MailChimp is a nice, easy-to-use service for sending email newsletters. (If you’ve never used them but their name sounds familiar, they have also sponsored almost every single podcast ever made!)
Our clients use MailChimp, and we had a question the other day about the details of how MailChimp’s pricing works. (Note that all the prices below are current as of February 19th, 2015.)
MailChimp offers two ways to pay: monthly and “pay as you go”.
MailChimp’s monthly plans let you send unlimited emails to all of your subscribers. The cost of the monthly plan changes automatically as you lose or gain subscribers. For example, if you have 10,000 subscribers, MailChimp is $75 a month, or if you have 15,000 subscribers, it’s $150 a month. (You can send 0 emails or 100 emails a month to those people, the price doesn’t change.)
MailChimp’s “pay as you go” plan works on an email credit basis — you pre-pay for each email you send. The price per email changes depending on how many credits you buy at once. It ranges from $9 for 300 credits (or $0.03 per email) to $1,000 for 200,000 credits (or $0.005 per email).
Generally speaking, regardless of the number of subscribers you have, if you are sending one or more emails to all of your subscribers per month, MailChimp’s monthly plans are always going to be more cost effective. This holds true from 500 subscribers at $10 a month ($0.02 per email) all the way up to 25,525,000 at … $102,800 a month ($0.004 per email)!
The only time you should consider “pay as you go” with MailChimp is if you send one email to your subscribers less than once a month. For example, if you send out a quarterly newsletter to your 6,000 subscribers, using “pay as you go” is going to save you $650 a year! 6,000 subscribers are $75 a month — that’s $900 a year. A quarterly email to those 6,000 subscribers is 24,000 total emails per year, or $0.0375 per email. You can buy 25,000 credits at the beginning of the year for $250, or $0.01 per email, and save $650. That’s a lot of money!
If you want to figure out how much you’d be paying with MailChimp, head over to the MailChimp pricing page.
MailChimp is one of many tools and services we recommend to help make your work more efficient and enjoyable. If you want to chat with us about how to use technology to make your organization more effective, send us an email or give us a call at 1.877.439.6665!
