MailChimp is the email campaign service I’ve been looking for. It offers free beautiful email templates, ISP feedback loops and subscriber response tracking. Signing up for a free account will let you generate beautiful email campaigns for up to a thousand subscribers and let you send six thousand emails a month.
For larger campaigns (as in more subscribers & emails), MailChimp offers a wide selection of pay-as-you-go and monthly plan options. Creating an email campaign can be a daunting task even if you don’t take into consideration the technical aspects. MailChimp offers neat tutorial videos covering the entire process and several individual steps. Additionally the entire process of creating your first campaign is broken into simple steps and guided by a wizard.
MailChimp is also able to tap into your Google Analytics account so you can generate reports on the impact your email campaign is having on your website.
Finally, importing your contacts, leads or subscribers into a new campaign is also super easy. Most common export formats are supported and if you already use Google to manage your contacts, exporting isn’t even required.
When you’re all done designing your campaign, you can send yourself a test message to make sure everything is in order before you push the big red button.
In conclusion, I think MailChimp is the SAAS (software as a service) for email campaigns that offers the most and charges the least. Plus it just looks so darned good. Every page elegantly simple yet functional in its design and guess that kind of stuff matters to me.