Mad Mimi email marketing built a loyal following among small businesses and solo operators for nearly two decades. It was affordable, genuinely easy to use, and cut through the complexity that plagued many competing platforms. But if you are researching it today, there is one fact you need first: Mad Mimi was officially retired on August 30, 2024.
Mad Mimi was retired as of August 30, 2024, and GoDaddy streamlined its email marketing product offering under GoDaddy Digital Marketing.
This review covers what the platform was, what it offered, where it fell short, and what former users and new buyers should consider now.
Key Takeaways
- Mad Mimi was a bootstrapped email marketing provider founded in 2007 by Gary Levitt. Along with Mailchimp, it was one of the most popular small business email marketing platforms during the "Web 2.0" era.
- Mad Mimi offered four subscription packages: Basic (ranging from $10 to $27/month), Pro ($42 to $139/month), Silver ($199 to $749/month), and Gold ($1,049 to $1,499/month), all priced by contact count.
- On GetApp, Mad Mimi earned a 4.5 ease-of-use rating from 55 verified reviews. Users appreciated the clean templates and simple setup but felt the platform lacked advanced options and flexibility found in competing tools.
- GoDaddy acquired Mad Mimi in 2014 for $45 million to cross-sell email marketing services to its user base. Since the acquisition, GoDaddy left the platform virtually unchanged.
- The platform's biggest weaknesses were limited automation, poor segmentation capabilities, and a complete halt in product development after the GoDaddy acquisition.
What Was Mad Mimi?
Mad Mimi was a cloud-based email marketing solution designed for small, midsize, and large enterprises. It offered email design, list management, tracking, and analytics within a single suite.
With a unique, template-free approach to email creation and what the company called "fanatical customer support," Mad Mimi was trusted by more than 100,000 customers, from micro businesses to large brands like AOL, StumbleUpon, and Air Canada.
The platform's value proposition was simple: strip away complexity, keep the interface clean, and let small businesses send professional emails without a marketing team. That positioning worked well from 2007 through the mid-2010s, but the product stagnated after GoDaddy's acquisition.
Users cited a complete lack of automation and no new integrations, with one reviewer noting there had been "ZERO updates" in five years of using the platform, and that it seemed GoDaddy had no plans to update the service in any way.
Mad Mimi Features
Mad Mimi made it simple to create HTML emails with a template-free email design approach. The easy-to-use platform helped users create, send, and track email campaigns from within a single intuitive interface. It included email design tools, list management, reporting, and tracking technology, plus add-on features including web forms, email drip campaigns, social links, and signup IPs.
Email Design
Unlike many competing products, Mad Mimi did not provide users with an extensive range of templates. Instead, users were given one theme with a few layouts geared toward specific applications (product promotion, quick updates, newsletters), and a range of color schemes to choose from.
The newsletters sent with Mad Mimi were responsive, meaning they automatically adjusted their layout to suit the device on which they were being accessed, whether mobile, tablet, or desktop.
List Management
The list management functionality helped users create or upload mailing lists in CSV files. Users could categorize contacts for email campaigns.
The service automatically removed unsubscribes and bounces from contact lists, keeping deliverability cleaner without manual effort.
Analytics and Tracking
The campaign analytics tool allowed users to accurately track key metrics such as email bounce rate, deliveries, unsubscribers, open rate, click rate, and forwarding rate.
Mad Mimi offered a clean, simple analytics interface that made understanding the basics of a campaign straightforward. Users got access to essential data: open rates, clickthrough rates, and unsubscribe rates. The Google Analytics integration was notably useful, as Mad Mimi would rewrite URLs in emails so that traffic from specific campaigns was easily trackable in Google Analytics reports.
Autoresponders and Drip Campaigns
Autoresponders in Mad Mimi let you send subscribers emails at intervals you define. You could set up a welcome message immediately after someone signs up, a discount code a few days later, and a social media invitation two weeks after that.
However, the automation was time-based rather than behavior-based.
Mailchimp's autoresponder functionality, by contrast, allowed creating autoresponders based on user actions such as clicking a particular link, opening an email, or purchasing a product, enabling sophisticated subscriber journeys and sales funnels that were not possible in Mad Mimi.
Pair this limitation with what we know about how automation lifts results. Behavior-triggered welcome sequences, for example, consistently outperform batch-and-blast approaches. See our guide on Welcome Email Sequence Best Practices: 7 Proven Strategies for sequences that work regardless of which platform you use.
Integrations
Mad Mimi integrated with a wide range of applications including Wix, Wufoo, PayPal, Google Analytics 360, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, SurveyMonkey, Shopify, BigCommerce, Zapier, Eventbrite, Jotform, Leadpages, OptinMonster, and more.
Security
Mad Mimi offered impeccable delivery and security with PCI compliance and 248-bit SSL encryption.
Mad Mimi Pricing
Mad Mimi used a contact-based pricing model, meaning you paid based on your list size rather than the number of emails you sent.
Their pricing model was based on number of contacts, which allowed users to send unlimited emails to all email addresses in their contact list. This was advantageous for businesses that sent more than one email per month to the same list.
Four subscription packages were offered: Basic (ranging from $10 to $27/month), Pro (ranging from $42 to $139/month), Silver (ranging from $199 to $749/month), and Gold (ranging from $1,049 to $1,499/month).
Here is a snapshot of how the Basic tier stacked up by list size:
| List Size | Mad Mimi Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Up to 500 | $10 |
| Up to 2,500 | $16 |
| Up to 5,000 | $27 |
| Up to 10,000 | $42 |
| Up to 15,000 | $59 |
All plans allowed users to send an unlimited number of emails until their audience exceeded 75,000 subscribers, after which send limits applied. If those limits were exceeded, an additional $0.40 per 1,000 messages applied.
The key difference between the four Mad Mimi pricing tiers (beyond send limits) was sending speed. The more expensive the plan, the faster Mad Mimi sent your emails out, ranging from normal speed to 2x, 3x, and 4x speed on higher tiers.
For reference:
a list of 2,500 contacts cost $16/month with Mad Mimi, compared to $27 via GetResponse or $45 with Mailchimp at the time.
Pros of Mad Mimi Email Marketing
Genuinely easy to use.
Mad Mimi's brightly colored interface was very easy to use. Thanks to large text links and big buttons, key features were easy to find, and users new to email marketing could send newsletters and create autoresponder campaigns very straightforwardly.
Affordable pricing for list-based senders.
Reviewers consistently noted Mad Mimi's pricing as affordable and attractive for small businesses or nonprofits, with a free tier and reasonable costs for paid plans.
Strong customer support.
Mad Mimi's customer support was one of its best qualities. While the platform did not offer phone support, its live chat was exceptionally helpful, with short wait times, available Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm ET.
It also had 24/7 email support, with every support representative described as very knowledgeable.
Clean, responsive emails.
Users praised how easy Mad Mimi was to set up and how clean and crisp the resulting emails looked visually, with some reporting regular compliments on their email designs.
Solid integrations and API access.
Integration with third-party applications like CRM systems and e-commerce platforms allowed Mad Mimi to fit within broader marketing workflows. Its API offered further customization for developers needing advanced functionality.
Automatic list hygiene.
Mad Mimi provided smart list management, removing the friction of dealing with bounces and unsubscribes automatically.
Cons of Mad Mimi Email Marketing
No meaningful product development post-acquisition.
Since acquiring Mad Mimi in 2014, GoDaddy left the platform virtually unchanged. Once GoDaddy built its own homegrown email offering (GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite), it forced customers to switch rather than invest in the platform.
Weak segmentation.
There was no way to have automatic user segmentation without contacting support directly. Users could not maintain two or more lists with different users without affecting settings for the whole account, and would need separate accounts to keep lists entirely separate.
Limited automation depth.
There was no way to use segmented lists based on what subscribers clicked on, which severely limited behavior-driven campaign strategies. For teams that want to leverage email list segmentation strategies that can boost ROI by 760%, Mad Mimi's capabilities were a meaningful constraint.
Fewer templates.
In comparison to other email service providers, email templates were limited, as were sign-up form options.
Unlike other email marketing software, Mad Mimi did not provide users with a range of templates to choose from.
No device preview.
There was no way to preview what an email would look like on different devices. Users had to actually send a test email and open it on each device to see how it appeared.
No spam checking tool.
Mad Mimi did not have a spam checking tool, which is a meaningful deliverability gap compared to more modern platforms.
Limited image storage and handling.
Users noted that Mad Mimi did not allow much space for storing images used in newsletters, and the process of adding images was described as needlessly difficult.
What Happened When Mad Mimi Shut Down?
Mad Mimi, a GoDaddy brand, was discontinued on August 30, 2024. After that date, Mad Mimi customers no longer had access to their accounts.
Prior to retirement, Mad Mimi customers were able to download their data from madmimi.com. Customer data available for download included contact lists, emails, and campaign results.
Customers who wanted to continue using GoDaddy for email marketing had their Mad Mimi content migrated when they started the transition to GoDaddy Digital Marketing services.
While GoDaddy offered to migrate contact lists and some campaigns, engagement stats were not preserved. Former Mad Mimi customers had to learn a new interface and rebuild engagement data from scratch.
Alternatives Worth Considering
Since Mad Mimi is no longer available, here are the platforms most commonly cited as replacements:
- Mailchimp:
Mailchimp offers basic automation options and features designed to boost orders and customer lifetime value.
It is more expensive but significantly more capable.
- MailerLite:
MailerLite is a user-friendly platform especially suited to new businesses, with a simple email builder, surveys, a website builder, and pre-built automation workflows.
- GetResponse:
GetResponse supports list-building, landing pages with signup forms, and A/B testing, and stands out with SEO tools, pre-designed templates, and autoresponders.
- AWeber:
Having been in the marketing space since 1998, AWeber combines time-tested strategies with modern features like AI writing and subject line assistance.
Whichever platform you land on, your results will depend heavily on how you write and structure your campaigns. Our guide on email subject line best practices that boost open rates by 27% applies across every platform on this list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Mad Mimi still available?
Mad Mimi officially retired as of August 30, 2024.
The platform is no longer accepting new accounts or processing campaigns.
GoDaddy has transitioned to a new platform called GoDaddy Digital Marketing
as its replacement offering.
What were Mad Mimi's pricing plans?
Pricing was based on the number of contacts. Four subscription packages were offered: Basic (ranging from $10 to $27/month), Pro (ranging from $42 to $139/month), Silver (ranging from $199 to $749/month), and Gold (ranging from $1,049 to $1,499/month).
All plans included unlimited sends up to the 75,000-subscriber threshold.
Why did GoDaddy shut down Mad Mimi?
GoDaddy acquired Mad Mimi in 2014 for $45 million to cross-sell email marketing services to its user base. Since the acquisition, GoDaddy left the platform virtually unchanged. Once GoDaddy developed its own GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite, it decided to force customers to migrate there rather than continue investing in Mad Mimi.
What is the best Mad Mimi alternative for small businesses?
The right alternative depends on your priorities.
MailerLite is a strong option for new or small businesses, with a simple email builder, surveys, a website builder, pre-built automation workflows, and integrations for Stripe, WordPress, Zapier, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
If you send frequently to a larger list and want strong automation at a competitive price, GetResponse is worth a close look. For e-commerce specifically, Omnisend and Klaviyo are the most commonly recommended.
