How to Use Mailchimp’s Automation Tools to Save Time and Increase Efficiency

by Anne Clark | Apr 27, 2024 | Business, Email Marketing, Mailchimp

How to Use Mailchimp’s Automation Tools to Save Time and Increase Efficiency

Mailchimp offers a suite of automation tools designed to streamline your marketing efforts, save time, and enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. Let’s look at how you can leverage Mailchimp’s automation tools to automate repetitive tasks and create more personalised customer journeys.

Understanding Mailchimp Automation

Mailchimp’s automation features allow you to set up emails that send themselves based on specific triggers and conditions. This can include everything from welcome emails and birthday offers to follow-ups based on customer behaviour. By automating these processes, you can ensure timely and relevant communication with your subscribers without lifting a finger for each email sent.

Setting Up an Automated Welcome Series

A welcome email series is one of the most effective uses of automation. Here’s how you can set it up:

Trigger: Set the trigger to send the first email when a new subscriber joins your list.
Timing: Schedule subsequent emails a few days apart. Consider the subscriber’s journey—what information would they benefit from next?
Content: Tailor the content to introduce your brand, provide valuable information, and include a call to action. For example, the first email could introduce your brand, the second could highlight key products, and the third could offer a discount.

Automating Based on Customer Behaviour

Behavioural triggers are incredibly powerful, enabling you to send emails based on how subscribers interact with your website and emails. Here are a few ways to use this feature:

Page Visits: Send a targeted email when a subscriber visits a specific page, like a product page or a blog post.
Purchase Behaviour: Follow up on purchases with care instructions, related products, or a thank you note.
Email Engagement: Trigger emails based on whether a subscriber opens an email or clicks a link.

Using Customer Journeys to Create Personalised Experiences

Mailchimp’s Customer Journeys tool allows you to create a flowchart of emails that respond to more nuanced subscriber behaviours and preferences. Here’s how you can utilise it:

Map Out the Journey: Start with a common subscriber action, like signing up or making a purchase. From there, create different paths based on how subscribers might respond to your emails.
Add Conditions: Use if/then conditions to create branches in the journey. For example, if a subscriber clicks on a link to a product, the next email could provide more detailed information about that product.
Test and Optimise: Always test your customer journeys to see what works best and refine them over time.

Automating for Special Occasions

Use Mailchimp to automatically send birthday greetings, anniversaries, or seasonal promotions. This will delight your audience and encourage engagement without ongoing effort from your team.

Set Date-Based Triggers: Configure campaigns to fire off on specific dates tied to individual subscriber data.
Personalise Offers: Include special offers or exclusive content as part of these emails to increase the impact.

Efficiency Tips

Segment Your List: Automation works best when combined with segmentation. Tailor your automated emails to specific segments to increase relevance and engagement.
Monitor and Adjust: Keep an eye on the performance of your automated emails. Experiment with different triggers, timing, and content to see what yields the best results.

Mailchimp’s automation tools can transform how you engage with your subscribers, saving you time while improving the effectiveness of your campaigns. By setting up thoughtful, automated email sequences that respond to and anticipate subscriber needs, you can create a more personalised and efficient email marketing strategy. Start exploring these features to free yourself from routine tasks and focus more on strategic activities.

The Top 10 Mailchimp Features You Aren’t Using But Should

by Anne Clark | Mar 15, 2024 | Business, Email Marketing, Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a great resource for small businesses wanting to step into email marketing. While many users stick to the basic functionalities of creating and sending emails, Mailchimp offers a suite of advanced features that can significantly enhance your marketing strategy. Here’s a look at ten lesser-known Mailchimp features that you might not be using, but definitely should consider.

#1 Advanced Segmentation

Segmentation allows you to divide your audience based on specific criteria, but advanced segmentation takes this further by enabling the combination of multiple conditions. This means you can target extremely specific groups of contacts, leading to highly personalised campaigns and improved engagement.

#2 Multivariate Testing

While A/B testing is common, multivariate testing lets you test multiple variables at once. This feature can reveal how different elements of your email interact with each other and impact subscriber behaviour, allowing for more comprehensive optimisations.

#3 Behavioural Targeting

Mailchimp’s behavioural targeting tools enable you to send automated emails based on user activity. For instance, you can set up emails that trigger when a subscriber visits a specific page on your website, adding a layer of personalisation that can boost conversion rates.

#4 Dynamic Content

Dynamic content allows you to change parts of your email based on who will be receiving it. You can customize messages based on user’s past behaviour, demographics, or other data points, ensuring that the content is relevant to each individual recipient.

#5 Predicted Demographics

Using artificial intelligence, Mailchimp can predict the demographic categories of your subscribers. This insight helps in crafting campaigns that resonate more effectively with different segments, improving overall engagement.

#6 Send Time Optimization

Mailchimp can predict the optimal time to send emails to your subscribers, ensuring that your messages arrive when they are most likely to be opened. This feature maximises the potential for your emails to be seen and acted upon.

#7 Social Post Scheduling

Beyond email, Mailchimp offers features to unify your marketing across channels. Social post scheduling allows you to manage social media content, schedule posts, and track engagement directly from the Mailchimp platform.

#8 Landing Pages

Create custom landing pages within Mailchimp to support your email campaigns. This is particularly useful for promotions and events, providing a seamless experience from email to web that can improve conversion rates.

#9 Integration with E-commerce Tools

Mailchimp integrates seamlessly with many e-commerce platforms. This integration enables features like abandoned cart emails, product recommendations, and sales reporting directly within your email dashboard.

#10 Customer Journeys

This feature allows you to design and automate complex user paths based on how subscribers interact with your emails. You can set up multiple branches that trigger different actions, delivering a tailor-made experience for each path a subscriber might take.

While Mailchimp is commonly used for its basic functionalities, leveraging these advanced features can dramatically improve your email marketing efforts. By tapping into the full potential of what Mailchimp offers, you can create more effective, personalised, and engaging email campaigns that better meet the needs of your audience and drive your business forward. Whether you’re looking to enhance personalisation, optimise send times, or integrate across multiple channels, these top features are worth exploring.

How to Set Up Your Mailchimp Account: A Step-by-Step Guide

by Anne Clark | Nov 26, 2023 | Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Mailchimp

How to Set Up Your Mailchimp Account: A Step-by-Step Guide

Setting up a Mailchimp account can open up new avenues for email marketing, allowing you to engage with your audience more effectively. Here’s a detailed, step-by-step guide to help you get started with Mailchimp, from creating an account to sending your first email campaign.

Step 1: Sign Up for a Mailchimp Account

Visit the Mailchimp website: Go to Mailchimp’s homepage.
Click on ‘Sign Up Free’: You’ll find this button on the top right corner of the homepage.
Enter your email, username, and password: Follow the prompts to enter your details. Mailchimp requires a strong password, so be sure to mix upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
Activate your account: Check your email for a confirmation message from Mailchimp and click the activation link provided.

Step 2: Set Up Your Profile

Fill in your personal information: After activation, complete your profile by providing details like your name and contact information.
Set your time zone: This ensures that your email campaigns are sent according to your local time.
Add your address: Legal requirements necessitate that your physical business address is included in every email footer to comply with anti-spam laws.

Step 3: Create Your Audience

Navigate to the Audience section: This can usually be found in the sidebar menu under ‘Audience’.
Create an audience: If you’re new to Mailchimp, you’ll need to set up your first audience. Enter details such as the audience name and default email address.
Import your contacts: If you already have an email list, you can import it via CSV file, or manually enter subscriber details.

Step 4: Customise Your Email Preferences

Set up your email templates: Go to the ‘Templates’ section and choose from pre-designed templates or create your own.
Personalise your template: Customise your chosen template with your brand’s logo, colours, and fonts to make your emails recognisable to your subscribers.

Step 5: Design Your First Campaign

Go to the Campaigns section: Click ‘Create Campaign’.
Choose your campaign type: Select ‘Email’ and then choose between a regular campaign and an automated one.
Customise your campaign: Add content and design your email. You can use drag-and-drop builders, which are user-friendly even for beginners.

Step 6: Test and Send Your Campaign

Preview and test: Always send a test email to yourself to check the design and content before sending it to your audience.
Schedule or send your campaign: Choose ‘Send Now’ to send your email immediately or ‘Schedule’ to send it at a later time.

Step 7: Analyse the Results

Check your reports: After sending your emails, monitor how they perform. Mailchimp provides detailed reports that include open rates, click rates, and subscriber activity.
Adjust based on feedback: Use the insights from your reports to improve your future email campaigns.

Setting up your Mailchimp account is just the beginning of your email marketing journey. With its comprehensive set of tools and features, Mailchimp not only helps you manage your email lists and campaigns but also provides analytics that can guide your marketing strategies. Remember, the key to successful email marketing is consistency and adaptation based on recipient feedback and engagement metrics.

How to create a landing page in Mailchimp

by Anne Clark | Dec 11, 2019 | Business, How To, Mailchimp

What are landing pages and why do businesses use them?

A landing page allows you to create a page focusing on an offer that your target audience wants. As a landing page is created only specifically for content of ‘value’ to your audience, it captures all relevant information on that page and avoids your target market getting distracted by other pages on your website.

How many times have you landed on a website and gone to do something specific and ended up somewhere completely different, because you were distracted by other areas of the website. A landing page helps eliminate those distracts for your audience.

Landing Pages and Mailchimp

Mailchimp help support small businesses, especially with low budgets and offer some of their amazing features under their free option level, and more premium features on their paid levels.

Landing pages are great for building a buzz on products, or getting a key message out to your audience.

Mailchimp had templates to cater to some of the following:

How to set up your Mailchimp landing page

Sign into your Mailchimp account

Click on the CREATE dropdown menu button

Click on LANDING PAGE

Name your landing page AND select the AUDIENCE group the landing page will be directing sign ups to.

Click the BEGIN button

You will now land at the following page.

SELECT A TEMPLATE you want to use. You can edit any template, so choose the one that is a style you like. Look at the names of the templates, which will help give you an indication on what they’ll achieve for you. For this example I have selected GROW YOUR LIST blank template.

Click on the LOGO to add your logo (or header image if desired)

EDIT YOUR TITLE

Add in your ‘pitch’ for your audience. You can edit the style and colours etc on the right hand side, just as you would in a campaign (newsletter) creation.

CLICK ON THE SIGN UP FORM SECTION

On the right hand side are the options to show what you can include. Eg: You can add FIRST NAME and you can make it a required field.

You can also adjust your button words SUBSCRIBE

To adjust the style of the SIGN UP FORM, click on the middle tab called STYLE.

Once finished click SAVE & CLOSE.

TO ADD YOUR BACKGROUND, click to the MAIN MENU and click on DESIGN tab and then PAGE, this will allow you to add your background image or colour.

If at any stage you want or need to change any section of your landing page, you can do so through this page.

TO REMOVE THE MAILCHIMP LOGO at the footer of the landing page and privacy information, you need to have a paid account, and you can simply click the option off.