Mailchimp: 8 tips to improving your return on investment
No organisation wants to be paying out more than necessary, and like every other aspect of your business Mailchimp needs to provide return on investment. Here are some key things to think about to make sure you’re optimising yours.
Mailchimp’s costs are based on two factors:
The type of plan you’re on and the features that gives you access to.
The number of contacts in your account. This usually includes subscribers (who you can send emails to), unsubscribers (who have withdrawn their permission and can’t receive campaigns) and sometimes non-subscribed/transactional contacts (who can receive e.g. abandoned cart and follow-on purchase automations but not marketing emails).
Ultimately, unless you have a free account with a small audience, every single contact in your account has a cost “per head” by being in there:
For example, if you have 2,500 contacts in your account and are on Essentials at £35.62 pcm (plus tax), the total annual cost is around £512.93. That means that each person in your audience costs you about 21p a year.
Not much is it? Especially when you compare that to the potential income associated with every single one of those people in your audience.
But costs add up, especially if you need to tighten your belt or if you’ve got a LOT of contacts in Mailchimp, and it makes sense that your account therefore needs to generate MORE than that cost per head in revenue to justify it.
And if you want to look at it deeper, add onto that the cost of staff time to manage the email marketing. You might be taking a run-up and growing your list ready for it to start paying, but it’s always worth having that in mind for the end game.
Here are my top 8 tips to improving the ROI from your Mailchimp account
/1. Do you know what the ROI for your Mailchimp account is?
It’s very rare that I start to work with a client who can answer this but it is incredibly worthwhile spending a bit of time setting up a quick spreadsheet to monitor it.
If you have an online shop integrated into Mailchimp, your life is made easier because you can see the total revenue generated figures pulling through but that’s often not the case for lots of businesses. Either way, here are the absolute most basic things you might want to keep track of (you can go into way more depth but you really should know at least these things):
Mailchimp total fees for the year
Number of contacts
Cost per contact
Income directly and indirectly generated by Mailchimp emails (these might be online sales or enquiries, leads, bookings and associated sales)
Revenue per contact.
/2. Are you actually sending out any emails?
Now this might sound like I’m stating the totally-bloody-obvious, but I’ve lost count of the number of businesses I’ve worked with over the years which have been paying for Mailchimp month-in-month-out (sometimes year-in-year-out) and not actually been using it to send any emails or automations at all. If you don’t use it to send campaigns, it can’t generate you any revenue. In 2023 I started working with a client that had been paying £6,500 in Mailchimp fees every year and only used it to send ONE email every 12 months to let their audience know when they were shut over Christmas. That email didn’t even have a call to action.
So if you’ve not used Mailchimp to send anything for months but are paying for it, for goodness’ sake send an email (but speak to me first because your data will be out of date and can cause an issue if lots of emails bounce).
/3. Are you on the correct Mailchimp plan?
Mailchimp has 6 different types of plan with varying features:
Free
Essentials
Standard
Premium
Marketing - these are old legacy plans that are no longer offered
Custom (for huge audiences)
They have different features and different price tags attached. It’s not uncommon for me to start working with a new client to discover they’re paying for a higher plan than they need. For example, do you have Standard but aren’t actually using any of the additional features? It might be worth reducing your plan to Essentials OR exploring the extra features to see if they will generate you extra revenue.
Similarly, the free plan may not actually be the best option for you if it’s a) limiting your marketing potential because e.g. you can’t send a welcome or abandoned cart automation, or b) meaning that you have to use time-consuming work-arounds which could be done in a fraction of the time by upgrading, allowing you to spend that time generating income.
So take a look at exactly what you’re on at the moment, whether you’re using the features, or might achieve a higher ROI by upgrading. Going back to those cost-per-head figures above, upgrading from Essentials to Standard only increases it by 7p contact per year but it opens up so many more features that can help you to generate revenue.
And if you’re on a Marketing (legacy) plan, it’s sometimes cheaper to just switch to a new-style plan without any loss of functionality.
/4. Do your contacts need a good tidy up?
This is a big subject in itself - contact management and tidying up messy audiences takes up a big part of my working life. Here are a few things to consider:
A) As I mentioned above, the the vast majority of accounts, the number of contacts you pay for includes unsubscribers (who you can’t email) and in some cases transactional contacts if your Mailchimp account is integrated with an online store.
With the odd exception, there is rarely any point paying for contacts to be in your account who you can’t send emails to. So unless you are making good use of ecomm related automations, archive your unsubscribers. And do this regularly. When you remove them from your active audiences you stop paying for them.
B) If you have multiple audiences, it’s often very likely that you can reduce your headcount and fees by amalgamating and them and removing duplicate contacts. It’s not always the right solution, but very often is. I’ve recently worked with a large charity and was able to reduce its annual Mailchimp fees from £23,412 to £8,560 simply by doing this.
C) Get rid of disengaged contacts If someone hasn’t opened an email from you OR been a customer OR been in touch for years, why are you paying for them to be in your audience? Identify and archive.
D) if you’re just over a contact band, check to see if it’s more cost effective to tidy some up, pay for an overage contact block or move up to the next contact band.
/5. Are you making use of automations?
If you’re on anything but a free account you have access to automations / customer journeys in Mailchimp. Use them. For example:
welcome email with attractive call to action
abandoned cart email
“we’ve not heard from you for a while, have you seen this?”
“this time last year you came to our webinar / had some training - lots has changed since then, can we help?”.
“this time last year you bought a thingy - does it still fit?”
“it’s your birthday, here’s a voucher”.
Put your thinking cap on and get creative. If you don’t have them running, they can’t generate revenue for you.
/6. Is the design and content of your Mailchimp campaigns holding you back?
I realise it takes time to create and send an email and can feel low on your to do list. Make it easy on yourself by keeping your emails short and sweet and just send the damn email. Mailchimp simply can’t provide an ROI if you don’t. If the email is short it’s more likely to get read AND and the call to action (think shiny button with the #1 thing you want someone to do when they open your) will be nice and near the top of your email and more likely to be acted on.
/7. Are you getting your money’s worth by using these other features?
You may as well get your money’s worth so check out these:
Multivariate testing (helps you find the sender / subject line / content that generates the highest ROI)
Segmentation (helps you be super-specific with your messaging for greater relevance, engagement and return)
Campaign planner (helps you fit your email campaigns into your bigger marketing picture)
Landing pages (useful for specific campaign data collection when your website is either not capable or your web team is not available or costs too much)
Analytics.
/8. Have you ever asked for help?
Like anything, DIY can only take you so far. If you really want to improve your ROI using Mailchimp by tapping into Mailchimp’s potential and maybe even reducing costs, ask an expert. There are lots on Mailchimp’s website or you can get in touch with me right here.