Mailchimp

Hey guys.

Simon here, and today we're going to take a look at mailchimp, the email marketing platform.

It's a product I'm sure everybody is familiar with so we're going to be taking a look at their ux, taking a look at their sign up, the onboarding process and that first use experience.

We are going to click on start free trial.

And it looks like as part of the first step in the process here mailchimp is asking us to select a plan.

This looks all too complicated for me to figure out right now so we are just going to sign up for the free plan so we can get into the product.

So the signup process here looks fairly straightforward.

let's put our email address in here.

So it's just three things that I'm asking for.

So it looks like we've got some kind of confirmation here.

An email that, that has been accepted with the real time check mark.

I'm not quite sure why it's asking me for a username but it has pre filled it with my email address so I'm just going to keep that in there and then password.

Right.

So they've got quite a few password rules that are listed beneath here.

These are really clear and easy to understand but there's so many of them.

The likelihood is the first time I put a password in here it's not going to meet this particular criteria.

So let's give it go.

Okay, so we've got a password in there.

and again it's given us this real time feedback which is super cool.

So I don't want to receive emails from mailchimp.

okay, let's click sign up.

Okay, so it looks like we've got to activate my account before we can go through that signup process.

Appreciate this is fairly common.

but I think what mailchimp do really well here is rather than just leave users to figure this out themselves, they have added a couple of really handy quick links here so we can open in Gmail and Outlook.

And also if we didn't get the email then we can, we can try resending it as well.

So let me activate the account.

Okay, so once we've clicked the link in the email here we're taken to the account setup screen as you'd probably expect.

So inevitably mailchimp want to learn a little bit more about me at this point.

So let's enter some Details here.

Add our first name in, last name, business name.

What's nice here is if you do make a mistake or your business name changes, they are telling users here that they can change this later.

So I just think that helped users at ease.

We've got our phone number in here as well.

Okay, so the second step in the process, they are looking for our business address.

we can see a progress bar at the top.

I feel like we've made very little progress so far.

So they're asking us for our business address here and this is to follow anti spam laws.

So again I think mailchimp are doing a really good job here of explaining why this information is needed.

So let's go ahead and put our address in.

I'm just going to paste that in there and you can see it's given us some suggestions.

so it looks like it's picked up on the business address from Google Maps, which is neat.

Saves us some time.

Get that in there and click next.

Okay, so third step in the process now, mailchimp want to know what our top goal is and again this is to help personalize the experience and make recommendations based on our choice.

And we can also skip this step as well, which is cool.

let's go for grow a list of email subscribers next.

Cool.

So rather than just throwing us into the product here, mailchimp, are asking us what we want to explore first.

So this is quite neat.

let's just click top one.

Engage your audience with beautiful emails.

Click next.

How many contacts do you have?

None yet.

I'm just getting started.

Next, how do we sell to your customers?

sell website.

do you want to import your brand?

This is not something I've seen before.

This, this looks pretty neat.

I'm going to give this a try, although I have very little faith it's going to work.

Let's put the savvy design website in here now.

And click next.

Okay, almost there.

Select the emails you'd like to receive from mailchimp.

I'd rather not receive any, so I'm going to click next.

Sneaky.

Interesting.

So they've now taken us back to the pricing plans and for whatever reason are recommending the standard plan.

I have no idea how they've come to that conclusion, but for the purpose of this we're just going to continue with the free plan.

Okay, so it looks like we're not far off now.

Preparing your account, going through a checklist here Personalizing the setup, generating recommendations.

Boom.

And we are in.

So, as you'd expect, the, UI is really nice and clean here.

on the home screen we've got a list of recommendations, based on my profile here.

So they're talking about growing the audience, setting up an automation, creating our first email.

And you can't help but be drawn into some of these cards here that talk about capturing leads from signup forms.

Beneath that we've got an overview of our audience size and then some kind of, activity feed down here.

So it looks like it's just going to keep an eye on what we've been doing and then once we've created a campaign, we'll have a little bit more information down here as well.

Top left we've got a create button, which is fairly easily missed if I'm honest.

And then underneath that we've got our navigation.

And as you'd expect from a product of this size, they've broken down the product into various different sections here.

So it looks like when we open one of these we'll get further options as well.

This is a really nice breakdown, gives me a really good overview of the whole product here.

But for the purpose of this UX review, I really want to create an email.

I'd like to see how well it's pulled in the assets from the savvy design website and whether that's going to save users a bunch of time branding their emails, or whether I'm going to have to, do some rejigging.

So let's see if we can create our first email here.

Ok, so it looks like we've got a choice of builders.

I'm not too familiar with either of these options.

So we've got a new builder which has got AI assisted tools, or we've got the classic builder which I presume is more of a drag and drop interface.

And that's the one I'm going to go with for now.

See if we can create our first email here.

Nice.

So the first step in the process then is to select a template which is obviously going to save users a bunch of time here.

And we've got the option to choose different themes, save our own templates or build our own from code.

I'm going to use one of these featured ones so we can click in here.

Damn, it takes a while to load.

Might be my Internet.

So this has just given us the bare bones of the template, almost like a wireframe where we can just fill in our own information here.

I mean, I'm not too familiar with these interfaces, but even as I'm hovering over these different elements, it looks like I can interact with them.

I can drag and drop them, I can move them around, we can duplicate them, we can delete them.

Like, this is really intuitive.

Let's see if we can figure out a way of pulling in the branding when it was asking us to do that.

as part of that signup process, let's click style.

No blocks, Not in comment.

preview.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Looks like we're not actually editing in line here.

So as you're selecting each item, we're getting a fly in menu from the right here that gives us all of the options we need to format the content and add anything like images and text.

I think it'd be much more intuitive if you could do this in line with the email rather than have this slide out menu on the right.

The autosave is a nice touch though, so let's just save and close this.

Okay, so we've just got rid of some placeholder content there so we can continue.

And this is a neat little reminder here.

So we've just built, our first email with the classic builder.

And if that's something users found easy, then they can now set that builder as the default one next time they create a different campaign or a different email.

So that was easy enough.

So let's set this one as the default builder and continue with the process here.

So we've built our first email, but it looks like we've missed a few steps in the process.

So I'm just going to fill those in now.

Let's add a name, let's add a subject.

Simon at savvy design.

Again, mailchimp are really good here at guiding users.

Even just this help text here underneath the name, just reminding users, to use something that your subscribers will be able to recognize, maybe your company name.

It's just pretty helpful, for somebody who isn't familiar with, email campaigns, we'll click save.

Okay, so we've just manually added a subscriber here just so we can send the email.

So it looks like we've got everything we need.

We know who we're sending it to, where it's coming from, what the subject is.

We've designed our email really, really quickly, so just a really nice overview screen.

It just helps users get everything set up before they're going to send their email.

And it looks like there are also some additional settings down here as well, so we can add a social post to the campaign.

And, we've got various other settings that we can edit down here as well.

But looks like we've got everything set up.

So let's send our first email with mailchimp.

Are we ready to send?

So we get a confirmation message which is really nice.

We're being told this is who it's going to be going to and the two subscribers.

Right.

Let's click send.

Awesome.

So it looks like we sent our first email with mailchimp.

This is the first time we're seeing these really quirky illustrations here, but we have got a nice confirmation message shortcut to be able to check the email report, which I assume will tell me all about the delivery.

And some subtle, in app, marketing that tells me about the customer Journey builder as well.

So it's just a nice neat, way of introducing users to new features.

Just check the report really quickly.

This just gives us a really nice breakdown here, of the campaign that we've just sent.

We've got a ton of information, around what's been opened, what's been clicked, what the performance has been, how we might be able to optimize the content further.

Setting up some, campaign benchmarks, some performances.

There's so much going on here, all really useful stuff.

Anyway, I think we'll wrap it up there.

If you want your own UX tear down, just click the link below.