“It is now 44 years since the first email was sent and its hard earned status as one of the strongest weapons in the marketer’s arsenal shows no signs of diminishing,” reads the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) National Client Email Report 2015.

How is this weapon working for your business? Are you ready to take it to the next level?

For small business email ‘power users,’ there’s a new tool available – MailChimp Pro. Designed with small businesses in mind, it’s targeted to those with lists of 50,000 or more who want to ramp up their email campaign results to grow their business.

Here at Page Progressive, we’ve been using Mailchimp and recommending it to our clients from the start. It’s technology savvy and small business-friendly. We’ve scanned the information on the newest tool and developed this post to help you determine if “Pro” is a fit for your business.

General highlights from Mailchimp blog posts:

  • “MailChimp Pro is a robust set of powerful features for users who want to be more sophisticated and intentional in using customer engagement data to better understand and serve their audience.”
  • “Small businesses need to leverage technology to maximize their time and passion. We’re here to equip small businesses with the powerful technology they need to grow, like automation, data science, and e-commerce tools.”
  • “MailChimp’s specialty is taking powerful features normally reserved for large enterprises and making them accessible to small businesses.”
  • “Our intention in building this tool … is to make rich data available to our users, so they can know more about their customers and use that information to grow their businesses.”

Features of Mailchimp Pro give users insight and control of many more variables of email campaigns, such as:

  • Testing up to eight variations (including combinations of subject lines, from names, content and send times)
  • Detailed analysis of performance over time to track subscriber engagement
  • Automated running, updating and sending of comparative performance reports
  • Tracking delivery in real time with “stop delivery” capability
  • Monitoring your MailChimp reputation and understanding the reasons behind it
  • Subscriber ‘opt-in’ and ‘opt-out’ of email series without unsubscribing from your list
  • Integrating with e-commerce data to learn what content drives purchases

See the Mailchimp website for the complete list of features and descriptions. The cost for the full “Pro” tool set is $199 per month in addition to the current cost of your subscription (based on your monthly email volume).

“Freddie” image courtesy of Mailchimp & The Rocket Science Group