Erin M. Wiles

There really is a lot of monkey business going around in the web world and I am not just talking about the crazy amounts of spam in my inbox everyday.  I am talking about two of some of the more usable web softwares available through the internet: SurveyMonkey and MailChimp.

These two web businesses have similar names, but are in fact two different companies.  In 2007, the two companies started teaming up and are now, as they put it, “working beautifully together, like chocolate and peanut butter.”  They are both very powerful tools that can be utilized by any industry, especially those in sales and marketing, and offer free and paid versions of their services.  Below is my brief description and review of each.

SurveyMonkey (SM) is an online tool designed to help anyone create simple or complex web surveys.  SM allows you to build, tailor, and brand your own surveys.  You have the ability to add your logo and select a color scheme to match.   Once you have completed designing your survey, you can upload email addresses of those you want to receive the survey and SM will fire it out to them and collect their responses.  If you don’t want to email, SM can provide an HTML box to add to your website or provide a link for you to post as you please.

SM manages all the responses so all you need to do is login to your account and export the data to a format of you choice (excel, etc.).  Being able to easily view your results quickly and easily makes your job that much easier.

If you are sending out smaller surveys to smaller groups of people, then the free edition is for you.  However, if you expect to have more than 10 questions per survey or expect more than 100 responses per survey, then you may want to look into getting a paid SM account.

My only criticism for SM is that once you get into collecting the responses, you can get confused as to where everything is.  I have also read other complaints that if users encounter a problem, SM is slow to respond to their issue.  Lastly, though SM is very clean and professional, I would like to see them work on a facelift to add more eye-pleasing layouts to their templates.  I think they look a bit dated compared to the new looks present on the web today.  Overall, any pitfalls I have mentioned are well made up for by the ease and usability of this application.

Weather you are polling your friends for their favorite places to eat or go around town or sending out a survey to your target market to better learn their habits, SurveyMonkey in my opinion has the abilities and  power to help you accomplish either.

MailChimp (MC) is a amazingly easy tool designed to help with email marketing campaigns.  Its eye-pleasing design and layout is more advanced than SurveyMonekey’s and offers a bit more humor with its personalized monkey messages on each page.  I recently used this tool to design an e-newsletter for my MBA group and found it extremely helpful.  The set up is simple, you choose from existing templates, brand it with logos and colors and create your campaign.  You can upload existing email address to send your email to or create a subscription page.

To me, their reports are the shining star of the application.  You can export all data to excel or view it on your MC dashboard.  The reports show how many emails went through successfully, how many bounced, if you got any complaints, if it was forwarded, which links within your email were clicked (and the number of clicks), a comparison of your response rate to others in your industry and much, much more.  You can even export your MC email to twitter or post a web link or HTML box that leads to your email campaign.

If you aren’t very good at managing web applications, MC makes learning very easy.  They not only offer regular webinars, but also have a large library of video tutorials to help you learn their ins and outs.

MC only offers a free trial to users, unlike SurveyMonkey’s free version.  In the free trial you are given a sending max of 600 emails, including any test emails you fire out.  But, if you utilize the web link to provided to you by MC in your campaign, it does not take away from any of your 600 emails allocated.

I really couldn’t find much to criticize with MC.  The only thing I didn’t like was that any test emails (which they strongly recommend you send to all email servers before you blast your final email) took away from your free trial emails.  It would be nice to even have MC do some automated email testing for the users through some of the bigger email providers (gmail, yahoo, msn, etc.).

I honestly can’t say enough good things about SurveyMonkey and MailChimp.  I highly recommend them to anyone for work, school, or just a side project.  They make their tasks so easy on people that, well, it’s monkey work.

Tags: Add new tag, email marketing