Mailchimp was never the hard part.

Let us be fair to Mailchimp first

Mailchimp is one of the best pieces of email software ever built for small businesses. The editor is good, the deliverability is good, the templates are good, the reporting tells you what you need. It has a free entry point, which is how most people meet it, and paid tiers that scale with how many contacts you hold.

It leans e-commerce. The strongest things in it are the automated ones — abandoned cart, post-purchase sequences, product recommendations, segmenting by what somebody bought. If you sell things online, that machinery is genuinely valuable and it runs without you once it is built.

We are not going to pretend a shortcoming exists so this page has a villain. There isn’t one.

The bottleneck is a blank page, not a send button

Automation is the part of email that runs itself. The newsletter is the part that does not. Nobody has ever built an automation that decides what you think is worth saying this month.

So the pattern goes like this. January is enthusiastic. February is fine. March goes out on the 22nd instead of the 1st. April does not go out. The account stays open, the contact count keeps being billed for, and the last campaign in the dashboard is from the spring.

That is not a tool problem and switching tools will not fix it. It is a writing-and-production problem, and it is the entire job we sell.

Month four is where newsletters die, and month four is a production problem.

Our own services page, and we have not found an exception yet

Keep the software if you have the writer

This is the honest version and we would rather say it here than after you have paid us.

If there is somebody in the business who actually enjoys writing the newsletter — and those people exist, they are usually the owner or one unusually good office manager — then Mailchimp is all you need. Keep your money. Buy the tier that fits your contact count and let them get on with it.

Hire this out when nobody enjoys it. That is the whole test, and it is a better test than any feature comparison.

The e-commerce case is the one where you probably keep it

Mailchimp buyers often come to us from a product business — a shop, a storefront, a subscription box — and the answer for them is usually different from the answer for a law firm.

If your revenue depends on behavioral triggers tied to purchases, that lives in the tool and near your store, and it should stay there. What we would look at instead is the one thing the automation cannot generate: a monthly issue with a human in it. The people who buy from you repeatedly are usually buying from a person, and no post-purchase sequence has ever sounded like one.

That can be run alongside everything you already have. It does not require ripping out your automations, and we would advise against ripping them out.

What changes when you pay for the work instead of the tool

The economics are simple to check. Software is priced per contact and the work is priced per issue, so at some list size the software is a rounding error either way. The question is only ever whether the issues actually happen.

• A twenty-minute interview a month is your input. That is it.
• You get a written issue in your own voice — not a template with your logo dropped in.
• It is designed and typeset, so it looks like a publication rather than a marketing email.
• There is a print and mail option, billed at cost, which is a thing no email tool can give you and which is why our clients get replies from people who never open email.
• A digital flipbook you can text, post and link from a signature.
• A date that does not move, because production runs on our own system rather than on anyone finding an afternoon.

You do not have to leave Mailchimp to do this

A lot of people assume hiring this out means a migration. It usually does not.

We can write, design and produce the issue and send it from the account you already have, under your login, with your list untouched. Your subscriber history, your automations and your reporting all stay where they are.

If a move does make sense — usually because you want CRM follow-up and text-back sitting in the same place — we will say so and give you the reason. Every account we open is opened in your name and stays yours if we part company.

What the open rate will and will not tell you

One more reason people conclude the newsletter is not working: they judge it on the dashboard. Open rates have been unreliable since mail clients started pre-fetching images on the reader’s behalf, and click rates on a newsletter are low by design because most issues are not asking anyone to click anything.

The number that matters is duller and lives outside the tool. Did somebody mention it when they called. Did a referral arrive from a name you had not heard from in two years. Did the list stop shrinking. That is what a monthly issue is buying, and no email platform can report on it.

So do not switch software because a percentage looked bad. Look at whether the issues went out at all, and at what people said to you.

When we would tell you not to bother

If your list is a few dozen people, do not buy a program. Write them an email yourself. It will be better than anything we produce, because at that size they know you.

If you have never sent anything and have no list at all, the first job is collecting one, not producing an issue for nobody. That is a CRM and website conversation, and it is cheaper than this one.

And if you are shopping for a cheaper Mailchimp, we are the wrong page. This costs more than software, because it is not software.