Why Mailchimp Should Be Your First Email Platform

Your First Goal is to Capture Emails From Your Visitors

The Story

As a young boy growing up in Arizona, I had a paper route and was a paper boy for the Arizona Republic and later The Phoenix Gazette, when paperboys on bicycles distributed the news. I lost both jobs to someone older with a car, when the papers discovered an adult in a car could deliver papers more cost effectively than a young kid on a bike. 

I loved my paper route. Every morning at 3am-4am, a tied bundle of papers would be delivered on my driveway by the paper distributor. I would get up at 4:30am, unbind the papers, fold them with a rubber band and pack them into by Schwinn bicycle baskets. With fully loaded baskets, I would ride the 1 mile to my route and begin tossing papers from my bike in the street to the front porch of the homes of my subscribers. "Porching" a paper from the street was a great feeling. ("Porching" meant throwing a paper from your bike on the street and landing it exactly on the front door mat.) When you missed the porch, you had to step off your bike, walk to the porch and set the paper down which took more time and energy. So it was important to become a skilled paper thrower.

When my sons ask about my paper route - confused why someone would throw papers on the porch of the house - I tell them that is how we delivered the internet to homes why back in the old days...I digress. 

On Wednesdays and Sundays, the paper distributors would drop two bundles on my driveway. One bundle for the paper (which was exceptionally larger on Sundays) and the second bundle was for the pages and pages of advertisements and coupons of local businesses. We called them inserts. On those days I was required to put the insert into the paper and then fold them all together with one very strained rubber band. (I was often required to "double band" the large papers.) 

Advertisers paid top dollar for a sizable listing in the Wednesday and Sunday papers. Their return was significant enough to come back and pay for those listings again and again. The advertising inserts were often larger than the papers themselves. I wondered why anyone would keep their subscription to the paper when it was full of so much "junk mail", but the papers knew their subscribers and how to monetize the news by putting just enough "junk mail" wrapped inside the news to maximize ad revenue and subscription revenue. 

With the inserts included, the papers were thick and could often only be folded in half. And with all my baskets full, as well as a pouch that I would wear over my shoulder, I could only get 1/3rd to 1/2 of the papers to fit, so the one-mile trip to my route would take place 2-3 times on a Sunday or Wednesday morning. Being a paper boy on those days was hard work. 

My dad would sometimes drive me on "insert days"  to help. I would put all the papers in the back of our Ford Ranger pick up truck, my dad would drive my route with me and my papers in the back. I would hop out of the truck bed to walk the papers up to each porch. (You couldn't throw the big papers from the street.) My dad's window would be down and I'd yell direction to him from the back. He'd swerve back and forth down each street and Hank Williams would play from his radio. It took about the same amount of time to finish the route as it took to get through both sides of the Hank Williams Greatest Hits tape that my dad never tired of listening to. And when Hank sang, "I've got a hot rod Ford and a 2 dollar bill", I'd smilie while sitting in the truck bed of our Ford Ranger and think of how I'd spend $2 after my next payday. 

The Lesson

Today, news and coupons are delivered digitally - but consumer behavior is still very similar. People still comb through their metaphorical Wednesday and Sunday coupons and offers. The ads are still effective, but they have to be delivered correctly. 

The buying and selling of email lists is projected to be a $17billion industry by 2027. Most consumers have accepted the inevitability that they will receive junk mail and have systems set up to filter that which they want and don't want. Most consumers have an email address that is used for all their online shopping, to keep their personal email address clean from SPAM. And, as with the Sunday and Wednesday paper, many consumers set aside a day or two each week to comb through their offers in their "junk email" to decide what offers they want to take advantage of.

If you were the first and only ad in the first newspaper, then your "percent of voice" among all other ads would have been 100%. As soon as another business paid for an ad, your percent of voice became 50%, then 25%...and down and down. 

The same true today with emails. Your message is delivered to an inbox that is full of ads. Your % of voice on any given day is incredibly low. And the only way your email reaches the recipient in a way that can drive actions is if it stands out. So as a business owner that is investing money in putting your ad into the inbox of a consumer, how to you get the biggest bang for your buck? It's the same problem the businesses faced when advertising on insert day in the papers. How to stand out? But in today's digital world, you have so many more tools available to help you achieve your marketing goals - tools that newspaper advertisers could have only dreamed of in the 80s. 

Enter Mailchimp

I should note here as I have done when recommending other platforms (like Shopify) that I am not paid in any way by Mailchimp. I am not an affiliate nor do I received any type of commission or kickback should you decide to use them. I recommend them purely based on my own experience. I have used other email platforms like Klaviyo, and I always return to Mailchimp. The user experience is easier. Their cost is lower. And the results with Klaviyo or other "more sophisticated" platforms never seem pay off. If you aren't succeeding on Mailchimp, the switching to another platform is not going to fix your problem. Mailchimp has all the tools you need to succeed. 

Whether you are a small business or a larg business, Mailchimp has the tools you need to maximize deliveries, segment your audience, convert your customers and customize your customer's experience. In the past 12 months (I'm writing this in April 2025), I have sent over 10million emails with Mailchimp - and growing every year. 

As a start-up entrepreneur, I was able to begin with Mailchimp for free, utilizing their 2 week trial. Then I paid $20/mo which allowed me to grow to 500 subscribers before it increased. With my first start-up, I waited until I had a few hundred email subscribers before subscribing to Mailchimp. I tried to manually manage my subscribers and unsubscribers to send a few emails each month. I realized later how many more sales I would have converted had I taken advantage of Mailchimp's automated emails, custom journeys, optimized send times, cart abandonment features, etc. and I would have captured emails more quickly with their pop-up forms. 

NOTHING is more value to you as a start-up entrepreneur than someone that visits your website and agrees to accept your emails by sharing their information in your email pop-up banner. These people are not cold calls. They are potential customers that visited your site and thought, "This looks interesting. Sure, I'll share my email." If you manage these people well, they possess the highest likelihood of becoming a customer. 

A subscriber is someone that wants your paper delivered to their home and they enjoy looking at your ads in the Wednesday and Sunday bundles - to borrow a metaphor from the story above. Your job now is to find what days of the week their "Sunday" and "Wednesday" are. In other words, what days of the week they will regularly open your email. Deliver on those days, and your % of voice goes up! Deliver on those days with the right content, and your % of voice increases even more! 

Here is a list of 20 tools offered in Mailchimp's cheapest $20/mo plan that will provide a significant return on that $20/mo over the course of your first year in business. All of these tools can be easily synced with your Shopify website. (Click here to learn why I recommend Shopify.)

1. A custom pop-up window on your Shopify store to collect emails. 
2. SMS (Text messaging) ad ons. Texting is very effective when done correctly.
3. New-customer onboarding email automations.
4. Custom landing pages to collect emails/cell numbers. 
5. Custom customer segment builders. 
6. Email send time optimization tools. 
7. Easy email development - pulls directly from your Shopify store. 
8. Intuitive interface. You don't have to be a programmer. 
9. Real time reporting. 
10. An easy-to-use app to make changes to your emails on the go. 
11. Responsive customer support. 
12. The lowest pricing for email sends. 
13. Anti-SPAM tools to keep your emails out of junk folders. 
14. Shopping cart abandonment automated emails. 
15. Shopping behavior automated emails. 
16. Birthday and anniversary segmenting. 
17. Send-time optimization to increase open rates. 
18. AI tools to help optimize each email. 
19. Automated recommendations to help you build smart emails. 
20. Tiered pricing - you only pay more as you grow. (Every year as a % of sales my Mailchimp fees decline as I optimize further.) 

Of course, there are many more reasons to use Mailchimp to begin sending customer emails immediately. The list above are the 20 items I wish I would have known when I started my first business. If you have a website and just one or two customers emails, you should join Mailchimp immediately. Your email acquisitions will increase as will the likelihood of converting those emails into customers for life. 

Of course, Fulton365 can help you set up your Mailchimp account to ensure an easy start. Once our templates are created, you can simply "copy and paste" the work we do for you and begin making alterations and customizations of your own. We simply shorten the learning curve and apply expert applications to your systems from our 15 years of experience. 

Conclusion

If I could go back in time, the second thing I would do after setting up my first Shopify store  would be to sync Mailchimp, build the email request pop-up and develop my 21 email onboarding campaign. Then I would simply let Shopify and Mailchimp do their thing to increase my sales on month #1. 

For brick and mortar retailers, you should still have a basic website where you can direct customer to visit and enter their emails in addition to a system of collecting emails in person, in return for a discount you will send via email for their next visit to your store, market or booth. 

Emails are your first step towards new growth. Maximize the possibility of every email you collect with automation that you only have to create once. And watch the sales come in.