Create Audience
Audiences are the bedrock of your email marketing activity. Without an audience, you don’t have anyone to send emails to. At its most basic, an audience is made of a list of email addresses of people who have opted in to receive communication from you but with Mailchimp, you can use audiences to segment which contacts you can send your emails to and create targeted campaigns. The free Mailchimp account only allows you to create one audience and it will be already created for you when you set up your free account. Mailchimp uses your business name as the name of your audience by default. If you already have a list of email addresses of people who have opted in receive communication from you, you need to add them to your audience.
Create Tags
Tags are labels you can create to organize your contact. Assigning different labels to contacts allows you to create segments that you can target with tailored emails and you can add multiple tags at once.
Create a Campaign
From the main dashboard, click on ‘Campaigns’ from the left menu, and from the dropdown, select ‘All campaigns. This will take you to a screen where you can see all past, present, and future campaigns you have set up. Click on the ‘Create Campaign’ button on the top right-hand side of the window. On the next screen, you’ll be presented with three options for building either a Regular email, Landing page, or an Embedded form. The next screen that you will see is all about the structure of your email and includes several elements using which you can build and design an email campaign.
Once you finish designing your email, you can preview it to make sure you are happy with the outcome. You can also preview the outcome in both desktop format and mobile format. You can send a test email that will enable you to check how your email campaign will appear in your contact’s inboxes.
Send a Campaign
As soon as you finish creating a campaign, Mailchimp will display the details of the draft on your screen by default so you can decide what you want to do next. There are two ways to send a campaign, you can either send it immediately or schedule it to send it on a specific day and time. Unfortunately, the Schedule feature is not available as part of the free plan. In case, you plan to upgrade your account in the near future, you should know that using the schedule feature, it is possible to set a specific day and time. Mailchimp will also suggest the best time to send your emails based on the previous campaign’s performances.
With the free account, your only option to send emails is manual. Although, manual process, try different days and times of the week and check your campaign report to figure out when your audience responds the best.
Create a Sign-up Form
What if you don’t have an existing list of contacts to send your emails to, or want to increase the size of your audience. The best way to increase the size of the newly created audience is to capture new contacts via a signup form you can place in strategic places such as your website or social media channels. One of the most common ways to do this for example is to add a signup form on the homepage of your website and invite visitors to sign up to subscribe to your newsletter or anything else you have to offer. There are many options to create a form such as you can create one from scratch using the form builder tool, you can use the embedded form which you can integrate directly on your website, you can design a pop-up signup form which can trigger after visitors have been on your site a few seconds, you can create a contact form so customers can send you messages directly to your inbox or integrate a form with other popular platforms using Form Integrations.
Track Campaign Performance
To improve campaigns, it’s important you understand their performance. With Mailchimp, you can track how well or not your campaigns have performed after they were sent. From the main menu click on ‘Campaigns’ then ‘Reports’, this will take you to the list of all the campaigns you have sent. At a glance, each campaign will display two metrics the open rate which tells you the number of people who have actually opened the email you send them, and the click-through rate which is the percentage of people who have clicked on a link within the email. The higher the numbers the better. For more in-depth information on a specific campaign, you can click on the view report button. You will have access to a much more granular report wherein each data point can be clicked on for further details. On the menu, you also have an option ‘Click Performance’ activity which not only lists the links people have clicked on but also a visual representation of where people clicked. This can be very useful if you want to understand the types of components that resonate the most with your audience.
Create Email Templates
Designing a new email every time you want to launch a campaign can be time-consuming. Fortunately, with Mailchimp, you don’t have to go through this process over and over again. You can design multiple templates that can be reused. From the main menu click on ‘Campaigns‘ then, on ‘Email templates‘. On the top right-hand side of the window click on the ‘Create Template’ button. There select the layout of your choice and customize and design like would do for your manually designed email campaign. Once you are done click ‘Save Template and Exit’. Whenever you want to send your monthly newsletter or launch a new product/service, you need to click on the email template you saved earlier and click on the edit button and ‘Create campaign’. This will take you to the start of the campaign creation process. All you need to do is edit the design with new images and text without having to create an entire layout from scratch. You can also turn your email that you have created from scratch into a template.
When it comes to email marketing, design consistency is key for better results. Using templates will help you achieve that and save you tons of time as well.
Manage your Audience
Managing your audience is an important part of your Mailchimp account. Since the number of contacts in your audience will affect the price of your plan, it’s important you keep a list of contacts you want to hear from you. With your free plan, you can create one audience of up to 2000 contacts but once you reach this threshold you will either have to pay for a subscription or you will no longer be able to send your campaigns. Eliminating contacts from your audience who don’t want to hear from you will therefore help you keep your costs down or stay within the boundaries of the free plan.
Depending on the size of the audience, clean it up monthly so that you don’t get overcharged or you don’t go over the 2000 contact thresholds.
