
Credit – 123 marbella internet services
MailChimp can be a tricky system to get used to but once you know what you’re doing its great for reaching out to your clients and prospects and receiving accurate analytics. Before sending newsletters and press releases I follow these four steps:
1. Make sure you have organised email lists. You don’t want one huge list of clients and prospects email addresses as you may want to send specific emails to specific contacts. Ensure you split lists out e.g. a prospect list and a client list, this way you can choose what gets sent to who. It’s a good idea to make a ‘test’ list, a list of contacts that you test campaigns on, these contacts could be colleagues and/or your own personal email addresses. For your test list try and include email addresses from different networks e.g. Gmail, outlook, msn as your email layout may vary in appearance depending on which network it is sent to. You can import contacts from excel onto MailChimp or add them manually.
2. Once you have the lists organised, you can start creating and editing templates. There are a range of templates to choose from, ‘Predesigned’ templates offer you a variety that are ready to be filled with content. However if the predesigned templates aren’t what you are looking for you have a wide range of choice within ‘Classic’ templates where you can edit and design whatever you like. You also have the option of coding your own and importing saved templates from elsewhere.
3. When you’re happy with your template and you’re ready to create a campaign, first select which list to send to, remember always send to a ‘test’ list first. You can then name your campaign, this name is for your reference the recipients will not see the name of the campaign. When writing the email subject (which recipients will see) try to avoid capital letters and exclamation marks as these can cause filters to treat your emails as spam and they will bounce.
4. After that it is time to choose your design. From here you can scan through templates you have previously made or you can choose to make one from scratch, check to make sure everything looks how it is supposed to and then you are ready to confirm the campaign and send out.
MailChimp is terrific for providing analytical data and once your emails have been sent off a report will be provided. The report includes open rates, clicks, bounces and unsubscribe. It provides graphs of how well the lists are doing in terms of the open rate and provides data of the top links clicked. These reports help you to analyse your lists and campaigns, to help you improve future campaigns.