Speaker 1: MailChimp. It's one of the most popular email marketing platforms available. It's basically the default option for many churches and non-profits.

Speaker 2: But my question is, and I've never used MailChimp, so I have a lot of questions. My first question is, should it be the default?

Speaker 1: Well, that's the million dollar question. Or should I say, 12 billion dollar question. Okay, so starting things off. So MailChimp, it has been around a hot minute. And by hot minute, I mean, what, 20 years now, Matt?

Speaker 2: I think I read it was founded in 2002, if I'm correct. It's been a while. It's been around about as long as Church Track.

Speaker 1: Yes, and I have used MailChimp on and off for many years. And I've seen just the progression of their software come from what it was, where it just was a very basic email marketing tool. Tiny little email marketing tool. But it blossomed and grew into this behemoth that pretty much everyone knows about, that is familiar with email marketing. So first things first, MailChimp has changed a lot from that. They were purchased by Intuit. I have this article I pull up here. $12 billion they were purchased by Intuit.

Speaker 2: I feel like you need to put your pinky here.

Speaker 1: $12 billion. All right, that is a lot of money. And if you're unfamiliar with Intuit, TurboTax, QuickBooks, that's Intuit. They purchased MailChimp. So MailChimp is now part of that ecosystem. And it makes sense because businesses use TurboTax. It's like the most used accounting software tool for a lot of businesses. I'm sorry, QuickBooks is. But then TurboTax is like one of the most used tax softwares out there, especially businesses. So it makes sense that businesses would want a tool that also does their marketing and emails and stuff, which is such an important part of running a business. Absolutely. So nonprofits, churches kind of lump into there in a way because they operate in many ways like a business. I'm not here to argue if a church should run like a business, by the way. But just speaking-wise, using similar tools.

Speaker 2: And not just that, but I also know, and this is from someone that's never used MailChimp, I also know that they were not only the first in that space, and that's part of the reason why a lot of churches jumped on board, but they also offered a lot of really great tools and features that other platforms didn't. Like a church can have a Gmail account, but a Gmail account doesn't give them analytics. It doesn't give them a lot of other tools that they would need to really amplify the message that they're sending out in these emails.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And gone are the days where you can send out mass emails with something like Gmail. You can't do that anymore. You need some sort of platform like MailChimp to do that. So let's talk about just kind of like some of the things MailChimp has and whether or not it's still even like a relevant tool that churches should even think about using now. Because just because something is really popular 10 years ago, 5 years ago, doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be the best tool. Of course. But it could be. We'll see. So first and foremost, MailChimp, just to kind of quickly recap it here, I've got my MailChimp account pulled up here somewhere. Where is it? There it is. So I'm not here to like do a whole review of MailChimp and everything. There are so many YouTube videos you could check out for that. But just really bringing quickly to your attention, you log into MailChimp, just like you do with many other software as a service programs, SaaS programs, and you can log into it from anywhere in the world. And then you can just start writing emails. You can create templates. And I think this is one of the things so many churches love about the tool, is being able to just quickly create email templates within the MailChimp software. And they look great. They look very professional. Yes. And on top of that, just being able to have access to other types of tools beyond just sending out templates. But as a church, being able to really pinpoint your audience and have like all of your contacts, being able to have different tags too of people.

Speaker 2: Oh, so you can segment your audience and you can even do surveys. You can survey your audience, do like polls and questionnaires and stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. MailChimp offers this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: And this is pretty common stuff that we're seeing in a lot of email marketing tools out there. But again, going back in the past, MailChimp was one of the first that really did this at scale in a way that was kind of easy to use. And just being able to give churches the option too, where churches can do things like import their own type of templates that they want to utilize. Really? Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot of really good stuff going on here. I don't have time to cover it all. I mean, there's so much. I mean, you could literally spend all day just going through like the different types of automations and analytics that MailChimp provides.

Speaker 2: And integrations as well. I know that.

Speaker 1: So many integrations. So many integrations. And this is probably, I mean, this is a big reason we integrate with MailChimp at ChurchTrack because so many churches use MailChimp that it just kind of makes sense that why not have that integration in your church management software to be able to communicate with your people. So we're just trying to make life easier. So those are a lot of the good things going on. So many great things. But there are some cons to MailChimp. Okay. So it's not all puppy dogs and unicorns and rainbows. No, it's not. So there are some downsides. Probably one of the biggest downsides that I've talked with other church leaders about is just the complexity of the software. Because it is like when you look at it, just quickly looking at the software, I mean, they do lay it out very nicely in a way that other software tools lay out. Sure. And so I can quickly know, okay, this is where I go to my campaigns. Here's my audience of all my people. And I really like the little icons. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the little things, man. So they do make it easy in that regard. But then as you start getting deep into it, it starts getting a little bit overwhelming.

Speaker 2: I'm sure the automations get pretty complicated and complex. Yes.

Speaker 1: And so if you're like a church leader, especially like at a small or mid-sized church, and you're wanting to utilize a tool like this, this is a tool that can get overwhelming just because of all the features that it has going on in it.

Speaker 2: Well, greater and greater complexity means a steeper and steeper learning curve anyway. Yes. But most of us, especially in small churches who are trying to lead and serve and do everything, wear multiple hats and do it all ourselves, we don't have time. No. To learn something complex like this. No.

Speaker 1: It is a lot to learn, especially if you're wearing multiple hats in ministry. Yeah. And it's not us saying this. I mean, there are people out there. You hop on Reddit. You can find almost anything, both good and bad. But it was just funny seeing someone ask the question that I was literally asking the other day. Is it just me or did MailChimp get overly complicated? And people agree. Like, it has gotten overly complicated. But a lot of people also said, hey, this is the progression of what happens as a company. You add more features. You add more functionalities. You add more integrations. And so, of course, it's going to get more complicated. But that's kind of where we stand in terms of how MailChimp has grown. It has become this behemoth of a software that does have a lot more complications. And when it comes to, like, church leaders or if you're leading a nonprofit and you're wanting to kind of develop, build that email list of your people, communicate with your people, that is one thing to really keep in mind when we're talking about it. The other thing, too, MailChimp, their discount price, they offer a 15% discount to verified nonprofits. Nice. Which is great, but it's not as much as I've seen with other tools out there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It used to be really great. Now it's actually kind of lagging behind the rest of the field.

Speaker 1: And the last area that they're lagging behind is pricing. And by lagging, I don't mean they're not upping their prices. I mean the opposite. They're no longer competitively priced. To be brutally honest, they're not. So if you go to their main website, you go to their pricing page, they've got, like, their different platforms. And, again, like, MailChimp is doing so much more now. They're doing websites. They're doing transactional emails, which most churches are not in this realm, but they are in these two. So let's look at their tiers. So they got the free tier. And this is the tier that most churches, I would say, churches under 200 congregants, this is the tier that they fell into. But now this tier has gotten a lot lower. Like, now you can only send 1,000 emails per month, and you can only have an email list of 500 contacts. Oh, wow. And so, you know, for your church, you've got how many people regularly attending your church? 30 to 40. Yeah. So smaller church. And, like, those kinds of churches, the free plan for MailChimp is awesome because they're never going to come close to that volume anytime soon.

Speaker 2: Yeah, we would definitely stay under that 1,000 tier very easily.

Speaker 1: And a lot of churches fall in this boat. And I would argue that the majority of the churches in North America fall in that boat of they're not going to send more than 1,000 emails a month if they're just doing, like, a weekly email newsletter or, like, a biweekly or monthly email newsletter. But where it gets a little sticky in pricing is when you start talking about churches that may want to send more than 1,000 emails a month. And so…

Speaker 2: We're talking churches that are – once you basically start approaching about 200 people in your contact list. Yeah. You should start getting a little nervous about having to start paying for MailChimp, essentially.

Speaker 1: Which is a good thing you're growing as a church, but… Yeah, it's a good problem to have. The other problem that comes with that is the increased cost. And so, at minimum, you're looking at $13 a month just to send out emails to people. And $13 a month may not sound like much, but then let's say you're a church and you have more than 500 contacts. Maybe you have, like, 600 or 700 contacts, which isn't uncommon, especially for a church that maybe has, like, 250 congregants that are regularly attending weekly. But you've got, you know, triple that number of people that are actually in your books. Well, you're going to have to bump up to that. And so, now you're starting to look at $26 a month.

Speaker 2: I see. I thought $13 a month was actually really fair, but I see now that as you add more and more contacts… Yeah. …the price of all their tiers.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And so, it does start exponentially getting more expensive. And so, this is kind of the crux of it all is, you know, is MailChimp the best tool for my church? Just to send emails. Just – yeah. And we're talking about just sending emails. And not just any email. This is just like your email newsletter because you don't want to use MailChimp to just do all of your emails. No, absolutely not. It's not what it's designed for. It is designed to send mass emails to, like, your congregants or to the people that are donors of your nonprofit organization. When you start getting into the other realm of wanting to send out emails to maybe, like, a dozen people about this, or you want to send out emails to this discipleship group about that, or your elders about this, that's not what MailChimp's for. And so, we're just talking about not even just email. We're talking about just a portion of your church's email. And so, we have this little thing, you know, and we'll include this in the notes here, but should churches and nonprofits use MailChimp? And we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of MailChimp. We've got this, is MailChimp right for your church? It just comes down to this, really. How many people do you have in your email list? Do you have under 500 or do you have over 500? If you have under 500, chances are MailChimp's probably going to be the best deal for you because they have so many features. They have so many integrations. The integrations alone are kind of amazing. But when you start having to email more than a list of 500 people every single month or every single week, or you're sending out more than 1,000 emails or more than 6,000 emails or so, MailChimp is just not the best option out there. Flat. I'm just throwing that out there. There are a lot of other alternatives, and this is kind of the beauty of it, Matt. You have seen just the number of alternatives out there for mass email marketing. It's just kind of daunting. I mean, last time I looked, there was like 300 or something.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and just most of these have come up within the last not even 10 years. So within the last 10 years, a lot of other companies have hit the market to compete with MailChimp and offer similar features and are starting to compete with both their feature list and also their pricing. For instance, like Constant Contact is a popular one that I've heard a lot of churches are using, and they offer the best discount for nonprofits. For Constant Contact, if you pay six months up front, they offer you a 20% discount, which is already better than what MailChimp offers. But if you pay for 12 months of using Constant Contact ahead of time, they offer a 30% discount off their sticker price. That's pretty awesome. Their discount structure is way better than MailChimp, and they offer a lot of similar features to what MailChimp has to offer. Another option is a company called Campaign Monitor. We were looking at the templates earlier in MailChimp and talking about how, for their free account, they have a very limited set of templates. Well, Campaign Monitor offers thousands of templates that you can use that are all there for free. That's sweet. Yeah, and again, just like MailChimp, you can create your own template. As part of how they have such a large list of templates, companies will add their own and make it available for anyone else to use as well. Cool. Another is SendinBlue, and what stands out with SendinBlue is that, unlike MailChimp, they offer texting and SMS marketing.

Speaker 1: That's a big thing.

Speaker 2: And they include it in their price. In fact, it's even available for free users. It's a part of their base package. So they're the only church marketing platform that offers SMS built in. It's not like an additional charge. Okay. Also, ActiveCampaign, they offer what I think may be the most intuitive automations compared to all these other platforms. Okay. MailChimp, you can create a drip campaign and a whole automated sequence of emails that go out every so many days just to follow up with your new guests. Yeah. But it's a very complicated process to set that up. ActiveCampaign has made it very intuitive and very simple just to click and drag a whole automation process together.

Speaker 1: That's pretty awesome because especially church leaders that, you know, we're doing a million other things, so the last thing we want to know is how to mildly code or something.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And then ConvertKit. This is the last one we'll talk about. This is kind of niche. A lot of churches probably wouldn't want to use ConvertKit. But if your church has a YouTube channel, if your church has a podcast, if your church has a website and other content, online content that you're creating and putting out there and you want to grow that audience, ConvertKit offers a lot of tools and features to help amplify the work that you're doing on those other platforms and get the message out for that. So if you have content that you're adding and you're creating on other platforms, you may want to consider ConvertKit as an option for marketing and email marketing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And when it ultimately comes to looking for an email provider in a church setting, you definitely want something of free support. You need something that has good support. So like documentation to go along with it because you're going to have to use it at some point.

Speaker 2: Well, also like MailChimp. They don't offer, I think, phone support unless you're paying their highest price tier. Oh. So they actually hide certain levels of support behind a paywall.

Speaker 1: They kind of do that with QuickBooks, too, I've noticed. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So you can get support with MailChimp, but I think it's only email support unless you pay more. OK. You should be looking for a platform that offers free support no matter what price tier you're at.

Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. Well, that is a lot of stuff about MailChimp. Another special mention there, I'll just throw out there, Email Octopus. That was kind of a funny one. I've not heard of that one. The reason I liked it so much is just because it seemed very easy to use and very pleasing to the eye. And so like if you're a church leader that legitimately you're just like, dude, I just want to send out an email newsletter, and I want it to be like really easy for me to do. That seemed like a great tool for that as well because, you know, every church has different needs. So if you're a smaller church and that's kind of the need that you have, that's a great tool.

Speaker 2: Well, what email platform do you think churches should be using in the first place? Like if you could just offer a recommendation to most churches, what do you think they should be using?

Speaker 1: It's still going to be MailChimp. If you're a small church and I'm talking like you are not sending more than a thousand emails a month, it really just can't be beat. With all the integrations they offer and even though it can get a little daunting if you start getting into the nitty gritty of MailChimp, it's still relatively easy to use. The fact that all that's available for free for church, that's just unbeatable. But if you're trying to send more than a thousand emails a month, then MailChimp is just the last thing I would look at, to be brutally honest, because there's just too many other good platforms out there. I feel like MailChimp has kind of entered this stage where they know they're at the top, and they're just kind of sitting there hanging out, enjoying it.

Speaker 2: Resting on their laurels, huh?

Speaker 1: They really are, which isn't a bad thing necessarily. But at the same time, there are just a lot of other great tools out there that I feel like if you're going to have to be paying for an email platform as a church because you have a certain volume of emails you're sending out, then MailChimp is going to be one of the most expensive. But again, those integrations they offer, not many people come close to that. In fact, I would argue to say MailChimp probably has the most integrations out of any email marketing platform that's geared towards nonprofits and churches and stuff too. So yeah, that's my recommendation, and I'm sticking to it. Let us know in the comments though. Is your church or your nonprofit using MailChimp to send mass emails? Maybe you found a better alternative. Maybe it's not even one that we mentioned. Now, when it comes to church communicating, church communications, people, you know, the average ministry, they're using at least seven different apps to do all the things at their church. They're using these things for email, texting, online giving, worship, scheduling, so much more. ChurchTrack is an all-in-one management software that does all these things. You can visit churchtrack.com to learn more about that. See ya. ♪♪