Mailchimp Pricing: Know their Pricing Plans, Billing, Credits, and More [2024]

Understanding the pricing of a powerful email marketing tool like Mailchimp is a crucial aspect to consider when planning your marketing strategy. In this blog, we'll dive deep into the ins and outs of Mailchimp's pricing, exploring different plans, and analyzing its overall cost-effectiveness to help you make the best choice for your business.

Mailchimp Pricing in a Nutshell: 

Let's give you a quick snapshot of Mailchimp's pricing structure, including the main tiers of service and their respective costs.

A Detailed Overview for Decision-Making

To help you make an informed decision about which marketing plan best suits your needs, here's a clear and straightforward comparison of the four options: Premium, Standard, Essentials, and Free. Each plan offers different levels of features, flexibility, and support, which may impact how you manage campaigns and engage with audiences.

1. Plan Details

When considering the collaboration needs of your team:

• Seats (User Access):
  If your team is growing or requires multiple roles, the Premium plan stands out with unlimited seats. This is ideal if you anticipate needing varied roles such as Admin, Manager, Author, and Viewer. The Standard plan allows for 5 seats, Essentials limits you to 3 seats, while the Free plan restricts you to just 1 user.
• User Roles:
  If team flexibility is crucial, the Premium plan also offers the most comprehensive set of roles, allowing a range of access from Owner to Viewer and even specific roles like Manager. The Standard plan includes most of these roles but lacks the Manager role, while Essentials and Free offer fewer roles, making them more restrictive for collaboration.

2. Plan Limits

For managing your contacts and email sends:

• Maximum Contact Count:
  If you expect to work with a large database, the Premium plan offers custom contact limits, which can scale with your business. The Standard plan supports up to 100,000 contacts at $800/month, and the Essentials plan allows up to 50,000 contacts at $385/month. For small-scale operations, the Free plan limits you to just 500 contacts.
• Maximum Monthly Email Sends:
  The Premium plan offers a high capacity of 15x your contact limit for monthly email sends, which could be crucial for larger campaigns. Standard provides 12x, and Essentials gives 10x the contact limit. The Free plan, however, restricts you to 1,000 emails per month, with a daily cap of 500 emails.

3. Audience Features

When managing your audience segments:

• Audiences:
  The Premium plan gives you unlimited audiences, which could be beneficial if you plan to manage multiple customer segments. The Standard plan includes 5 audiences, Essentials offers 3, and the Free plan limits you to just 1 audience, which may restrict your ability to manage various audience types.
• Segmentation:
  Both the Premium and Standard plans provide advanced segmentation, which allows you to create more precise targeting groups. If you want to perform detailed segmentation based on behaviors or customer profiles, these plans offer more flexibility. In contrast, Essentials and Free provide only basic segmentation, which might limit your targeting options.

4. Audience Insights

In terms of audience analytics and insights:

• Advanced Insights:
  The Premium and Standard plans provide a suite of valuable insights, including predicted demographics, customer lifetime value, and purchase likelihood. These tools can help you forecast customer behavior and refine your marketing strategies. These features are not available in the Essentials or Free plans, which could limit your ability to access deeper customer insights.
• Surveys and Audience Dashboard:
  Regardless of the plan, you will have access to audience dashboards and the ability to run surveys, allowing you to track engagement and gather feedback across your campaigns.

5. Behavioral Targeting

For tracking and targeting based on customer behavior:

• Engagement Tracking:
  The Premium and Standard plans offer a more extended period of data tracking, including app engagement for up to 18 months. This gives you access to long-term trends and insights into customer behavior, which could be beneficial for optimizing future campaigns. Essentials and Free limit this tracking to just 1 month, restricting your ability to analyze long-term engagement.
• Website Engagement:
  In terms of web-based insights, both Premium and Standard track page views, while Essentials and Free only provide site view data, which offers a less detailed picture of how users interact with your website.

6. Design and Branding

For creating and customizing your campaign content:

• Templates and Customization:
  If custom branding and advanced design options are important, the Premium and Standard plans allow for custom-coded templates and give you the ability to remove Mailchimp branding from your emails. Essentials provides some pre-built templates, but not custom-coded ones. The Free plan offers only basic templates and requires Mailchimp branding on all emails.
• Creative Assistant:
  All plans include access to the Creative Assistant, which helps generate designs. However, only the Premium and Standard plans allow you to download designs, giving you more flexibility in reusing content outside the platform.

7. Marketing Channels

When considering additional marketing capabilities:

• Email Scheduling and Social Posting:
  The ability to schedule emails and social posts is available in all plans, except for Free, which lacks email scheduling. If you want more advanced control over scheduling social media posts, both Premium and Standard include social post scheduling, while Essentials and Free do not.
• Campaign Manager and Retargeting:
  The Premium and Standard plans include tools like a campaign manager and retargeting ads on Google, which could help you better coordinate and optimize multi-channel campaigns. These features are not available in the Essentials and Free plans.

8. Automations

For automating your customer journeys:

• Customer Journey Builder:
  Premium, Standard, and Essentials plans provide full access to the customer journey builder, which allows you to create automated workflows. The Free plan offers only a preview version, limiting the level of automation you can achieve.
• Multi-Step Automation:
  If you need more sophisticated automation, the Premium and Standard plans allow for multi-step automations, enabling complex workflows. Essentials and Free only offer single-step automation, which limits the depth of automated interactions.

9. Insights and Optimization

For improving campaign performance:

• Reporting:
  While all plans include basic reports, the Premium and Standard plans also offer custom reports, anomaly detection, and comparative reporting, giving you deeper insights into your campaigns. Essentials and Free do not include these advanced reporting tools.
• Testing and Optimization:
  A/B testing is available in all plans except the Free plan. If you want to test more than two variations, multivariate testing is exclusive to the Premium and Standard plans. Additionally, features like send time optimization and delivery by time zone are only available with Premium and Standard, which could be helpful in improving open and click-through rates.

10. Support and Onboarding

For assistance and onboarding:

• Support:
  The Premium plan provides the most comprehensive support, including phone support and personalized onboarding with 4 sessions. The Standard plan offers 1 session of onboarding. Both Essentials and Free do not include onboarding sessions, and the Free plan also lacks live chat support, only offering email support for the first 30 days.

Key Takeaways

• If you're looking for the full set of features with maximum flexibility, scalability, and advanced automation, the Premium plan is the best choice. It is ideal if you need to manage large lists, run complex campaigns, and have dedicated support.
• The Standard plan is a solid middle-ground, offering a majority of the Premium features, but with some limits on contact sizes and reporting capabilities. It could work well if you want to balance costs and functionality.
• Essentials is more suited for smaller campaigns, offering enough tools to handle moderate-sized audiences with basic automations. However, it lacks advanced reporting, segmentation, and support.
• The Free plan is only practical for very basic needs. It has strict limits on contacts, email sends, and features. This could be useful for smaller teams or test runs but will likely be insufficient for serious marketing campaigns.

Additional Overage Charges