3 ways to save on your Mailchimp subscription

None of us like to spend more money than we have to. Even although the ROI with email marketing is generally overwhelmingly positive, most of us still wouldn’t want to pay more than we have to for email marketing.

In Mailchimp, each subscribed email address we have in our lists counts towards what we pay for our subscription (unsubscribed and cleaned email addresses don’t count). Mailchimp offer a very good free account which isn’t charged for the first 2,000 subscribers. Once we exceed 2,000 subscribers then Mailchimp will recommend that we move to a monthly subscription.

I often get asked by clients how they may reduce their Mailchimp subscription. Here are the three easiest ways to reduce the amount you pay to Mailchimp each month. Using the simple cost saving measures below recently saved an Australian client of mine over $240 per month (with no adverse effect on their conversions and sales).

Save 10% off Mailchimp immediately

Mailchimp will give you 10% off your monthly subscription by increasing your account security. As crazy as it seems, by protecting your security, Mailchimp gives you a 10% discount. All you need to do is enable two-factor authentication for your Mailchimp account. Once enabled you’ll use an app such as Authy or Google Authenticator on your computer or phone.

Remove duplicate contacts to save money

As noted above, Mailchimp bills for each subscribed email address you have in your lists. As an email address must be unique in each list it makes sense to have a single Mailchimp list. Your single Mailchimp list may then be segmented so that you may target subscribers with distinct similarities. For example if you have the city for each subscriber then you can easily segment your list by city such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast and so on.
In Mailchimp training, as soon as I mention that we should only have one list many attendees say that it wouldn’t be possible for them to operate with a single list. By the end of training these same attendees are adamant that only one list is definitely the easiest and most efficient means of managing subscribers.

Stop paying for low quality subscribers

Mailchimp calculates a contact rating (also called a member rating) for every one of your subscribers. New subscribers are given a rating of two on a scale of one to five. As a contact opens, clicks and engages more with your campaigns so their rating goes up. If a subscriber doesn’t engage with your campaigns then they will be shown with a rating of one star.

Deleting the one star rated contacts from your list can save you considerable money if you have a large number of subscribers. Best practice is to send all subscribers that haven’t opened a campaign for three months and have a one-star rating a re-engagement campaign. If they don’t respond to that campaign then it may be worth deleting that subscriber.

The above three tasks are the simplest way to save money on your Mailchimp subscription. If you need assistance then hire me or attend my Mailchimp training.