In our first part of this blog series we introduced you to Email Marketing and why it is important to consider it within your digital marketing strategy. This time we are taking a more indepth look at Mailchimp.
How do I sign up?
It is free and very easy to sign up to mailchimp. Visit Mailchimp.com and complete the forms. You will need to verify your email address and then you are ready to import your emails or start your very first campaign. Mailchimp has great 'how to's' to help you along the way, and talks you through each process in a clear way. It is probably best to create your lists by importing all your database and you can then get started on your first campaign.
Mailchimp is simple to follow but spend some time on it perfecting your email layout – once you have one you are happy with you can use this is your own template for future emails. Become used to what all the buttons do, and how to add text, images and change colours etc. For our example we used a template that we changed the logo, text and images to show you how simple it can be. However, for your own template, remember to try and keep consistency. Use branding and colours that identify you to your audience. It will take you some time to get your first template right but once you have you can use it from then on, so be patient!
Firstly, choose your type of campaign, and give it a name.
You can then create your template, whether it's one you design yourself, or a pre-designed one (there are lots to choose from!)
We went through the options and chose a newsletter template.
By clicking on each element of the newsletter you can change it.
For example, I wanted to upload our own logo, so I clicked on the header box and it opened up the option to replace the current header. It is easy to upload from your computer and then resize your own logo.
You can go through this same process to change the text in each box, and the image boxes too.
You can then check the email to see how it will look on a mobile and send a test email to yourself to see how it comes up on your own email.
Once you have completed your campaign it is very easy to go back into it and edit, or check analytics. Each campaign will be listed within your account.
And that's it! As mentioned above, it does take some time to get your first template exactly how you want it, so try not to rush and if you need any support there is plenty of help from Mailchimp. This is where spending some time getting it right really does pay off, as all your future emails will be quick and easy to send out.
One of the most regularly asked questions regarding e-marketing is this: How do I get subscribers?
Ultimately, you need to get people to click that subscribe button. So you need to give them remarkable content. You need them to want to open that email. Firstly, it is necessary to look at your content marketing strategy and work out how email marketing fits into that. What do your customers want and what will you be offering them? If you need some help and support on content please get in touch.
You also need to have a call to action button on your website and all your social media channels. You can ask your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, or offer them rewards if they get a friend to sign up, or offers/vouchers for following your blog, promote giveaways or contests. Any way you can get people hooked in is great, and then you can give them the content that you’ve worked out within your strategy.
Mailchimp has a button that you can add to your website or blog which makes it easy for people to subscribe. You can also promote your newsletter through your Social Media, create a Twitter campaign or use your Facebook page. Your blog is a perfect place to advertise your newsletter. And any offline events that you attend can be a great opportunity to collect email addresses.
It helps to create segmentation within your email lists to help tailor the information to the right audience. Here at Cosmic we split our audience into Web, SEO, Social Media, Video and Training as well as having a general email newsletter for those who would liek to recieve the best of all of those topics. There will of course be crossovers, but giving subscribers the option to tick what subjects they are interested in will help you push the right information in their direction. Your sign up form is the perfect opportunity to find out what your customer is interested in. Do they have a family? Pets? How often do they want to receive your emails? What do they want to read? Are they on Social Media? By finding out these details early on, it makes your content so much easier to plan. You are targeting the right information to the right person at the right time.
It is really important to have a good, comprehensive mailing list, but also to keep monitoring that too. Mailchimp will help you to a point, by using your analytics you can then see who is or isn’t opening, but it helps to have regular clean ups of your contacts. Stats say that your email marketing database degrades by about 22.5% every year. Why is this? Well, contact’s move, change email addresses, leave jobs, opt out, many reasons. So it is important to keep your contacts relevant.