One of the first things you realise once you start pushing MailChimp harder is that although their form solutions are great from a starting point and (mostly) easy to get your head around… once you start stepping things up they struggle.

The biggest issue is that you can’t use MailChimp forms to update an existing person on your list – which if you’ve got multiple entry points into your email marketing system (such as multiple lead magnets) will definitely cause some headaches.

Plus, their pop-ups can be a bit hard to manage and get working, you can only have one main hosted sign up form per list (which is the main reason why people end up with several lists… boo!!!), and you need to be a bit “code savvy” if you’re going to work with hidden groups – which is one of the ways to take MailChimp to the next level.

As such, you start to look at the many, many options out there to see whether they are any good and can they solve the shortcomings of MailChimp forms.

This is a journey I’ve been on for a long while and I’ve assessed several of the tools out there as to whether they can do what I want them to do, and recently decided to have a quick look at MailMunch to see if it’s got the ability to become my form software of choice.

I’ve decided that it’s not for me, but I figured (just so I could come back in time and see if they’ve updated some stuff) that I’d do a very quick review based on a few hours messing around with the system – the things I’m looking for may not be the things you want and so MailMunch may be right up your street – so take my comments on board accordingly.

These are the things I specifically look for in form software:

• Is it easy to use? – i.e. can I do it all in my WordPress website or do I need to go elsewhere to create a form and then add some code back in.
• How much does it cost? – is there a free level? to get what I need how much is it?
• How flexible are the templates? – how much can I customise them for my own needs?
• What are the options for different types of forms? – pop ups, landing pages, scroll boxes etc?
• Does it give the option of hidden fields? – so I can capture data from the form without having to ask people to fill in boxes
• Does it let you automatically allocate people to groups? – and how flexible is it in doing this?

Here are my thoughts on MailMunch.

Ease of Use – I found MailMunch to be pretty easy to use.  It gives a plug-in for MailChimp so that I can do most of the editing within the system and don’t have to spend ages worrying about copying code from one system to another.

Cost – MailMunch has a free level so you can have a good play with it and learn how it integrates with MailChimp. To get the features I was looking for costs $20 monthly (discounts for annual membership).

Templates – MailMunch has lots of different templates, but frustratingly, you are a bit limited in terms of how you can edit them. I wanted a simple form layout with headline, image and text, then the form, and then the footer (where privacy policy links etc sit) – and the system didn’t really give me a chance to play around with the formatting that much. This is fine if you are looking for simplicity in your forms, but in a post GDPR world, having the ability to add a footer with text linking to a privacy policy (and format it) is becoming the standard and not having many templates that I could do this with was a bit frustrating.

Form Options – MailMunch gives you loads of form options, pretty much everything you could possibly want.

Hidden Fields  – Yep, MailMunch ticks this box. When you create your form you get the ability to add hidden fields, which gives you much needed flexibility in the information you can capture.

Hidden Groups – Hoorah!…  MailMunch handles hidden groups much in the way several other systems use them… giving you the chance to add subscribers directly to various groups in your MailChimp list easily. One thing I would note though, was that I couldn’t find a way to allocate a visible field to a group. So if you want to give people options (i.e. are you interested in A, B or C?, where A, B & C are groups) to chose and self select which groups they want to be added to… I couldn’t see an easy way to do this… (I’m not saying you can’t – just I couldn’t find it)

Other Comments – I was a bit disappointed with the support options, they seemed to be a bit limited in terms of self guided stuff and I didn’t wade through their live support system.

Overall – I thought MailMunch was actually pretty good and certainly ticked some of the key boxes I have when it comes to form software. Unfortunately, the lack of ability to do much template customisation meant I didn’t really want to continue delving deep into it.

So MailMunch gets a B+ and my search for the perfect form system continues.

I’d love to hear your comments on MailMunch if you use it and whether my assessment is close or off base…