Email Marketing Remains One of the Highest-ROI Channels Available
According to the Data & Marketing Association, email marketing delivers an average return of $36 for every $1 spent—outperforming paid social, display advertising, and most other digital channels. Mailchimp, with over 13 million active users, is the platform of choice for businesses looking to capture that return.
The challenge is consistency. Email marketing only works when campaigns go out on schedule, lists stay clean, and performance data informs each subsequent send. For small and mid-size businesses without a dedicated marketing team, maintaining that consistency is difficult.
Virtual assistants trained in Mailchimp are solving this problem.
What a Mailchimp VA Manages
A virtual assistant with Mailchimp expertise can own the operational side of email marketing end to end:
- Campaign creation: Drafting emails using existing templates, inserting approved content, setting send schedules, and managing preview text and subject lines.
- List management: Importing subscribers, segmenting audiences by behavior or demographics, merging tags, and removing unsubscribes and bounces.
- Automation setup and maintenance: Building welcome sequences, re-engagement flows, and transactional trigger campaigns.
- A/B testing: Setting up split tests on subject lines and send times, monitoring results, and applying winning variants.
- Performance reporting: Pulling open rate, click rate, unsubscribe, and revenue data, then formatting reports for stakeholder review.
When a VA owns these tasks, campaigns go out reliably and the data stays organized for strategic decisions.
The Gap Between Mailchimp's Capability and Most Users' Utilization
A 2024 Litmus Email Marketing Survey found that businesses using segmentation and automation in their email programs see 14.3 percent higher open rates and 100.95 percent higher click rates than those sending unsegmented broadcasts. Yet the same report found that fewer than 40 percent of small business Mailchimp users regularly use segmentation.
The reason is almost always time. Setting up segments, building automation trees, and interpreting analytics takes consistent effort that business owners and generalist marketers rarely have. A Mailchimp VA removes this bottleneck by taking ownership of the platform's advanced features.
Industries Getting the Most Value From Mailchimp VAs
E-commerce businesses use Mailchimp VAs to manage abandoned cart automations, post-purchase sequences, and promotional campaign calendars. Service-based businesses rely on VAs to nurture leads through drip sequences and maintain consistent newsletter output. Nonprofits use Mailchimp VAs to manage donor communications and event promotion without consuming staff time.
In each case, the VA is not writing strategy—they're executing it reliably, which is often the harder problem to solve.
Cost Comparison: VA vs. In-House Email Marketer
A junior email marketing coordinator in the US typically earns $45,000–$55,000 annually, before benefits and overhead. A skilled Mailchimp VA working part-time can manage most of the same operational tasks for $600–$1,200 per month.
For businesses sending two to four campaigns per month with a list under 50,000, a part-time VA is almost always the more cost-effective structure.
Getting Started With a Mailchimp VA
Onboarding a Mailchimp VA typically involves granting account access, sharing brand voice guidelines and approved templates, and providing a content calendar or brief for upcoming campaigns. From there, the VA manages execution with regular check-ins for strategic input.
If your email marketing is inconsistent or underperforming, the issue is rarely the platform. It's usually the bandwidth to use it well. To explore dedicated VA support for your email marketing operations, visit Stealth Agents.
Sources
- Data & Marketing Association, "Email Marketing ROI Report," 2023
- Litmus, "State of Email Marketing," 2024
- Mailchimp, "Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry," 2024