Mad Mimi Review for Authors

Staying in contact with your readers and cultivating a list of superfans is one of the most important marketing moves you can make as an author. And having an email marketing service that gives you the tools to contact your readers is super important.

So, let’s look at one of those email marketing services and determine if it’s a good one for authors. Today, we’ll be reviewing Mad Mimi.

In this article, you will learn:

• What Mad Mimi is
• The features it has to offer for authors
• What integrations it has
• How much it costs
• What I didn’t like about Mad Mimi
• And, of course, whether it’s the right email marketing service for you

Let’s get into it!

By the way, there are affiliate links in this article–that’s to keep the coffee fund topped up–but those links don’t change my opinion on the product itself.

What is Mad Mimi?

Simply put, Mad Mimi is an email marketing solution for businesses, and since you’re an independent author selling books to readers, that’s you! You’re a business owner who needs to keep in touch with his/her customers.

Mad Mimi is a simple solution built around list creation for subscribers, campaign drips and drag and drop email building that is supposed to make it easy to use (we’ll find out if that’s the case when we go over the features). They also have an ‘About Us’ page where you can learn more and a very helpful FAQ section that lists answers, in the form of articles, to just about any question you have to ask.

As a positive, my experience with their customer service has been pleasant, so if you need something from there, you can probably reach out to ask, as well.

What Features Does it Offer?

Now that we know what Mad Mimi is, let’s get into what it can do for you. The goal for indie authors is usually to find something low-cost and super easy to use for mailing list management and email sending.

Psss… I usually include ‘Free Account’ as one of the categories because that’s a huge deal to authors, right? Well, Mad Mimi doesn’t have one. More about that later.

1. Automation

Onboarding new readers onto your mailing list is super important–you want to welcome them to the list by giving them your reader magnet (usually a small book or bonus extra) and convince them to stay with some cool content. Most email marketing service providers allow you to create automations that will feed your readers through a funnel and onto your list.

Mad Mimi is no different, except for the fact that it calls these ‘funnels’ drip campaigns. By hitting ‘Create Drip Campaign’ under your Drip tab, you can create a new automation sequence for your readers and connect it to a specific form (more about those later).

Once you start your drip, you’ll be given the opportunity to create email campaigns for your automation and select the triggers for them–i.e. When they’ll go out to your subscribers. Creating the emails is simple–you drag and drop the features you want, write the text, and then add the email to the drip.

What I like about Mad Mimi is that I create the automation and then can set up the emails with their different triggers quite easily, and I can stop them at any time, or come back and edit them or change them.

Interestingly, however, if you change an email at the end of a running automation or drip campaign, readers who had already joined and completed the previous emails in the campaign won’t receive the new one.

Say you onboard them and then later decide, “Hey, I want to add another bonus email to this drip campaign,” the subscribers who’ve already completed that drip won’t get it. Only new subscribers just starting the campaign will.

2. Forms

In order to collect subscribers for your mailing list, you need a form to collect their email addresses and other information. Let’s take a look at how Mad Mimi’s forms work and whether they’re easy to use and integrate with your website and social media pages.

It’s pretty easy to navigate to the webform section of the dashboard. One click takes me to a page where I can create a form. Check it out:

It’s a pretty simple layout. You can change the style and color of the form itself and add a background image if you choose. You can also select which list you want people to sign up for when they complete the form.

You can edit the following settings when creating your form:

• Details. Your form name, ‘from name’, ‘from email address’, the list you want subscribers to sign up to, and what information you want to gather from subscribers (eg. name and email address or just email address).
• Style. The logo background, logo image, main background color, and background image.
• Advanced. The activation message, the confirmation landing page, the activation landing page, signup form page, button text, resubscribe policy, confirmation policy (single or double opt-in), and language.

And you can embed the form in the following ways:

• Style Embed–when you embed this on your website, it will contain visual elements.
• Plain Embed–when you embed this on your website, there will be no visual elements included.
• Side Tab–attaches a sign up tab to the left side of your website.

You can also link to your form with a simple URL.

I feel like Mad Mimi’s form creation is super simple and easy to use, but the functionality and integrations for forms could be improved. For instance, integrating them with Facebook lead ads must be done through Zapier. There’s no automatic integration like there is with MailChimp, for instance.

3. Email Campaigns/Creation

I look for service providers that make creating email easy and fun. The last thing I want to do is sit around and mess with settings for hours on end. I want to reach my readers fast, be able to schedule my emails easily, and then move on with my day. So, let’s take a look at how you can create emails with Mad Mimi.

There are several different formats for creating email with Mad Mimi:

1. Sales Promotion. You can use this template when promoting multiple books, for instance. The template is editable, and you can drag and drop different elements to change it as you see fit. Here’s an example of how the template looks:
2. Event Invitation. This template allows you to craft your own event invites–say you’re setting up a giveaway for your readers or you want to invite them to an event on your Facebook page like an author takeover. This is the type of email you might use.
3. Build-your-own. This is my personal favorite because the ability to craft your own email exactly as you want it is super important to me. With this template, you can do exactly that. It’s super simple to drag and drop the elements you need into place.
4. Traditional Newsletter. This is another cool template for authors to work with. Let’s face it, most authors send out a newsletter every other week (if they’re not staying in touch that often, they definitely should be), and this template makes it easy.

Mad Mimi has ‘thousands of royalty-free stock images to choose from,’ and you can also create plain text emails or insert HTML according to your needs.

The following elements are available to you when crafting email with Mad Mimi’s drag and drop email campaign builder:

• Headings
• Text boxes
• Styles–you can change your style and color scheme and fiddle around with creating your own.
• Add logos and images
• Text boxes with images
• Buttons
• Dividers

Naturally, you can link out to other websites or to your books. You’re also able to send your emails now or schedule them out for a specific date and time. You can schedule them on Pacific Standard Time but not in other timezones, unfortunately.

Email creation is really simple with Mad Mimi because it’s drag and drop. And for launch emails, where many authors might use a plain text email, you’re covered too. I had no problems creating email with them, and I think it was one of the highlights of crafting this review!

4. Extras/Important Details

There are plenty of features included in Mad Mimi’s marketing service, but not all of them warrant their own section, so here are some of the features and important details you should be aware of if you’re considering a purchase:

• List-based. Mad Mimi’s subscriber management is list-based–that means that you’ll be managing your readers in lists. If you’re used to MailChimp, transferring over to Mad Mimi will be simple because it’s a similar management scheme, whereas some of the other email marketing services manage subscribers via groups or segmenting (like Mailerlite and Convertkit).
• Management. You can unsubscribe non-reads/non-clicks but the process is complicated… there’s no ability to actively unsubscribe people who don’t open your emails without contacting support (see below in the ‘what I don’t like’ section) for more information on this.
• Reporting. Reporting is easy to access for each individual campaign, but there’s no central reporting dashboard where you can view overall subscriber gains and click/open rates. So, you can see them for your drips and campaigns but not overall for your entire list, for instance.
• Integrations. Mad Mimi integrates with the following services: Acuity Scheduling, AddThis, AgilOne, Ambassador, CapsuleCRM, CartLoom, ClinchPad, Desk, Digioh, Drupal, Etsy, EventBrite, Facebook Sharing, FreshBooks, Gleam Captures, Gleam Competitions, Google Analytics, WordPress Gravity Forms Add-on, PayPal Zap, pInterest, SurveyMonkey, Twitter Sharing, WordPress, Zapier and many more.
• Triggers. Triggers are a pretty neat extra whereby you can associate a certain date with an audience member and when that date comes around, an email will be sent to them. That’s useful if you’re going to send out emails to people on their birthdays for instance, but you’d have to collect that information in the first place. I don’t see great functionality for authors here.
• Other Add-ons. Mad Mimi has several add-ons that don’t cost anything extra with your account. These include: Multi-User (for more than one email manager), Mailer API, RSS to Email, Custom Domain, Social Links, Sign Up IPs, Display Names, Promotion Tweaks, Stats Sharing, Link to List, Subscriber Management, Triggers, and Personalization.
• Social Links. There’s a separate tab where you can add all your social links, so you can insert them easily into your email campaigns.

While going through the features, I was impressed with some of them, but others… I felt like there were add-ons that I didn’t need and then the ones I did need just weren’t there.

What Does it Cost?

This is the question most authors ask upfront, so I thought it was prudent that we cover it in it’s own section.

Upfront, the most important thing you need to know about Mad Mimi’s pricing is there is no free account with them. And there’s no free trial either. That means you can’t try before you buy. Bummer.

However, Mad Mimi’s prices are generally much cheaper than the competition’s (probably because you don’t get as many features as you do with, say, Mailerlite or ConvertKit) and you get unlimited sending–no matter the level of your account–up to 50,000 contacts. Above that, you’ll be limited in your sending.

But let’s face it, once you reach 50,000 contacts, you’ll probably migrate to a different marketing service because you’ll need advanced tagging and segmenting to manage them all!

Check out the pricing below:

So, for the most basic of accounts, you’ll pay $10 a month. I like this pricing scheme because it’s all laid out clearly for you. Whereas with MailChimp, for instance, you’ll be stuck looking for quotations and unsure of how much you need to pay a month.

Mad Mimi is super cheap, but that comes with its drawbacks.

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What I Don’t Like About Mad Mimi

Here are the things that I thought Mad Mimi could do better…

• No free account. Every other email marketing service I’ve come across (granted I haven’t looked at every single one of them) has had a free account or at least a free trial so you can try before you buy. Mad Mimi doesn’t and I think that’s a marketing flaw on their part.
• Limited reporting. There’s no way for you to check out who isn’t opening and reading your emails. You can’t see your overall growth either, other than to check the tabs and tally up your subscriber amount today versus last week for instance.
• Are the open rates right? After spending some time using Mad Mimi, I discovered that some of the open rates didn’t seem correct. When I emailed subscribers and asked them if they wanted to stay on the list (as they hadn’t been opening my emails according to Mad Mimi’s support team) they replied that they had opened every email.
• Lack of integrations. While there are some great integrations that come with Mad Mimi, there aren’t as many included as with other email marketing services — like Mailerlite, for instance.
• No unique landing page creation. You can’t create landing pages. You can only integrate your forms, or send out a pretty plain looking form link that acts as a landing page.
• Not nearly as many features as with other email services. Mad Mimi is super simple. That can be a negative or a positive depending on what you need as an author. If you’re into simple list management and you want a lower price, Mad Mimi is probably a good service for you. But if you’re looking for segmentation and tagging, you’ll soon get frustrated with the service.
• There’s no segmenting or tagging to speak of. That means you won’t be managing your lists and readers in any other way than getting them onto a list or placing them on another when they click a link in your email.

Is Mad Mimi the Right Email Marketing Solution For You?

If you’re looking for a simple email solution that will cost you some money (but not too much) and you’re not too worried about integrating with your various other services, like Facebook lead ads forms, for instance, Mad Mimi should serve you pretty well.

However, I would be remiss not to mention that Mailerlite can do everything MadMimi does (and more) for free. I highly recommend you check out my MailerLite review if you’re interested in purchasing a subscription to an email marketing service. Honestly, you can’t go wrong with MailerLite’s free account.

I would say that, of the email marketing services I’ve reviewed, MadMimi is a good second choice. I know several authors who really enjoy it.

Do you have any suggestions for email marketing services I should review? What’s your favorite? Leave a comment down below and let me know… I might review them in the future!

Mad Mimi vs MailerLite

As you can tell from my notes, MailerLite is a strong competitor for Mad Mimi. So, let's take a quick look at the two services side-by-side and find out how they stack up.

	Mad Mimi	MailerLite
Free Account		1,000 contacts. Unlimited emails.
Pricing
Automations
Landing Page
Ease of Use

As you can see from the table above, MailerLite comes out on top. It has a free account that has more capability than Mad Mimi's basic paid account. Why pay for something that will give you less value than the free, popular option?

If you want more information about MailerLite, check out my free video course where I'll show you how to start using it right away. If you'd like to learn more about other email services, check out my Best Email Services review here.

Cheers!