For the last few months, I have been travelling up and down the county running one-to-one MailChimp workshops. MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms that's currently available. The platform is especially of interest to small and medium sized businesses.
Due to the fact that businesses don't have to pay for their campaigns until their reach 500 subscribers, marketeers like to use MailChimp as a way of introducing email marketing to their overall marketing mix.
I personally like MailChimp because of its intuitive user interface. Creating responsive email marketing templates is very straight forward.
Another big player in the email marketing sector is Campaign Monitor. It's an alternative to the overstylish MailChimp and provides more detailed statistics. Especially the interactive map which becomes active once a campaign has been sent is quite addictive. Campaign Monitor encourages the user to create mailers by using their templates. I personally find this a bit too restrictive but many users will disagree.
Both platforms offer the same functionalities when it comes to list management, segmentation and grouping. Campaign Monitor provides a more professional looking display of the campaign statistics. The main difference between the two is how they deal with unsubscribers. MailChimp takes an agency approach which means a reader unsubscribing from list A won't be unsubscribed from list B. Campaign Monitor takes a single user approach. Unsuscribing a reader from list A will also unsubscribe him/her from list B. This is worth keeping in mind when deciding what software to use.
I also need to mention that Campaign Monitor does not offer a free service. Prices start from 9GBP per month for a total list of 500 subscribers.
At the end of the day, it does not really matter what email marketing software you'll decide to use. The important thing is the message you are communicating to your customers and the design chosen for your mailer.
If you would like to take part in a MailChimp workshop or a Campaign Monitor workshop, feel free to contact me.