In this article, we will cover the following 5 ways to maximize your MailChimp List.

  1. Clean up your lists

  2. Schedule your campaigns 4 weeks in advance

  3. Use automated campaigns

  4. Stick to your branding code

  5. Connect your apps to for multi-platform publishing


How to Use MailChimp

MailChimp offers bloggers, business owners, and Entrepreneurs the ability to conduct Re Marketing campaigns. Anyone who signs up to a list can then be targeted with a marketing campaign or a newsletter afterwards.

Trusted;

MailChimp has been around for many years and is well trusted. It’s considered the biggest email marketing platform on the market right now.

MC offers all the tools you need in order to conduct a successful marketing campaign. There are many pre-constructed templates to choose from, there are built-in reports on each campaign, there’s automation, there are advanced scripts like the ability to send emails a certain time after a subscriber is added and much more.

A case study;

Lets say you have a blog or website. You sell a product or service on this website. You can create a landing page or a sidebar with a sign-up list. you can offer an incentive for a person to sign up to this list. The incentive might be a coupon discount code on one of your products.
Now you have the customer’s contact details and you can schedule regular marketing campaigns to go out to this customer.

2 Step sign up;

MC has a two-step opt-in function that works like this; A customer signs up to the list on your website then is sent an email from MailChimp to confirm that they signed up. this is a great way to prevent spam bots from signing up to your list.

MC offers it’s recipients an opt-out or unsubscribe option in the footer of each campaign which by law you must include.

MailChimp pricing;

At the time of writing this article, MailChimp pricing is free to use until your list exceeds 2000 subscribers or 12000 emails per month. From there the subscription plans are still very affordable. There’s a “Grow” plan which is from $10 per month and a “Pro” plan from 199 per month.

MailChimp support;

MC only offers chat support to its free plan users for the first 30 days. After this time if you want support you will need to upgrade your plan.


1. Clean up your Lists

If you have multiple lists in your MC account from years gone by don’t worry. MailChimp offers a great tool for combining multiple up lists. Click on the combine list tool and merge all of your lists into one or 2. You want to have a list for your blog readers and maybe another list for your subscribers who come through your digital marketing funnels. You want a separate list for your digital funnel campaigns so you can Re Market to these customers later.

Also, it goes without saying that your e-commerce checkout system should add the customer’s email to your list by default.

MC has a way to see who has bounced on your last campaign. These bounces are from email addresses that are no longer valid. It is a good idea to remove these bounced email address from MC as they are only cluttering up your lists. Remember also that the first 2000 subscribers are free and if you have 2400 subscribers on a list and 500 of these subscribers are bouncing email addresses then you could remove the bouncing emails and downgrade to the free MC service.


2. Schedule Your Campaigns 4 Weeks In Advance

In today’s busy world who has time to sit down and set up a mailing Campaign?

Well, the answer is you. When do you do it? Set aside a time each week, mark the time in your calendar, set a calendar alert, sit down and do it!

If you want to achieve consistent results with digital marketing it’s important to send out consistent content. If you conduct your campaigns in a random hit and miss type scenario your customers will not pay much attention to your campaigns. However, if you are consistent and do mailouts once a week at least then your customers and subscribers will appreciate the fact that you are consistent with your marketing and will eventually take notice of your efforts.

We have a formula here. Every week we create a blog just like this one. That blog is then sent out to our mailing list in the form of a short snippet MailChimp campaign with a “Read More” button directing the viewer to the blog post.

These mail out Campaigns are scheduled to go out once a week at the same time every week. We always have 4 MailChimp campaigns scheduled in advance. Why do we have 4 scheduled in advance? Simple, because your working week can become very busy very fast. And you can’t afford to drop the ball with digital marketing. So let’s say you have a family event that takes you away from work for 2 weeks. No problem, your mailing campaign will still go out as planned and you have a 4 week buffer time to catch up and get back on track with your scheduled campaigns.

At the end of the day if you are just to busy to devote time to such an important part of your online strategy as content writing then you can outsource it. We offer a popular service for this.

And let MailChimp schedule your content delivery for you. The program has a unique algorithm that chooses when is the best time to target your audience. you can even use their time zone feature to set your campaign to arrive at the same time of day in every subscriber’s individual time zone. This is a great feature if you have a global audience.

MailChimp_Scheduling

You may wish to instead set a specific time based on the data you collect from your Google analytics reports. Google analytics will tell you when is the most popular time that people are visiting your website.


3. Use Automated Campaigns

MailChimp has the great ability to set up and send out automated campaigns. Now, this is a step beyond the standard scheduled campaign. An automated campaign means a campaign that is set up with rules. These rules can help you target your marketing audience more effectively.

An example of an automated campaign is where a customer might fill out a contact form that provides you with their email address. The email address is added to a unique MailChimp list. Then you set up an automated campaign using MailChimp integrations and the MailChimp templates. This campaign will have multiple campaign forms set up. One form can be set to send out immediately when the persona joins your mailing list. This first campaign might offer the client a thank you letter and a free download or coupon code for your store. Then you can set MailChimp to send out another campaign to the unique list 2 days after the first email went out. this second campaign might say something like “I hope you enjoyed our free gift”.. and so on.

This automation gives you the ability to set up a pipeline of automation that is set and forget. It will be like having a virtual assistant working for you.

 

 

Consider adding an automated sales funnel on your site that will sell for you when you sleep. Here’s a detailed guide on how to set up your own sales funnel.

MailChimp-Landing-Page
MailChimp-Landing-Page_2

MailChimp also has the fantastic feature of landing pages.

Landing pages by MailChimp is a great resource for marketers and business owners. If you have read our article on digital marketing you will know how important it is to have a digital marketing funnel directing people to a landing page. A landing page is sometimes referred to as a squeeze page. This page is where you direct people to from your ad campaigns. The customer lands on the page and provides you with an email address that you can use MailChimp to market o to in the future.

For those pro digital marketers out there you can set multiple landing pages for multiple marketing campaigns and store each of your campaigns sign up details in separate lists on the MailChimp dashboard. Another way to do this is to use tags instead of multiple lists. Basically, you can have one list but you can filter subscribers with different tags for ease of access later.

MC allows you to set the form up on your own domain for a price, $99 USD per year or use their domain. See images here.


4. Stick To Your Branding Code

It’s important to maintain your brand across all of your marketing platforms. MailChimp is no exception. You want to maintain the same colors and fonts in your email marketing campaign like the ones that you use on your website.  MailChimp doesn’t offer you many choices as far as text styles so try to pick one that is similar to your brand font style. the colors, however, are completely customizable with the color picker. Ask your designer what color code your website uses and plug that number into the color picker.

You can also use any modern internet browser program to check the color codes on your website. Simply place your mouse over the logo or text and then right click. From there you will see an option that looks something like “Inspect element”. This opens up a pop-up that’s full of code. In that code, you should see a small line of numbers preceded with a hashtag. That is the color code for that text that you clicked on.

You can also use any modern internet browser program to check the color codes on your website. Simply place your mouse over the logo or text and then right click. From there you will see an option that looks something like “Inspect element”. This opens up a pop-up that’s full of code. In that code, you should see a small line of numbers preceded with a hashtag. That is the color code for that text that you clicked on.

Inspect-Element
Color-Code

5. Connect your apps to for multi-platform publishing

Mailchimp gives you the ablity to link your Facebook account and your twitter account. What this means is that you can save time hitting your social media audience by doing it all from Mailchimp.

Here’s how we do it.

  1. Create a MailChimp Campaign
  2. Schedule the Campaign to go out on a future date.
  3. Click the button that also publishes the blog to your chosen Facebook page
  4. From there you can choose to click the button to publish the campaign to twitter but you don’t need to. Instead login to Twitter and connect your Facebook account. Then when MailChimp sends your campaign to Facebook Twitter will automatically post it to as a Tweet.

So then you can see the process of connecting with your audience is all done from MailChimp.

  1. Create a Blog
  2. Schedule it in Mailchimp
  3. Sit back and relax 🙂

FYI we offer a Mailchimp management service and a blog writing service if you’re interested.