Mad Mimi Review (2019) — Pricing, Templates, Features Overview
In this Mad Mimi review, we take a look at the pros and cons of one of the cheapest email marketing tools available.
Our overall rating: 2.5/5
When it comes to picking a tool for creating e-newsletters, there are simply tons to choose from: Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Getresponse, Aweber…the list, if you’ll pardon the pun, goes on.
On first inspection, these products allow you to do the same thing: put attractive marketing messages in inboxes. But they can differ enormously in terms of both price and features, and it can be difficult to know which one to use.
In this review we take a look at one of the cheapest e-marketing tools out there: Mad Mimi. Is it cheap and cheerful, or does it cut too many corners to make it a professional email marketing solution for your business?
Mad Mimi pricing
As alluded to above, Mad Mimi is very competitively priced. In costs terms at least, it's fair to say that it wipes the floor with key competing products.
There are four main plans, each with several pricing sub-tiers (fees are in USD):
Basic
$10 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 500 email addresses
$12 per month - 1,000 email addresses
$16 per month - 2,500 email addresses
$27 per month - 5,000 email addresses
Pro
$42 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 10,000 email addresses
$59 per month - 15,000 email addresses
$89 per month - 25,000 email addresses
$139 per month - 35,000 email addresses
Silver
$199 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 50,000 contacts
$279 per month - 75,000 email addresses
$369 per month - 100,000 email addresses
$549 per month - 150,000 email addresses
$749 per month - 250,000 email addresses
Gold
$1,049 per month - 350,000 email addresses.
$1,499 per month - 500,000 email addresses
All the above plans allow you to send an unlimited number of emails. The key difference between the four tiers (other than the facilitation of different mailing list sizes) is to do with speed: the more expensive the plan, the faster Mad Mimi's emails will send your emails out.
The prices, as alluded to earlier, compare very favourably with those of competing products. For example, with Mad Mimi, paying $89 a month entitles you to email a database comprising 25,000 leads; Getresponse charges a monthly fee of $145 for mailing a database this size, and Mailchimp charges $189.
Similarly, Mad Mimi is also much cheaper than its competitors when it comes to emailing smaller databases: using a list containing 2,000 records costs $16 with Mad Mimi, compared to $25 with Getresponse or $29.99 with Mailchimp.
Unlike many competing products, however, there doesn't seem to be a free trial available for Mad Mimi. Key competitors Mailchimp, Getresponse and Aweber all offer free trials (with Mailchimp's being particularly generous - you can use it indefinitely with a list of up to 2000 subscribers).
Utlimately it has to be said that Mad Mimi is cheap for a reason: it does not have nearly as many bells and whistles as the competing products referred to above.
Drilling down into the product's features gives you an indication as to why the monthly fees are so much lower than the competition's.
Interface
Mad Mimi's interface is simple to use, if rather brightly coloured!
Key features are easy to find (thanks to large text links and big buttons) and users new to the world of e-marketing will find sending e-newsletters and creating autoresponder campaigns with Mad Mimi pretty straightforward.
When evaluating Mad Mimi, the only thing I found difficult to do was send a test email: there's no obvious 'test' button anywhere to be seen when you are designing your email; rather, you need to click a 'preview' button to see a full screen version of your email, and then locate a 'test' button at the bottom of that screen.
Other than that, everything’s pretty straightforward — but that’s possibly because the feature set is relatively slim.
The Mad Mimi interface
Templates
Unlike many similar products, Mad Mimi does not provide the user with an extensive range of templates to choose from.
Instead, you are given one theme (albeit with a few layouts geared towards specific applications - product promotion, quick updates, newsletters etc.), and a range of colour schemes to choose from.
Essentially, you add your own branding through uploading a header image, using a drag and drop builder to add your content and selecting suitable fonts to display it in. More adventurous users can use HTML to design more bespoke templates.
This approach is very basic, but it does mean that putting together e-newsletters is straightforward, and you can definitely attain very professional results with it.
Personally, however, I'd much prefer to be able to choose from a variety of pre-designed layouts and tweak them as desired.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals determined by you – you can set them up so that immediately after somebody signs up to your list, they receive a welcome message from your business; a few days later they could receive a discount code for some of your products; two weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on Twitter...and so on. Autoresponders tend to be a key part of e-marketing solutions.
With Mad Mimi, the autoresponder functionality is solid but basic: setting up 'drip' campaigns as Mad Mimi calls them is very straightforward.
However, you are limited to sending emails based on time intervals and event dates (birthdays, anniversaries etc.) — and nothing more sophisticated. Other products, particularly Getresponse and Mailchimp, provide much more functionality in this area and allow you to send autoresponders that can be triggered by specific user actions or information, for example:
opens and clicks
changes in contact preferences
completed transactions
completion of a particular form
visits to particular pages on your website.
This sort of functionality tends to be referred to these days as 'marketing automation', and it allows you to create very sophisticated subscriber journeys and sales funnels. If you need anything like this from an email marketing tool, you will be disappointed by Mad Mimi.
Analytics
Mad Mimi offers a clean, simple analytics interface that makes understanding the basics of what's happened with a mailout easy.
You get access to all the absolutely essential stuff — open, clickthrough and unsubscribe rates etc. — and the Google Analytics integration is good too (Mad Mimi will rewrite the URLs in your emails so that any traffic from specific Mad Mimi mailouts is easily trackable in your Google Analytics reports.)
However, you won't get anything like the sort of reporting functionality that's offered by other leading email marketing products.
For example, if you want to find out information about the devices your e-newsletters are being opened on, the ROI of emails or geographical data, you will be disappointed.
As with much else about the product, Mad Mimi provides on a very stripped-down, basic approach to reporting.
Split testing
In addition to the lack of responsive templates, another serious omission in Mad Mimi is the lack of split testing.
Split testing allows you to create different versions of your e-newsletters which you can test against each other — to a sample of your subscribers — to find out which subject headers or content generates the most opens or clickthroughs. You can then send a newsletter containing the ‘winning’ subject header / content to the remaining subscribers (this is usually done automatically by your email marketing tool at the end of a split test).
The upshot of split testing is usually more engagement with your newsletters — and more sales. So it’s a big shame that this functionality is not available in Mad Mimi.
Data segmentation
If you’re hoping to segment your data based on fields in Mad Mimi…well, you’re out of luck.
Although you can create multiple lists, and manually add email addresses to them (and you can do this in bulk, based on manual searches for keywords etc.), you’re not going to be able to define ‘always-on’ filters that automatically segment your data into different batches.
So, if you want to segment your mailing list in any way, you’d be better off avoiding Mad Mimi and looking at an alternative email marketing tool — when it comes to data segmentation, my favourites are Getresponse or Campaign Monitor (Mailchimp’s segmentation functionality isn’t great unless you’re on their $299+ per month premium plan).
Integrations
Mad Mimi provides quite a few useful integrations — you can connect the product to a decent range of third party apps in a variety of ways.
Key Mad Mimi integrations includes apps such as:
Google Analytics
SurveyMonkey
Etsy
Facebook
EventBrite
Drupal
Wordpress
You'll find an exhaustive list of Mad Mimi integrations here.
The Mad Mimi integrations gallery
Support
Two types of support are available from Mad Mimi:
a set of searchable online resources
email support.
Certain email marketing products (notably Getresponse and Aweber) offer more here: with both of these, you'll get not just email support but live chat and, in the case of Aweber, phone support too.
Mad Mimi review conclusions
There are two strong aspects to Mad Mimi.
First: it's very cheap. Very cheap.
Second, it's easy to use.
These two factors may be enough to convince users to purchase a Mad Mimi plan, and if you're on a budget, it's hard to think of any mainstream e-marketing tools that will allow you to broadcast so many e-newsletters so cheaply.
Mad Mimi has its flaws (and a lot of missing features!), but it will nonetheless tick quite a lot of e-marketing boxes, particularly where the owners of large databases are concerned. If all you ever want to do is send simple newsletters to a lot of people in one go, it’s hard to argue with Mad Mimi.
However, many users will find that there are some noticeable omissions when it come to the functionality available in Mad Mimi, particularly when it comes to autoresponders, reporting and split testing. If you are serious about growing your business, my view is that you need these sorts of features in your e-marketing toolkit.
Finally, a few templates wouldn't go amiss: when you consider that Aweber users can avail of 700+ templates, Getresponse 500+ and Mailchimp 100+, it makes the offering from Mad Mimi look positively scrawny.
The pros of using Mad Mimi
As mentioned frequently above, the price. It’s possibly the cheapest email marketing tool out there. At the very least it is significantly cheaper than all the best-known email marketing tools – Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Getresponse etc.
Because the emphasis of Mad Mimi is deliberately on 'simplicity', it's very easy to use, and shouldn't put off newcomers to email marketing.
It integrates with a wide range of third party apps.
A good range of integrations with other apps is available.
The cons of using Mad Mimi
The autoresponder functionality is fairly limited - you can create autoresponders ('drips') based on when people sign up to your mailing list, but that's more or less it. Other systems, such as Getresponse or Mailchimp allow you to create autoresponders based on a whole other range of variables - clickthroughs, purchases and more.
There is only, in effect, one email template available.
You can't really do A/B split testing (other similar tools allow you to test subject headers or content variants against each other using a sample of data and, based on the results, rolls the best performing versions out to your data).
Support is via live chat or email only, although Mad Mimi say that they will schedule calls by arrangement if 'really, really' necessary.
There's no free trial.
Alternatives to Mad Mimi
If you're considering Mad Mimi as an e-marketing solution, then chances are you're on a budget. As such, you might want to think about Getresponse.
Although Getresponse isn't as cheap as Mad Mimi, it is still one of the more reasonably-priced tools of its kind available, and comes with a truckload of extra functionality that you won't find in Mad Mimi - for example responsive emails, advanced autoresponder / marketing automation options and split testing (and it’s recently expanded its feature set to include webinars, autofunnels and a very basic CRM). You can sign up for a free Getresponse account here.
Similiarly, Mailchimp offers a lot of email marketing functionality that you won’t find in Mad MImi and provides a generous free plan (for users with lists up to 2,000 subscribers in size). However, after a major overhaul of its pricing structure, the paid version of Mailchimp has become very expensive by comparison to its competitors (and the company sneakily charges you to host unsubscribed contacts too, which again makes life more expensive).
Finally, I’d also suggest taking a look at Aweber - this is a solid and reasonably priced email marketing tool; it’s not as feature-packed as Getrepsonse or Mailchimp, but it nonetheless provides significantly more functionality than Mad Mimi.
General advice on how to create an e-newsletter
If you are interested in creating e-newsletters and e-marketing campaigns in general, you may enjoy our article on how to create a newsletter and our introduction to autoresponders.
And finally, if you've used Mad Mimi yourself, do feel free to give your thoughts on the product in the comments section below.
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