MailChimp Affiliate Marketing Terms Of Service: Time To Switch

Are you using MailChimp for your affiliate marketing? That might not be OK. This week I talk about some issues with the MailChimp affiliate marketing terms of service described in MailChimp’s knowledge base that seem to be hostile to affiliate marketers.

I also give an update on the Late Night Niche Site and discuss the initial content plan that I have in place for launch of the site next month.

Show Notes

I just found out – and was completely shocked about it – that affiliate links are illegal in MailChimp. MailChimp is an email service provider which is a disruptor, together with Infusionsoft and AWeber, in email marketing in the last 15 years. It turns out that MailChimp has this crazy clause in their terms of service that talks about affiliate links potentially causing your emails to stop. The clause is linked below but some portion of it states:

“Affiliate marketers are typically rewarded by a third party for recruiting customers. The reason we don’t permit this activity is that there’s no real obligation to care about subscriber satisfaction or to maintain a healthy e-commerce relationship with them. MailChimp isn’t meant for this type of marketing.”

They also noted that linking is fine but you need to ensure that the URLs that you link to are not blacklisted or else your campaigns may be stopped. If I were a blogger who is planning to monetize my blog knowing full well that I will be promoting people’s affiliate products of various types, and learning how flaky these spam lists are, I would stay very far away from MailChimp.

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In the episode, I refer to MailChimp’s “term and conditions” and “terms of service” — but what I am reading from in the episode is a MailChimp knowledge base article about those terms (authored by MailChip and on their site).

Specifically interesting is this bit:

Affiliate marketers are typically rewarded by a third party for recruiting customers. The reason we don’t permit this activity is that there’s no real obligation to care about subscriber satisfaction or to maintain a healthy e-commerce relationship with them. MailChimp isn’t meant for this type of marketing.

Their actual Terms of Use are here and basically state that they can close your account for any reason (presumably for the reasons stated in the knowledge base article above. This is not all that unusual. No one should have to do business with someone unless they want to (aside from reasons of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc).

The interesting things is that the MailChimp affiliate marketing position clearly indicates that they don’t want to do business with affiliate marketers (us).

LInks Mentioned In This Episode

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Transcript For MailChimp Affiliate Marketing Episode LNIM120

I hope you are finishing your year incredibly strong. I hope you had a fantastic holiday with your family. If you’re listening to this at the very tail end of 2016 when it’s getting released, I hope you can look back on 2016 and really appreciate some of the things that you’ve been able to accomplish.

You may be like me, you may not have gotten everything done that you intended to get done or that you wished to get done when you started out in 2016. I forgive you. It’s absolutely okay. You need to forgive yourself.

In fact, I want you to do this exercise. If you are listening to this near the end of 2016 or the very beginning of 2017, I want you to figure out what it is, the thing that you did in 2016 that you are most proud of, and I want you to write that down and I want you to take a moment to congratulate yourself about that thing.

It’s really important that you take the time to celebrate your successes. As human being type people, carbon based life forms that we are, we’re so goal driven, especially entrepreneurs or people with a side hustle that are trying to just scratch and claw our way to advantage, we’re worried about that list of things that we haven’t done yet.

I want you to take the time to identify the thing that you’re proud of that happened in 2016. Maybe there are three things. Don’t worry about that. Pick one that you like and just say, “I did this thing in 2016 and I’m pretty proud of it.” That’s put you in a very special category as an entrepreneur, because most people – the vast majority of people – that talk about wanting to do their own thing, start their own business, they don’t ever take any action. If you took some action, I want you to take the time to celebrate that success.

I’m proud of you. I think you did a great job. If you want to tell me what that was on Twitter or below in the comments, that’s great, I would love to hear from you. Most importantly, what I want you to do is to talk to yourself about it. Talk to yourself about how it’s great that you accomplished something that put you in the very top echelons of people who dream about having their own business. Congratulations to you.

(Episode 120 Transcript Continued…)