ICYMI: Mailchimp announced over 150 new features last Thursday at their recent star studded marketing conference, From:Here To:There.

Yup, you read that right!

150.

We’re talking advanced segmentation, richer reporting and analytics, AI capabilities, SMS Marketing, and a whole bunch more e-commerce automations.

Can you believe it?

Because, here’s the thing. With all the glitz, glamour, and shiny updates, it’s only natural to wonder, “Are these updates actually worth it? Will they make a difference in my Mailchimp experience?”

…And you’ve got to ask yourself: “Are the updates actually any good or even useful to the average Mailchimp user?”

Keep reading as we’ll explain exactly what these updates mean to you as a Mailchimp user.

We’ll dive deep into each of these new features, giving you an honest breakdown of what we think they bring to the table.

We’ve done the legwork to uncover their potential and relevance, so you can decide if they’re the real deal or simply just smoke and mirrors.

Let’s separate the hype from the helpful and uncover the features that will truly make a difference for you in your Mailchimp journey.

Or

Check out the Video Instead. From the Chimp Master Robin himself who was actually at the Mailchimp announcement event.

In a nutshell 

Perfect Personalisation

The new email content generator is an Ai powered tool that helps to create engaging content quickly and easily.

Not only are Mailchimp keeping up with trends with this tool, but they are also saving us time and boosting our productivity. Yet again diminishing our need to switch between different applications and giving us a truly ‘all in one’ solution.

Chimp Answers Insights: AI is here to stay and it’s great to see Mailchimp start making it practical and useful for people creating campaigns – just don’t get too over-reliant on it and remember your marketing strategy should be driving things, not a computer.

For e-commerce businesses, Mailchimp has developed 24 new starting points to help drive more growth with Customer Journey Builder and Pre-built Journeys.

Out of the 24 starting points, there are 12 new Shopify starting points that leverage real-time shopping activity to build customer journeys.

The fact that Mailchimp is leveraging real-time shopping activity to create customer journeys (which are pretty much likely to convert) is pretty impressive. It’s all about keeping up with the future trends and innovations, and with their new Ai and automation features,Mailchimp is leading the pack.

Chimp Answers Insights: If you’re not an e-commerce store, then much of this development isn’t going to have much impact on you… but if you’re a Shopify user, you should be doing a happy dance as this really powers up your ability to communicate with customers and prospects! Again, you still need to have a plan and ensure you don’t go over the top when it comes to setting up automations based on activity (limit them so people don’t get too many emails!), but these are big steps and for a store which is growing with Mailchimp is fantastic news.

Mailchimp is keeping up with demand, (not to mention recognising the need) for personalisation by adding expanded options for segmenting customers.

There are also enhanced contact profiles, pre-built segments, an e-commerce segment builder, and the ability to exclude certain segments from a marketing campaign send.

Chimp Answers Insights: Effective Segmentation is at the heart of successful marketing and so this should be great news… but you need to have a big enough audience for you to be able to benefit from this change. If you’re currently running a small audience (e.g. under 1,000) chances are these things won’t impact you on a day-to-day basis.….but if you’ve got a larger database, you can get much cleverer in your segmentation. Previously, you were only able to do 5 segments… but now you can do more… AND you can do nested segments as well (so you can combine “or” and “and” statements to fine tune your targets.…but remember, to segment, you need the data to segment… so if you’ve not got the right data – get collecting!!!

Richer Reporting and Analytics

Users will soon see a new email analytics and audience analytics dashboard which canseamlessly measure performance, report on ROI, and identify trends. You can also build your own Custom Reports and filter the report by a specific time frame, audience, campaign, and more.

Chimp Answers Insights: Mailchimp’s reporting section has always been a bit lack lustre, but you can now develop custom reports and get more details. it’s still not perfect, but it shows that things are moving in the right direction and hopefully we’ll get the ability to choose which campaigns appear on a report soon.

Epic Email templates

You’ll be spoilt for choice with over 75 new email templates in the new email builder ( growing to be over 100 soon) allowing you to design and create quality content with ease.

It’s worth mentioning that these new templates will only be available in the new email builder. Maybe that’s a good enough incentive to finally give it a whirl?

What’s more, e-commerce stores now have more dynamic product recommendation feeds, order notifications, and promo code blocks.

Chimp Answers Insights: As old-fashioned people who’ve used the classic Mailchimp builder for many years, we’re still clinging to it and so this won’t impact us… but we’re definitely moving to considering using it more and more and having lots of templates to choose from is always a great starting point (even if we believe you don’t need to get mega-creative with your template designs… but should concentrate on content more!).

Manage More with Campaign Manager

There are even more updates to the Campaign manager boasting new A/B and Multivariate Testing and social posting for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Managing your campaigns just got a whole lot easier and more effective! Again, Mailchimp have diminished the need to jump from desktop to desktop allowing you to do everything from one place.

Chimp Answers Insights: We believe the campaign manager will be something that makes a big difference for people once they get their head around it – it’ll make planning campaigns and reporting campaign success SO MUCH EASIER… and if you’re a regular emailer, this is a big step forward – and we’d recommend that if you’ve not used it before, go and check it out and have a play…

What you can expect from these features

Mailchimp has grown over the years from a standard email service to a shiny all singing, all dancing all in one marketing platform and they certainly know what they’re doing. The remarkable growth they’ve experienced in the past year is a testament to their ability to attract new customers and generate rising revenue.

It’s clear that these updates have been designed to help users build and analyse their marketing campaigns, accelerate their e-commerce growth, save time and get more hands-on support.

“With this latest launch, we’re introducing new AI and automation features plus new services with a human touch designed to help our customers save time and accelerate growth.”Mailchimp’s CEO, Rania Succar.

Mailchimp is keeping up with the demand for personalisation and helping marketers gain more customers and increase revenue.

Saying that though, we noticed there is a BIG focus on the e-commerce side, So if you’re in the e-commerce field this is great. Mailchimp is making up for lost time here and doing it with a bang and rightly so! These enhancements are long overdue.

We hope to see more standard updates next time as well as ones that can benefit the “average” Mailchimp user and not just the ones with big shops and big databases.

We think Mailchimp’s features are not an illusion or a ploy to deceive. They are real, tangible enhancements that can truly elevate your marketing experience. But we think it’s also down to you and how you use the features. You can truly make the most of them if you use them the right way.

Today, businesses are actively seeking marketing tools that can seamlessly handle their demanding tasks while offering customised all-in-one experiences and Mailchimp effortlessly ticks all the right boxes.

Availability

Many of these new and updated features have been rolled out over the course of the last few months and are available today. The improved Standard plan and SMS marketing will be available soon. You can find a full list of all the updates here.