person. Though the reason why I had previously selected MailChimp wasn't cause I was Very Serious or because it's more well known. For me their free account at that moment seemed better. I was being cheap and that was a mistake.

What happened?

I was doing fine with MailChimp for a while. I sent a bunch of emails, managed my lists, tweaked the forms and thank you emails and so forth.

But when my blog got more traffic and more spammers started to hang about my MailChimp-list got off my hands. The spammers had found a way around the two-step opt-in and where flooding my list. This wouldn't have been a problem if there hasn't been this strange behaviour with MailChimp: It didn't let me bulk delete these bots from the list. I would have had to delete them one by one. And there was way too many to do this.

The reason why I want to delete the spammers of my list is that letting them stick around would cost me eventually. These services are usually priced by the list size, eg. how many subscribers each list has.

I didn't know why I wasn't able to bulk delete these bots, so I contacted MailChimp support. First I got a very clear copy+paste-reply. It stated that one cannot do bulk updates to a list during the next 7 days after sending an email. Huge problem, since I was sending email every Wednesday.

Okay, so it was the spam, right?

I replied explaining that this isn't good, cause I have so many spammers on the list and deleting them one by one would be way too much work. Besides I was annoyed that there was this spam problem in general.

I got a lengthy reply stating the same facts about not being able to clean the list within 7 days from sending an email and all that. But hey, good news I would be able to add captcha (NO!!!) to my subscribing steps with Wufoo. The person replying me didn't mention this might end up costing me fun extra. That's in case I'd like more than 3 forms, more than 100 entries a month and no ads.

But the part that really sent me out of the doors was this person saying there doesn't seem to be so many spammers on my list and I could go through them one by one very easily. At that point there were 30 to 40 very clear spammers on the list.

Because of this part of the reply I decided to go back with Mad Mimi, which I had tried before. I wanted to test the pro features of the service (the drip campaigns mostly), so 10 USD a month didn't seem so bad (MailChimp has drip campaigns too but they are more expensive). And I would be able to downgrade any time I wanted in case it wouldn't work out for me.

Yup, I didn't only change the service, but I also started to pay this new one. Somehow MailChimp had never made me want to pay, not only because of their pricing.

Is it better with Mad Mimi now?

In short, yes. So far at least.

Mad Mimi doesn't seem to be as easy for the spammers (perhaps because it's less known?) to get around the two-step opt-in. Actually I could turn the two-step opt-in off at Mad Mimi if I'd like to, but obviously I don't.

There is a free plan, if I'll decide I won't need the pro features in future. I can downgrade at any point I want. Currently I think the pricing is more fair than with other similar services.

And there's something about the way the service looks in general. It has this touch of I-made-this, which I happen to like. And it's very easy to use. With MailChimp I was completely lost all the time.

Creating a new email with Mad Mimi feels very simple too and the built-in forms are attractive (to me). Cause they are simple.

There's also an automatic Suppression List, which includes all the bounced, unsubscribed and unconfirmed email addresses. This includes the spammers that haven't finalized their opt-in. Suppressed emails don't count towards your real, confirmed subscribers.

And there's this fun little feature: In case somehow someone who wasn't intended to receive the emails would get them and clicked through the links, I can choose them to be added to the list as well. The stuff on my emails is exclusively for my subscribers, after all.

It's not perfect. The Plain Embed form wasn't working great with my site, so I had to clean it up a bit. This wasn't really a problem for me, but anyone with less tech skills might panic at this time. MailChimp has segmenting of subscribers, which unfortunately seems not to be available on Mad Mimi.

With those little things I still like it better right now. Let's see how it goes!

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