Why Mad Mimi is Shutting Down, and The Best Alternatives

A few weeks ago, GoDaddy announced they plan to shut down Brooklyn-based Email Marketing Platform Mad Mimi on August 15, 2024.

Mad Mimi was a bootstrapped email marketing provider founded in 2007 by Gary Levitt — making the platform 17 years old at the time of closure.

Along with Mailchimp, they were one of the most popular Small Business Email Marketing Platforms during the "Web 2.0" era of the 2000s. Mad Mimi was acquired by GoDaddy back in 2014 for $45M.

Why is Mad Mimi shutting down?

GoDaddy originally acquired Mad Mimi to cross-sell email marketing services to their userbase.

However, since acquiring Mad Mimi in 2014, GoDaddy has left the platform virtually unchanged, the homepage still looking like a quirky early-2000s internet time capsule.

Now that GoDaddy has their own homegrown email offering (GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite), they've decided to force customers to switch instead of investing in the platform.

The Best Mad Mimi Alternatives

Unfortunately, GoDaddy isn't known for creating great software, and has been known to be quite hostile toward their customers.

Email Marketing is both important enough (as the highest ROI marketing channel on the internet) and complicated enough that you'll want it as a dedicated tool. So we recommend looking at the following alternatives for your email marketing needs:

Best Modern, Full-Featured Alternative: Audienceful

Audienceful is email marketing reinvented for the AI era: a feature-complete platform with segmentation, multi-step marketing automation, A/B testing, detailed analytics, and deep Stripe/Shopify integrations—plus a built-in AI agent that writes emails in your voice, generates images, and can build segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief. It pairs all of that with a fast writing experience that feels like your favorite notes app, so — like Mad Mimi did — it helps you waste less time when sending email newsletters and campaigns. We're biased of course (we built it!), but we believe it's the best choice for most businesses.

Best for Ecommerce automations: Klaviyo

Klaviyo primarily serves the Shopify customer-base, and over the years has built up many deep integrations with the platform. While quite expensive, if you have a Shopify store, most people will probably point you to Klaviyo based on their deep integration. If you need to setup a complicated automation with branching and purchase dependencies, this will be your best choice.

Best for Outsourcing to Partners: Constant Contact

Constant Contact has a big partner network, so if you're looking to outsource your email marketing to one of their partners, it can be a good choice. The platform itself is quite outdated however, and is not very user friendly or easy to use for beginners. Hence why we only recommend it if you won't be interacting with the platform directly.

How to migrate your email list data off Mad Mimi

Here's a guide for how to migrate/export your email list away from Mad Mimi in CSV format.

First, head to the audience tab and 'select all' on the list you want to export.

After confirming, you'll get a download dialog so you can save the .CSV file to your hard drive.

From there, you can upload to another platform.

If you're migrating to Audienceful, you can get up and running again in 30 seconds. Just create an account, and you'll be given the option to upload your Mad Mimi CSV in the onboarding.