Mailchimp
Also known as: Mailchimp email, Freddie (mascot), Intuit Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform used by businesses to send newsletters, promotional emails, and automated email sequences to subscriber lists.
It provides drag-and-drop email builders, audience segmentation, campaign analytics, and basic CRM features. Mailchimp is the most recognized brand in email marketing, particularly for small businesses and nonprofits. Intuit acquired Mailchimp in 2021.
Mailchimp, explained at three levels
At home
Mailchimp is a tool for sending email newsletters to a list of subscribers. If you have a blog, a small business, or an organization, Mailchimp lets you collect email addresses, design a nice-looking email, and send it to everyone on your list with one click. As of 2026, the free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, enough for a small personal or community project.
At work
Marketing teams use Mailchimp to send promotional emails, product announcements, event invitations, and newsletters. Mailchimp tracks open rates (what percentage of recipients opened the email) and click rates (who clicked a link inside), so you can see which emails work and which don't. It's also how you legally manage unsubscribes: Mailchimp handles this automatically.
At home
Mailchimp's audience segmentation lets you send different emails to different groups based on their behaviour or data. You might send a discount only to subscribers who opened your last three emails, or send a re-engagement email only to subscribers who haven't opened anything in six months. This targeting improves results by sending relevant content to the right people.
At work
Mailchimp's Customer Journeys (automations) send emails automatically based on triggers: a welcome email when someone subscribes, a birthday offer on their birthday, or a follow-up three days after someone abandoned a shopping cart. A/B testing lets you send two versions of a subject line to a small group, then automatically send the winner to the rest of your list.
At home
Advanced Mailchimp users use tags and custom merge fields to personalize emails at scale: emails that address recipients by name, reference their location, or mention the specific product they last purchased. Dynamic content blocks show different email content to different segments within the same campaign, eliminating the need to send multiple separate emails.
At work
Mailchimp's API allows marketing engineers to sync subscriber data from any system, trigger transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets) through Mailchimp's infrastructure, and pull campaign performance data into business intelligence dashboards. For compliance, Mailchimp's CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance tools automate consent management, double opt-in, and required unsubscribe links. Growing businesses often outgrow Mailchimp and migrate to Klaviyo (e-commerce focus) or HubSpot (CRM-integrated marketing).
Real-world examples
At home
Sophie ran a community garden and used Mailchimp to send a monthly newsletter to 200 members. She used a template, dropped in photos of that month's harvest, wrote an update, and sent it in under 30 minutes. Mailchimp told her that 68% of recipients opened the email: far higher than industry average.
At work
Carlos, an e-commerce marketer, set up a Customer Journey in Mailchimp for new subscribers. Day 1: welcome email with 10% discount. Day 3: best-selling products. Day 7: customer reviews and social proof. Day 14: second discount offer. The automated sequence generated revenue without any manual effort after the initial setup.
How it compares
| feature | Mailchimp | Klaviyo | HubSpot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary strength | Ease of use, brand recognition | E-commerce data integration | CRM-integrated marketing |
| Free tier | Up to 250 contacts (as of 2026) | Up to 250 contacts | Yes (basic marketing) |
| E-commerce integration | Good (Shopify, WooCommerce) | Best-in-class (built for e-commerce) | Good (native CRM data) |
| Best for | Small businesses, newsletters | E-commerce brands | B2B, inbound marketing |
Mailchimp is the easiest to start with and fine for newsletters and basic campaigns. Klaviyo is the better choice for e-commerce businesses that want deep Shopify integration and revenue-attributed email reporting. HubSpot is better when email marketing needs to connect tightly with CRM and sales workflows.
For analysts
Many small business clients are on Mailchimp out of habit when better-fit options exist. An e-commerce client selling on Shopify should almost always be on Klaviyo instead: the revenue attribution, abandoned cart automation, and product recommendation features are significantly more capable than Mailchimp's equivalents.
History & origin
Mailchimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in Atlanta, Georgia, initially as a paid side project alongside their web design agency. The famous chimp mascot, Freddie, became iconic in marketing circles. Mailchimp grew to dominance by offering a generous free plan and a simple drag-and-drop email builder. Its 2014 sponsorship of the Serial podcast, with a listener famously mispronouncing the name as 'MailKimp', became a cult classic. The company expanded into landing pages, social media ads, and CRM features. Intuit acquired Mailchimp for approximately $12 billion in 2021, the largest acquisition of a bootstrapped startup in history.