The internet has been paying my bills for over a decade, and in that time i’ve seen email marketing tools come and go. From open source to paid, there have been massive developments in the space over the past few years, and now the choices are greater than ever. Recently, however, I took the step to migrate all my email marketing lists (double opt in of course!) to Mad Mimi, a fantastically easy web app for managing email lists. Here’s why.
First of all, Mad Mimi is insanely simple to use. After migrating my lists over to Mad Mimi (also stupidly simple), I had one of our website managers trained in about ten minutes. It really is that simple to use. Every single button is where it should be, the workflow is perfect, and if you mess up at any point along the way, it’s easy to go back a step and make changes.
Mad Mimi comes with a variety of templates by default which are simple to customise. You simply point and click to select new colours, upload a header for your emails (or multiple headers), the app resizes the headers to fit, and you’re good to go. It’s possible to customise and save as many templates as you wish – total presentation flexibility.
Throughout the app, two main tabs have pride of place – ‘Promotions’ and ‘Audience’. The ‘Promotions’ tab allows you to create, edit, and most importantly clone emails, and also view extensive stats on each mailing (more about that later). The ‘Audience’ tab allows you to view subscriber figures, and if your ego needs a boost, it shows you at a glance how many new subscribers you’ve gained since the last time you’ve logged in.
When viewing your list of promotions (or mailings), you’ll see a list of links for each mailing: Scheduling, Send, Edit, Clone, View, Stats, and Delete.
Send, edit, and view are pretty much self explanatory. You use these to send, edit, or view the mailing.
Scheduling allows you to schedule the mailing for any point in the future – super handy for getting future mailings ready when you have time, and letting the Mad Mimi app take care of the delivery when the time comes.
The clone feature allows you to clone previous mailings – this saves soooo much time, it’s hard to get across unless you start to use the app regularly. It’s such a simple feature that most other mailing list management solutions don’t have, but it’s incredibly important.
Now we get to the stats link. Click on this, and you’ll get a lovely pie chart showing you at a glance how that mailing went. You’ll see open rates, click tracking stats (you can opt to switch this off, but why would you?), the number of times the mail was forwarded on (hello viral happiness!), the number of bounces (bounced email addresses are removed automatically), and critically the number of members who unsubscribed from your list after opening this particular mailing. See? Everything for the stat hungry marketeer.
As well as all of that, you can opt to switch on extra tools – some paid and some free. The include a ‘drip feed’ feature, to automatically send subscribers a set of pre defined emails at specific time increments after signing up with you. A multi-user feature allows you to add extra users to mange particular lists, or a particular set of lists. An RSS to email feature automatically creates mailshots at specific time intervals, parsed from RSS feeds – really handy for news websites, or if you’ve a regularly updated special offers blog.
Obviously you can create web forms to handle signups, and once again creating a web form is super simple. If the built in stats aren’t enough, a simple integration with Google Analytics is possible. Mad Mimi also have a Mailer Api if you’d like the system to handle registration emails for an app of your choosing, or even ‘lost password’ emails.
There you have it! Mad Mimi is the best email marketing tool i’ve ever seen. The best part? You can try it out for yourself for free - click here to give it a go.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Hugh,
I have recently started on a project http://www.startups.ie the aim of the site is to provide real advice, stories and actually useful information for anyone looking to start a business in Ireland. I am pretty new to working online and would be very grateful of any tips advice etc. you seem to be involved in a lot of sites. I am also looking for people to collaborte with on blogs, links etc. Let me know what you think,
Cheers,
Stephen
Totally! Thanks for getting me on to that Hugh, I used it to advertise a club night and was amazing and how much more simple it was to use, and WAY cheaper too!
Highly recommended