An exclusive look for partners: Mailchimp’s all-in-one Marketing Platform

FAQs for Partners

In the midst of these new, powerful features and updates, we want to empower our valued partners with the information to keep serving your clients and users well.

We’ve rounded up some questions and answers here.

What’s changing with Mailchimp?

We built an all-in-one Marketing Platform to empower small businesses to connect with their audiences and create the customer love that’s needed to grow. We just released new features and updates—like our audience dashboard and Marketing CRM functionality, new channels and updated automations—to make Mailchimp the smartest, most powerful place to do all of your marketing.

For more than 2 years, we’ve been adding new features, like landing pages, Facebook ads, Google retargeting, postcards, social posting, and our marketing CRM tools that have become the heart of the Mailchimp platform. This week, we’re bringing it all together with a deeply integrated app experience for users, so they can market smarter and grow faster, new plans that allow customers to get the most out of Mailchimp, and a global marketing campaign where we tell the world we’re officially an “all-in-one Marketing Platform.”

Hear more from our CEO Ben Chestnut in his announcement letter to customers and partners.

Why are we introducing new plans?

For a long time our primary product was email, so the price of a Mailchimp account was based on how many people you sent emails to and how many emails you sent.

With so many new channels to put to work for your business, our definition of “audience” is changing to include all of the contacts you can market to regardless of their email opt-in/subscriber status. So that happy customer that’s been on your subscriber list for 2 years? They’ll still be a part of your audience. But those customers that unsubscribed and that customer that attended your event but never opted in to your newsletter? They’ll be in your audience now, too.

These new channels allow you to leverage your entire audience, so you can encourage new engagement with your brand. It’s much more expensive to find new customers than to keep existing ones, so be sure to market to the audience you’ve worked so hard to build.

Now that we offer an all-in-one Marketing Platform with so much more than email, our new plans reflect these expansive capabilities and allow customers to choose what features they want and how advanced those features will be.

Where can I learn more about Mailchimp’s new pricing plans?

Mailchimp introduced a new pricing model on May 15, 2019. Check out our knowledge base and pricing page to review and compare our new pricing plans.

How does this affect existing users?

Mailchimp has three legacy pricing plans available only to users who signed up before the new pricing plans were introduced: legacy Free Plan, legacy Monthly Plan, and legacy Pay As You Go Plan.

Legacy Free Plan: Mailchimp's free, introductory plan that existing users are grandfathered into. The legacy Free Plan allows you to send 12,000 total emails per month and have up to 2,000 total contacts across all audiences in the account. Starting June 18, 2019, the legacy Free Plan will use whole-audience billing, which means that every contact counts toward the audience limit, including subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts. Cleaned or archived contacts do not count toward the audience limit. Users are able to archive contacts to stay under 2,000 contacts or can upgrade to a paid plan.

Legacy Monthly Plan: A recurring plan that existing users are grandfathered into. The legacy Monthly Plan charges once per month based on total subscribed contact count or send volume. This plan includes additional paid features.

Legacy Pay As You Go Plan: A flexible email marketing plan designed for infrequent senders. The legacy Pay As You Go Plan includes access to the same paid features as the legacy Monthly Plan.

Review the Pricing FAQ for Legacy Plans article as an additional resource for you and your customers.

How can service partners access accounts without customers being charged for an additional seat?

Service partners, such as freelancers, marketing consultants and agencies who help customers with Mailchimp, will need to use the agency flag and connect client accounts through the agency account management process. This will allow the service partner to access the client’s account without using (or being charged for) an additional seat.

It’s important for the service partner or agency to initiate the connection process to a client’s account to avoid having the client use a seat for agency access.

Learn how to turn on the agency flag and add clients.

Are custom templates available for free plans?

No. Users will need to upgrade to the standard plan (which starts at $14.99 per month) to create a custom template. Themed email templates (pre-designed layouts) are also restricted and require an upgrade. Existing free users will need to upgrade in order to add any new custom templates, although any existing templates will work as usual.

Some integrations may create a new audience for the user. Will any changes be made to the API to prevent an integration from creating a new audience accidentally bumping a user to a different pricing plan?

If an integration attempts to create a new audience for an account that has reached the audience limit, an error will be returned. We recommend the use of tags instead of creating a new audience for the user. Tags are labels that users create to help organize contacts based on data only they, or integrations they use, know about contacts. Tags are highly customizable, so users and integrators can create and assign them as needed.

If an existing audience can be used and a new audience is required, the user will need to upgrade to a plan that allows them to have an additional audience. Check out our Tags API Guide for complete documentation.