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How to Use Mailchimp?

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By Vijay Singh Khatri

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform designed and developed for businesses that use email to reach their target audience. It allows you to manage your mailing list, create custom email templates, and automate your email marketing campaigns. Many companies from around the globe use Mailchimp to manage their email marketing campaigns.

In this post, we have mentioned the importance of email marketing and all the essential information that you need to know about Mailchimp. So, let us get started.

Importance of Email Marketing

Email marketing is an effective way for many companies to promote their products and/or services without stressing their marketing resources. Although there is an increasing popularity in social media marketing, email marketing is still an effective way to promote the business, get new customers, and maintain a good relationship with the existing customers.

Many statistics prove that emails have many marketing potentials. You should not ignore it if you want to grow your business’s customer base, build stronger brand awareness, and increase revenue.

  • According to Lyfe Marketing, Email marketing offers an average ROI of 122%, which is higher when compared to other digital marketing channels.
  • More than 70% of millennials like to communicate with the brand via email.
  • More than 80% of the surveyed businesses state that email marketing helps to retain customers.

The statistics mentioned above highlight the importance of email marketing.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is an email marketing company founded by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in 2001. At the start, it was just a secondary project that helped Ben and Dan’s website design agency’s clients to build their email list and they continued to do the same for the first six years, bringing in a revenue of a few thousand dollars a month.

In 2007, they decided to focus mainly on growing Mailchimp as a dedicated email marketing tool. They borrowed money from investors and financed the business growth by reinvesting the profits.

Since then, Mailchimp has become one of the most popular and effective email marketing tools out there.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Mailchimp

Mailchimp is undoubtedly one of the best email marketing tools but it also has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. It is possible that Mailchimp brings impressive results for some while for many others the results might not be that great.

Following are the key advantages and disadvantages of Mailchimp that you should know if you are planning to use it for strengthening your business’s marketing efforts:

Advantages of Mailchimp

  • You can import your email templates: Mailchimp offers several email templates that you can use to create and run an email marketing campaign in no time. However, one particular thing that makes Mailchimp unique is that you can also import email templates. Additionally, you can easily customize the existing email templates as per your requirements.
  • Mailchimp offers many integration options: Mailchimp can integrate with your brand’s Facebook page. It also allows you to schedule and test different add-ons provided by Mailchimp and choose the best one. This will help you increase and improve your email’s open rates. Additionally, Mailchimp also allows you to add unlimited images to your email templates and make your marketing efforts more fruitful.
  • Access to all the analytic and other comparative metrics: You need to know if your email marketing campaigns are producing the intended results or not. It is even better to know how they are performing and which strategy is working the best. With Mailchimp, you can track the analytics related to the performance of your email marketing campaigns. You can also compare your strategies with that of other Mailchimp users.

Disadvantages of Mailchimp

  • Doesn’t go well with membership-based sites: Mailchimp’s integration with WordPress and Paypal is not always the best if you are planning to have a subscription or a membership website. Although you can also set up your autoresponders and it will only work if people have subscribed to your email list from one of the forms available on your website. It does not work with the contact you have imported from a virtual spreadsheet.
  • Suspension or deletion of your account: Email marketing is a tough process. Increasing an email open rate and conversions can be a daunting task. If you are getting many unsubscriber notifications or spam complaints, then Mailchimp has the right to suspend or cancel your account without any notification. So make sure you test your emails before sending them to your subscribers.
  • Need to create or import templates: The email templates available in Mailchimp are quite basic. They are not eye-catching from a reader’s point of view. This means you need to spend time and money creating and importing your templates.
  • Complex interface: If you are new to Mailchimp, you need to learn and get familiar with its interface. As a beginner, it can take a lot of time to design and manage your email marketing campaigns. However, if you are sending occasional newsletters, then Mailchimp is a great platform. For high-volume use, Mailchimp can be very annoying.

Getting Started with Mailchimp

Here in this section, we have mentioned the easy steps to get started with Mailchimp:

Step 1- Go to Mailchimp’s official website and sign up for free. You will be redirected to the signup form that requires you to add a valid email address, username, and password.

Step 2- Once you have submitted all the required information, you will receive a confirmation email to activate your account. Open the email received on your registered email address and click on the “Activate account” button.

Step 3- You will then be redirected to the Mailchimp login page where you have to sign in and fill in a series of information including your first name, business details, physical address, etc.

Registering with Mailchimp is very easy and does not take much time.

How to Use Merge Tags?

Undoubtedly Mailchimp is an easy-to-use email marketing tool with a pretty UI. The more you use it, the more you become comfortable with its features and functionality.

One important thing you need to know about before launching email marketing campaigns is merge tags.

Merge tags are tokens that you can feature and use while curating emails to make them look more personalized. These tokens pull data from your audience and your account.

For example- *|FNAME|* is a merge tag that stands for the recipient’s first name. Since you are collecting the subscriber’s first name, you can start your email as “Hey *|FNAME|*.” All of them will receive an email with their name on it. It is more personalized, isn’t it?

Another example is *|EMAIL|* to address your recipient’s email address in your message. There are many merge tags that you can use, which will help you effectively in building automation sequences and segmenting your audience.

Set up an Email Autoresponder Series

An email autoresponder is a sequence of emails that automatically triggers a new set of rules and criteria you set up. Some of the most commonly used automated response emails are:

  • Welcome emails for new subscribers.
  • Explanatory series of emails to attract new users and help them learn more about your product and services.
  • Emails to inform your users about any content updates for ebooks, cheat sheets, and other freebies.
  • Automated emails for prospects who have requested a quotation.

The main advantage of using Mailchimp is that it allows you to manage and improve your email campaigns. You can get started with autoresponders on Mailchimp by clicking on the “Set up automated welcome email” tab. Mailchimp offers three options: welcome message, onboarding series, and education series.

Once you click on the “begin” button, you will be redirected to a page where you can customize the welcome email. Once you have set up your welcome email, check by sending a test email to yourself.

You can also get started with setting up your onboarding and educational email for your subscribers. All you need to do is to navigate to the “create” option, click on the “email” tab, and then go to “automated” and start to create an onboarding and educational email.

Mailchimp offers automated email templates. You need to fill up the templates or use your own content and set up triggers for the same based on the following aspects:

  • Tags
  • Subscriber activity
  • Ecommerce and purchase activity
  • Data based
  • API leads
  • Custom settings

Mailchimp’s automated emails are an important part of email marketing because it allows you to engage with your subscribers, customers, and leads effectively, and build a strong relationship with them.

Create a Mailchimp Opt-in Form

An opt-in form is a form that asks for the name and email address of your leads and adds them to the email list once they have submitted the required information. Here in this section, we have mentioned how to create a form with Mailchimp’s form builder.

All you need to do is click on the “Audience” tab and go to “signup forms.” However, the default contact forms are not so eye-catching. So, there are three things you should try right away:

  • Change the headline and make sure it is user-centric and explain to the subscribers what they are opting for exactly.
  • Remove all unnecessary fields from your form.
  • Change the default button name to a user-centric name that tells the subscribers what is going to happen when they click on the button.

Now, if you want to embed a form on your website, you need to click on “Audience” and go to “signup forms,” and click on “embedded forms.” Once you have edited your form, you need to copy-paste the code to your website.

Note – Create a simple opt-in form that allows you to easily link the form to your website and start sharing it with people you think might be interested in collecting the email addresses and starting building an effective email list for your email campaigns.

Sending Broadcast Emails with Mailchimp

A broadcast email is something that you send out once, mostly an announcement about a product upgrade. You can easily send a broadcast email with Mailchimp by clicking on the “create” button available on the top corner of the dashboard screen. You then need to go to “email,” choose “regular,” and click on “begin” to get started.

Then you need to choose the target audience for your email marketing campaign, edit the email’s subject and body, and click on the “send” button.

While writing the body of the email, you need to choose either a pre-existing layout or upload your custom email template.

How to Create Engaging Emails?

Getting someone to subscribe to your emails is not a big deal. You need to make sure you build a relationship with the person who reads your emails. Else you will end up with many other “ghosts” in your subscribers’ email inbox, which means that people have subscribed for your emails but rarely open them.

The main aim of your email campaigns is that they should provide value and build a relationship with your subscribers. The subscriber needs to know, “why should I open this email?”

Before drafting an email, think and strategize solutions to the problem that people on your email list may be facing. Your email should offer a solution to these problems.

Since we all know content is the king, the presentation of the content matters as well. You also need to pay attention to the subject lines, email copy, and content formatting.

1. Subject lines

Headlines play an important role because headlines grab the attention of the readers. Remember, if you mess it up, no one will read the content in the main body.

The same goes for email subject lines. If you do not grab the attention of the subscriber, your emails will get lost in the sea of other emails in the receiver’s inbox.

You need to think a lot before coming up with a subject line for your email campaign and strategize how you can make sure your email stands out among other emails.

2. Email copy

Copy is the text that is meant to sell, whether it is an ad, an email, a product description, or any other media for advertising.

While drafting an email, you need to pay special attention to the content within the email body. Email is known as a copy because you are trying to get your subscriber’s attention. So, make sure you know how to grab the reader’s attention. Tell a story and then tie a message you want to convey. Make sure your emails are not boring.

3. Formatting

Reading long emails on the screen can be a pain, and at the same time, boresome. Make sure you do not make the content too stressful for your subscribers to read and understand. Make your emails easy by using white spaces, bold text, and bullet points to increase the readability of your content. It does not have to be fancy but readable. Here is an example of a perfectly formatted email.

The example given above has white spaces, bold text, a link that makes the email readable and more interesting. You need to follow a similar format for your emails.

Additionally, you also need to add a clear call to action that explains to people what to do next. Answer a question? Click on a link? Fill in a survey? Whatever the aim is, make it clear and persuade the audience to answer it.

To Sum it Up

Emails are never going out of fashion. Many brands use emails to communicate with the audience effectively. An email marketing tool like Mailchimp allows you to send emails in bulk and manage your email lists conveniently. Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing automation platform intended for businesses that use email to reach their target audience. We hope that this article has covered all the essential points for getting started with Mailchimp and use it to plan and put email marketing campaigns into action.

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