Mad Mimi Review

Full review

According to Mad Mimi, over 40 million messages are sent out using their service, every day. The company started out as a family business and is now a popular choice for email creation services. We looked at the features to see how the service differs from others and where Mad Mimi stands out. Is this a good choice for your email needs?

Setup

Pay based on the number of people in your subscriber list, not by the number of emails you send them. There are a number of monthly plans you can choose from depending on how many contacts you have and the price rises with the more contacts you have. If you need to send emails to more contacts than those included in the basic and advanced plans there are specialist plans available. All of the Mad Mimi plans come with the full feature set. There is a free plan available for up to 2,500 contacts and a maximum of 12,500 emails per month. The only thing lacking in the free plan, besides the extra number of contacts, is the Mad Mimi support.

Email creation

The Mad Mimi design process is based on a theme approach, where you choose a pre-designed theme (a set of colour combos for email backgrounds) and then use a set of modules to collect and store your content, which you use to populate your email along with your bespoke images. Once you have the email laid out there is the opportunity to change the fonts and the size of your text, plus the colour of links and headers etc. The templates are clean and easy to use, giving you a good degree of choice over how your email looks. Once you’ve got a great email template tweaked and designed you can save the customized theme and use it on other occasions to give your campaigns a uniform look. If you want to start from scratch you can make your emails using HTML code or CSS.

Campaign creation

The list management and segmentation features are on a par with other good quality email creation services and are all found on the same page on the Mad Mimi dashboard, making it easy to segment lists and manage unlimited list combinations. Adding new contacts is simple, whether you add them manually one at a time, or paste them from spreadsheets. Mad Mimi automatically removes duplicates and contacts that have opted out of receiving emails. You can create a form for sign-up and put it on your website in order to get more contacts. And send specific emails to separate lists at different times. Once people have signed up you can set a drip campaign in motion that sends emails at specific intervals. If you work with many different people the Mad Mimi multi-user platform is useful where you clone your campaigns through to child accounts so everyone can access what they need to.

Deliverability

Mad Mimi maximises email deliverability making it more likely you will be happy with the number of people actually reading your emails. The service is well linked with ISPs to create a good quality loop that enables your emails to get through more often. The usual bounce and unsubscribe requests are handles effectively. There are a number of best practice tools and advice on how to handle your email lists and prevent your email being blocked as spam.

Tracking & reporting

The tracking and reporting features are good with Mad Mimi and you won’t find it hard to see who is reading your mails and what they do with them. The tracking is in real time and you can find out who opened your email, which links they clicked, who they forwarded it to, and who unsubscribed. The unsubscribes are then handled automatically while the other stats are for you to use as you wish. Mad Mimi email creation is integrated with Google Analytics and you use the service to see stats which can be compared across email campaigns. Reports can be forwarded to friends or colleagues and you can also export statistics to spreadsheets for further analysis.

Features

Surveys – Integrate with SurveyMonkey to add interesting surveys into your email campaigns.

Social Media – Place a sign-up form on your Facebook page, or add a Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin button at the foot of your email to create a link-in with social networking sites. One good feature from the Mad Mimi service is the ability to convert a blog post into an email and send it automatically to a contact list. This happens through your RSS feed feature. Integrate with Etsy, FreshBooks, Salesforce and more.

Ease of use

Mad Mimi is easy to use and the features are intuitive and clearly laid out. If this is your first time creating email campaigns you will be able to manage the process with ease, and if you are used to another service it is easy to adapt to Mad Mimi. Designing an email is simple, and the stats and reporting tools are also a breeze to access and interpret.

Help & support

The only negative about the Mad Mimi support package is the lack of a phone support option, but they do say that you can email them and schedule a call if you are really desperate to get in touch by phone. Mad Mimi does offer chat support during business hours and you can email at any time of the day. Response time is generally good. There's a help section with a list of questions and tutorials, and a set of videos.

Overall

The Mad Mimi service is a good all-rounder – you get all the design tools and you can create emails from scratch, you can choose who to send emails to and create segmented lists, and you have access to some decent statistics and reporting tools plus some additional features. We like the general attitude of the company and the way in which beginners will find it easy to manage their email campaigns with this service.