Mad Mimi Review — The Key Pros and Cons

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In this Mad Mimi review, we take a look at the pros and cons of one of the cheapest email marketing tools available. Should you use it for your business, or go for a better — but more expensive — solution?

When it comes to picking a tool for creating e-newsletters, there are loads to choose from. Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse and Aweber…the list 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 more affordable email 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?

Let’s find out…

Mad Mimi pricing 

As mentioned above, Mad Mimi is very competitively priced.

There are four main plans, each with several pricing sub-tiers (fees are in USD):

All the plans with allow you to send an unlimited number of emails until your audience exceeds 75,000 subscribers – after this, send limits apply (see table below). If you exceed these send limits, you’ll have to pay an additional $0.40 per additional 1,000 messages sent (which, to be fair, is very reasonable).

Other than send limits, the key difference between the four Mad Mimi pricing tiers is to do with speed – the more expensive the plan, the faster Mad Mimi sends your emails out (you can avail of ‘normal’ speed, 2x speed, 3x speed and 4x speed as you go up the pricing ladder).

As mentioned earlier, the prices 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.

To put this in context, GetResponse charges a monthly fee of at least $174 for mailing a database this size; Mailchimp charges a minimum of $260; and Campaign Monitor’s equivalent fee is $219.

Similarly, Mad Mimi is also much cheaper than its competitors when it comes to emailing smaller databases: using a list containing 2,500 records costs $16 per month with Mad Mimi, compared to $29 via GetResponse or $39.50 with Mailchimp.

Unlike many competing products, however, there isn’t a free trial available for Mad Mimi.

Key competitors Mailchimp, GetResponse and AWeber all offer free trials that you can use indefinitely with lists of up to 500 subscribers.

So why is Mad Mimi so much cheaper than the competition? The simple answer is that it doesn’t come with nearly as many features.

But let’s look at what it does offer.

Interface / ease-of-use

Mad Mimi’s brightly-colored interface is very easy to use.

Thanks to large text links and big buttons, key features are easy to find, and users new to the world of email marketing will find sending e-newsletters and creating autoresponder campaigns with Mad Mimi very 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.

Additionally, there’s no way to preview what your email will look like on different devices — you’ll need to actually send a test email and open it on a desktop, tablet or phone to see how it appears on your chosen device.

Other than that, everything’s pretty straightforward; the learning curve is minimal.

Templates

Unlike many similar products, Mad Mimi does not provide users 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 color schemes to choose from.

(If you like, you can ask Mad Mimi to pull a color scheme from a website — you enter a URL and it grabs your colors for you).

Essentially, you add your own branding to your Mad Mimi newsletter through uploading a header image, using a drag and drop builder to add your content and selecting suitable fonts to display it in (no web fonts though: only ‘safe fonts’ can be used).

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 very simple with the platform, and you can definitely create very professional results with it.

The newsletters sent with Mad Mimi are responsive too, meaning they’ll automatically adjust their layout to suit the device they’re being accessed on (mobile, tablet etc.).

Personally, however, I’d prefer to be able to choose from a decent variety of pre-designed templates 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 email marketing platforms.

With Mad Mimi, the autoresponder functionality is easy to use: setting up ‘drip’ campaigns 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 significantly more functionality in this area and allow you to send autoresponders that can be triggered by specific user actions or information, for example:

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 and are best off looking at an alternative (some suggestions below).

Sign-up forms

When it comes to the mechanics of capturing email addresses, Mad Mimi gives you an easy-to-use form designer. You can use this to construct a form and are then given a snippet of code that you can use to embed it on your website.

However, the form designer is pretty limited in terms of what you can do with it. Although you can adjust the color scheme of the forms you create, you have no control over the typefaces used on them, meaning that they may not tie in neatly with your brand.

(That said, you can also create ‘plain embed’ versions of your form which you — or a developer — could style with CSS.)

You are also unable to create pop-up or mobile-friendly forms with the form designer, which is another drawback (that said, workarounds exist — you can create quite sophisticated popups for Mad Mimi by using it in conjunction with form building tools like Poptin or Privy).

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 a very stripped-down, basic approach to reporting.

Split testing

A significant omission in Mad Mimi’s feature set is the lack of split testing.

Split or A/B testing allows you to create different versions of your e-newsletters which you test against each other (using 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 result 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.

(To be fair, you could split your mailing list into two ‘pots’ and run manual split tests using Mad Mimi — a ‘compare’ feature is available to help on this front — but this is a rather cumbersome way to go about A/B testing).

Data segmentation

If you’re hoping to segment your data based on fields in Mad Mimi…well, you’re out of luck here too.

Although it is possible to create multiple lists, and manually add email addresses to them, 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 two favourites are GetResponse or Campaign Monitor.

Integrations with other apps

Mad Mimi provides quite a few useful integrations to add functionality to its standard feature set — you can connect the product to a decent range of third party apps in a variety of ways. At time of writing, 64 integrations are available.

Key Mad Mimi integrations includes apps such as:

You’ll find an exhaustive list of Mad Mimi integrations here; but if there isn’t an integration available for a tool that you want to use, there’s always the option of using a third-party syncing tool.

For example, although there’s no built-in Wix integration for Mad Mimi, the automation tool Zapier (pictured below) lets you connect the two tools together via a ‘zap’ — ‘if this, then that’ rules that you define.

Customer support

Three types of support are available from Mad Mimi:

If you want phone support, this can be arranged, but you’ll have to email Mad Mimi first to request it.

In terms of how Mad Mimi’s support shapes up against that provided by its competitors, the offering is reasonably good; other companies offer more accessible phone support (notably Aweber) or multilingual support (notably GetResponse), but the provision here will be fine for most users.

Mad Mimi review: the verdict

There are two very attractive aspects of Mad Mimi. First: it’s 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 email marketing tools that will allow you to send 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 email marketing boxes, particularly for the owners of very large databases. 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, marketing automation, reporting and split testing.

If you are serious about growing your business, my view is that you definitely need these sorts of features in your e-marketing toolkit. 

Finally, a few templates wouldn’t go amiss: when you consider that competing products like Aweber, GetResponse and Mailchimp offer hundreds of them, it makes the offering from Mad Mimi look rather scrawny.

Key alternatives to Mad Mimi

If you’re seriously considering Mad Mimi as an e-marketing solution, it’s likely you are on a budget. As such — and as you may have picked up on earlier in this Mad Mimi review — 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, webinars and split testing (and it’s recently expanded its feature set to include webinars, autofunnels and a very basic CRM). Significantly, a free plan is available, which works with lists up to 500 records in size, and gives you access to many of GetResponse’s core features. You can learn more about the GetResponse free plan and try it out here.

Similiarly, Mailchimp offers a lot of email marketing functionality that you won’t find in Mad Mimi and provides a decent free plan (it lets you send 1,000 email newsletters per month to a list of 500 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.

Related resources

If you are interested in creating e-newsletters and email marketing campaigns in general, check out our article on how to create a newsletter. Our top tips on how to grow your email list may also be of interest.