With the introduction of Customer Journeys, Mailchimp are looking to step up their automation game, but as ever, your ability to use them are dependent on which paid level of Mailchimp you’re on.

Here’s a quick break down of what you can do depending on which type of Account you’ve got:

Free Account (Both Legacy & New)

Like a tantalising treat that’s just out of your reach, Customer Journeys are something you can play with at the Free level, but not actually set live.

At least you get a chance to see what’s possible (or not) and whether it’s something you want to upgrade for.

Essentials/Paid Legacy Account

If you’re on an Essential paid account, or are one of those people clinging to their old legacy account (and who don’t want to change to the new paid system), then you can create Customer Journeys.

…but Mailchimp have limited it so you can only do 4 steps, and you can’t use ‘splitting’ to push people down different routes based on their information.

As a Paid Legacy Account this frustrated me a bit – I wanted to have a good play around, but ended up having to upgrade to a Standard Account to see the full potential of the tool (which I guess is kinda what Mailchimp wanted me to do!)

Standard Paid Account

At this level you get the full beans… you can create customer journeys as long as you like and can have them split off to different routes depending on information in a record.

Premium Account

At this moment, I can’t tell you what you get with a Premium Account when it comes to Customer Journeys, but based on information from Mailchimp HQ, it’s currently the same as the Standard Paid Account.

…but based on information provided to partners, I got the impression that there would be ‘some’ benefits in this area for Premium Account holders at some point in the future.

Obviously, this will potentially change over time as Mailchimp tweak and change things, but the key here is to get the most of Customer Journeys, you’ll likely need to be at the Standard Paid Account level.