How to Use Mailchimp | Everything You Need to Know

What Is Mailchimp?

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In case you didn’t know, Mailchimp is a marketing platform that specializes in using email to help businesses communicate and build relationships with their customers. It’s a great solution for anyone looking to scale their email database, and also provides the option of using automation to make maintaining a large email list more manageable.

One of the main reasons that Mailchimp is so popular is that you can do everything from its one platform. From managing your email lists to creating email templates, and even engineering larger sending sequences, Mailchimp brings all aspects of email marketing under one roof.

And, although it might have started off that way, Mailchimp doesn’t just offer email marketing anymore. Over the past few years, it’s grown to offer an all-around marketing experience, giving users access to Facebook ads, Google Remarketing ads, social posting, marketing CRM tools, and much more.

Even better, you don’t need to download any software to get started. Mailchimp is web-based, which means you only need its website address and an account to get started.

#1. Registering With Mailchimp

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Creating a Mailchimp Account

The first step on your email marketing journey is the simplest one – setting up your Mailchimp account! Head to the Mailchimp homepage, and click on the green ‘Sign Up Free’ button in the top right corner. This will direct you to a welcome page where you can enter your email, a username, and a password to create your account.

You’ll then be sent an email to activate your account. You need to open this before you can continue with the setup, but once you’ve clicked on the ‘Activate Account’ button within the email to confirm your identity, you’ll be redirected back to Mailchimp.

Choosing a Pricing Plan

Mailchimp offers a number of pricing plans. Each one is based on the number of contacts you’re planning to store. The more contacts you have on your list, the more expensive your plan will be.

If you have a strict budget to stick to, Mailchimp does offer a free plan. This will allow you to store up to 2,000 contacts without spending a cent. Whilst this is great if you’re just starting out, we wouldn’t recommend sticking with it in the long run. It’s quite restrictive, and its features are relatively basic.

If you want the most value for money, we think that the Standard plan is your best bet. It’ll set you back $14.99 per month, but offers a decent set of features in return. However, before we get too carried away, we should point out that picking a plan with Mailchimp isn’t as simple as just selecting the one you want.

That’s because its pricing structure works on a sliding scale. This means that the prices displayed are the starting prices, and only cover the minimum number of contacts allowed. For example, the $14.99 price attached to the standard plan applies to 500 contacts. If you need closer to the plan’s 100,000-contact limit, you’re going to need to pay a much larger sum.

To work out exactly how much your plan will cost, you can use Mailchimp’s calculator. Simply choose the plan bracket you’re interested in, and then use the sliding scale to select your contact threshold to generate your monthly cost.

When you’ve chosen a plan and you’re happy to continue, click ‘Next’ to move on to setting up your account.

Setting Up Your Account

Mailchimp needs a few more details to finish setting up your account. You’ll need to enter your name, business name, and address as a minimum, but there’s also the option to add your website URL and phone number if you wish to.

Once you’ve added in these final details, Mailchimp will ask whether you already have a list of email contacts. If you answer yes, it will provide you with a drop-down list so you can specify how many contacts you have. If the answer is no, you can click ‘Continue’ straight away.

Congratulations – you’ve almost finished the sign up process! There’s just one more step to go, and it’s a quick one. Mailchimp will ask whether you sell products or services online, so that they can determine the best experience for your business. They’ll also ask how you currently sell online. Select the options that apply to you and then click ‘Continue’. Alternatively, you can skip this step if you’d like to.

Finding Your Way Around the Mailchimp Dashboard

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be taken to your Mailchimp dashboard. Here, you’ll be encouraged to connect your store to one of Mailchimp’s many integrations. This is something we’ll cover in more detail below, so for now, we’d recommend just focusing on familiarizing yourself with the dashboard.

The most important part of your dashboard is the left-hand toolbar. This contains the various tabs you’re going to be using when you start building your email marketing strategy. Here’s a quick run-through of what they are and what you can use them for:

• Create

This is exactly what it sounds like – the place where you can create parts of your email marketing strategy, including emails, templates, customer journeys, landing pages, and multi-channel designs.

• Audience

Use the Audience tab to manage your contact lists. You can also import existing contacts here, and create signup forms, segmented lists, surveys, and tags.

• Campaigns

Here, you can view and manage your existing campaigns, as well as access performance reports.

• Automations

This tab allows you to build longer customer journeys, such as welcome sequences or educational series.

• Website

If you choose to build your website with Mailchimp, this is where you can view and manage it.

• Content Studio

The Content Studio allows you to build and store creative assets to use in your emails. It’s also where you can connect your Instagram account and store your logo.

• Integrations

This is pretty similar to an app store, and it’s where you can integrate your Mailchimp account with other applications such as Facebook, Google, or an ecommerce platform.

• Search 

This one needs very little explanation – it’s where you can search for anything within your campaigns and contacts!

At the very bottom of the toolbar, you’ll also find a circular icon with your first initial in the middle. This allows you to access your account settings. From here, you can manage your notifications, edit your profile and account, and find the option to upgrade your account or hire an expert if you want to.

#2. Integrating Mailchimp With Your Website

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Mailchimp is a great email marketing tool to use in conjunction with an already-established business. In this digital age, the chances are you’ll already have a business website up and running, so integrating the two is a great way of funneling your visitors into your email list.

Connecting Mailchimp to a third-party platform is easy. First, head to the ‘Integrations’ tab at the bottom of the left-hand toolbar. Next, search for your chosen provider. In this instance, we’re going to connect to Squarespace.

Once you’ve selected your platform, Mailchimp will ask you to enter your website’s URL. It will then generate a custom code that you can paste into your website’s HTML. Once that’s done, you can check the connection by clicking the button underneath the code box.

Mailchimp offers a number of integrations. These are split by industry, making it easier for you to find the one you’re after. Its largest selection sits underneath the ecommerce umbrella, giving you the chance to connect with platforms such as BigCommerce, Magento, Volusion, WooCommerce, and many more.

You can also connect your Mailchimp account to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Eventbrite, to name but a few of the other options on offer.

#3. Building Lists and Creating Signup Forms

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Before you can start creating emails, you need someone to send them to. This is where your contact list takes center stage.

Mailchimp gives you several ways to collect email addresses and build your database. Below, we’ll provide instructions for each.

Expert Insights

‘As a blogger, email marketing is probably my biggest draw outside of social media when it comes to getting the audience to come through to my website. Mailchimp has always been a tool I can trust, allowing me to make sure that my audience is up to date, and that my content is presented as professionally as it is on social media or my website.

A feature I find extremely beneficial is the audience separator, where you can assign specific lists of people, ensuring you are only engaging with the people who want to see certain content. I typically keep my entire audience up to date on new posts, but if I am specifically working with a women’s getaway retreat, for example, it allows me to push this feature in an email specifically targeting my female audience, and so it doesn’t come across as irrelevant for the male audience who won’t see its value. If people don’t see value in your emails, that is when they will start to unsubscribe.’

Michelle Halpern is the founding editor and photographer behind the travel blog Live Like It’s the Weekend. In 2016, she left the corporate fashion world for a year-long, solo around-the-world trip and never looked back. Now, she’s based in Los Angeles and blogs full time, covering adventures in California and beyond with a tastemaker’s sensibility.

#4. Creating an Email Template

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Now for the fun part – creating your very first email template!

Before we get started, it’s worth noting that email templates aren’t emails… yet. They’re just the basic outlines you create that will become emails further down the line.

For example, you might create a generic newsletter template, but before you can send it, you’ll need to edit it and add in the relevant text – only then can you schedule it to send to a group of users. Templates are really just a starting point, but if you have a few of them ready to go, you won’t need to start from scratch each time you want to create a new email.

To create your first template, select the ‘Create’ icon in the left-hand toolbar. This will take you to a creative dashboard, where you can choose what you’d like to begin building. Select ‘Email’ and then ‘Template’ from the sub menu options.

After you’ve clicked ‘Get Started,’ Mailchimp will give you the option of picking a layout to – you guessed it – get started with. You can choose a basic template or one of the more advanced featured layouts, such as ‘Sell Products’ or ‘Follow Up.’

If you want a bit more than a blank layout, Mailchimp also has a set number of themes. These are prepopulated with images and colors, and are sorted by industry or purpose. Alternatively, if you find that the layouts are too prescriptive, you can choose to code your own email. We only recommend this option if you’re comfortable with coding, though! (Read about  how to view html code in Mailchimp)

Customizing Your Template

When you’ve found a layout you want to use, you’ll be directed to Mailchimp’s editor. It might not be the most intuitive, but once you’ve had some time to explore and play around with it, you’ll find that it’s not as complicated as it first looks.

It works on a drag-and-drop principle. This might sound like a questionable 70’s dance move, but it actually just means you can add elements into your design by dragging them from the left toolbar, and then dropping them where you want them.

Although you’ll be dragging the elements in, this is mainly just to give you an idea of what the email will look like when you’re finished. Lots of the actual editing still happens in the left toolbar. For example, once you’ve inserted a text box into your template, a corresponding text box will appear in the toolbar, where you’ll enter your text and set the font, color, and size.

Mailchimp also allows you to upload your own graphics, so that the branding of your emails is consistent with that of your overall business. You can import gifs from Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant, too.

In the editor, there are a few ways to add images. You can either add a single image, an ‘Image Card’ with a related caption, or ‘Image + Text’. This last option is particularly handy, as it means you can do two things at once, rather than having to drag multiple content blocks in.

If you add something into your email, and then decide you want to remove it, just hover over the content block until the translucent grey banner pops up. This features an edit pencil, a ‘Clone’ button, and a ‘Trash’ button. Hitting this last icon will delete any unwanted content.

When you’re finished with your template, press the ‘Save and Exit’ button in the bottom right-hand corner. At this point, you’ll be prompted to name your template. We recommend choosing something descriptive, such as ‘Welcome Email,’ so you can easily identify it in the future. It’ll also make the template easier to find when you come to view it in the ‘Campaigns’ tab with the rest of your email designs.

#5. Creating a Campaign

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In Mailchimp, when we talk about creating a campaign, we’re not just talking about emails. The term ‘campaign’ refers to a combination of all of the marketing tools the platform offers, including ads, social posts, and landing pages. To start building your first campaign, you’re going to need to head to the ‘Create’ tab.

How to Create and Send a Regular Email Campaign

In the world of Mailchimp, a ‘regular’ email is a standalone email send. This just means that it isn’t sent as part of a sequence, or in response to a user action, but is sent manually. This kind of email is particularly useful if you want to send a one-off announcement or promotion.

To create a regular email, select the ‘Email’ drop-down menu in the ‘Create’ tab, and then click ‘Regular.’ Next, give your campaign a name.

Next, you’ll need to decide who you’re going to send your email to. It will automatically input your full list, meaning that all of your subscribers will be set up to receive it. However, if you only want to send to a segment of your users, you can click ‘Edit recipients’ and then refine your audience.

Once you’ve set your audience, edit the ‘From’ field, so your users know who’s sent the email, and add in a catchy subject line to encourage them to open it. The last thing to do is design your email content!

Editing your content works in the same way as building a template. You’ll first be invited to select a layout, or, if you’ve made your own set of templates, you can choose one of those. You’ll then be taken to the editor, where you can let your creative juices flow!

Expert Insights

‘At WinIt we use Mailchimp to help organize our email marketing. When we are getting ready to launch a new campaign, Mailchimp makes things easy and keeps our newsletters organized.

My advice to new users of Mailchimp is to keep your email copy clear and concise. Mailchimp can help with much of the newsletter process, but if the wording of your marketing is off, there is little use in using Mailchimp’s services.’

 

Ouriel Lemmel is the CEO and founder of WinIt, an app that helps millions of drivers manage and dispute parking tickets.

How to Use Merge Tags

Personalization is a key part of modern email marketing, and it’s not something you can afford to ignore. In fact, personalized email messages have a 14% higher click-through rate than those that are more generic. Don’t worry, though, we’re not expecting you to trawl through your email list and manually add everyone’s first name.

That’s where merge tags come in.

These little snippets are essentially coded text, and when you insert them into your email copy, they pull dynamic content into your email. Let’s look at an example.

One of the most common tags is the ‘*|FNAME|*’ tag. This pulls through a user’s first name, helping the email to feel more personalized. You can also use the ‘*|LNAME|*’ tag, which will insert their surname, too.

However, a merge tag will only work if there’s data in the field it relates to. For example, you won’t be able to use *|FNAME|* if you don’t ever ask your users to provide their names.

You can get around this by setting a default value. This means that if you don’t have any data for a particular user, your copy will populate the field with a more generic term. For example, if you set the default value to ‘Coffee Lovers,’ then when you write ‘Hello, *|FNAME|*’ without a user’s first name in the database, the email will instead read, ‘Hello, Coffee Lovers.’

Of course, this won’t work for everything – it’s tricky to come up with a default value for an address or a birthday!

To manage the default values for your merge tags, head to the ‘Audience’ tab and select the ‘Manage Audience’ drop-down menu in the right corner. Select ‘Settings’ and then ‘Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags’.

There are plenty of tags that you can use to give your emails a personalized spin, but luckily, you won’t need to memorize them all. Mailchimp has provided a handy merge tag cheat sheet, containing a glossary of all the tags you could possibly need!

Sending Your Campaign

Once you’re happy with your email design and your audience list, it’s time to hit that send button. But not so fast! Before you commit, it’s always a good idea to send yourself a test email, using the link underneath the content preview. Zac Surprenant, the Marketing Director at BPKC, recommends doing this every time you send an email:

‘For new users, my only recommendation is that you make good use of the draft feature, which allows you to send yourself a copy of the email before sending it out to the consumer. Make sure to do this every time you make a change, so you get it perfect before it goes out. I would also recommend sending it to a colleague for a fresh pair of eyes that can spot any mistakes you made.’

When you’re happy that there aren’t any mistakes in your design, you can send it out to your list or segment. There are two ways to do this: you can either hit the ‘Send’ button and send it immediately, or you can schedule it to send at a later date. Unfortunately, the scheduling feature isn’t available on Mailchimp’s free plan, so you’ll need to upgrade if you want this functionality.

Tracking Your Email’s Performance

As soon as your email leaves Mailchimp and begins winding its way to your recipients, it’s time to start tracking its performance. Why? Well, an email takes a lot of time and hard work to create, so you want to be sure that it’s worth the effort. This also allows you to see where you might be able to improve next time.

You can view your performance metrics in the ‘Campaigns’ tab. Here, you can check the opens and clicks at a glance, or download the full report to give a more in-depth analysis.

#6. Using Automation

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When we talk about automating your email sends, we’re not talking about employing a little robot to send them for you. Well, we sort of are, but don’t worry, you won’t need to deal with a small tin man running around your house. This kind of automation comes included with your Mailchimp plans and is controlled by workflows that you build and monitor yourself.

These workflows are designed to send specific emails in response to a subscriber action. For example, a customer might receive a series of emails when they subscribe to your mailing list. Triggered sequences are also commonly used if a customer abandons their cart without checking out – a friendly email will be sent as a reminder.

Mailchimp calls these ‘Customer Journeys,’ and you have two ways of accessing its Customer Journey builder – either through the ‘Create’ tab, or in the ‘Automations’ tab further down the toolbar. Either one will take you to a page where you can choose a premade map, or start building your own workflow from scratch.

Although these premade options can save you a lot of time, we’ll give you a quick tour of the builder, just in case you want to create your own from the ground up.

Once you’ve selected ‘Create from scratch’ and given your workflow a name, you’ll be asked to choose a starting point. This will be the action that sets off the sequence, and causes a subscriber to be added to the journey. For this instance, we’re going to select ‘Signs up.’

When you’ve selected your trigger, you can start to build your customer map. To do this, you’ll need to use the toolbar on the left side of the builder. From here, you can insert either rules or actions. The rules determine how a user moves through the map, using segmented data. Once a user has been filtered through these requirements, you can then input an action dependent on their journey.

To add rules or actions, click the ‘+’ symbol in the builder, and then select the element you want to add. When you add a rule or an action, you can edit it by clicking on its box in the workflow. A box will then pop up, allowing you to change the parameters of the rule or action.

Take a look at the example customer journey below:

The workflow begins when a user is added to the journey. They then pass through an If/Else filter, which checks whether they’ve opened any emails in the last five days. If the answer is yes, they’ll receive an email containing a promotional code. If the answer is no, they’ll be delayed for a day, before entering another If/Else filter checking if they still haven’t opened anything. If the answer to this query is no, they’ll be unsubscribed from your list.

It might look complicated, but building a customer journey follows a very logical path, and it goes a long way to helping you manage your workload. Individually making and scheduling emails to send is an arduous process, especially when you need to make sure the right email goes to the right person – at the right time. Using automation makes everything much simpler, and we recommend using it where you can!

#7. Setting up A/B Testing

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If you haven’t heard of the term ‘A/B testing’ yet, it’s about time you got familiar with the concept. That’s because it’s a central part of email marketing, and will play a big part in helping you figure out your overall sending strategy.

What Is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is where you split your audience into two sections – a section A and a section B. You then send both lists two different variations of the same email to test which version they respond better to.

For example, you might want to try two different subject lines to see which one achieves a higher open rate. Conducting an A/B test can give you the answer without forcing you to put all your eggs in one basket, allowing you to try out some risky new strategies!

How to Create an A/B Test on Mailchimp

To set up an A/B Test, select the ‘Create’ tab, and then click ‘A/B test’ in the ‘Email’ sub menu. You’ll then be prompted to name your email campaign, after which you can select ‘Begin.’

Just like when you’re creating a normal email, select the list or segment that you’re going to send your campaign to. After this point, however, things will start to look a little different.

Mailchimp will prompt you to select the variable you’d like to test, giving you four options to choose from: subject line, from name, content, and send time.

When you’ve selected your variables, you can then choose how many variations of your email you’d like to send. Traditionally, an A/B test has two variations, but you can send up to three. You can use the plus button under your variables to adjust this.

Next, use the slider to decide which percentage of your subscribers are going to be included in the test sample. This needs to be over 10% of the total amount of your database, and if you’re testing send time, make sure to select 100%, or else the test won’t work properly!

There are lots of different ways for you to determine a winner, be that through open rate, click-through rate, or something else. For your test to work, you need to tell Mailchimp exactly how you want success to be judged, so in the next section, select your winning metric and how long you want the test to run for.

Now it’s time to actually decide what your variations will say and/or look like. You’ll be prompted to enter the different versions of your email. For example, if you’re testing three different subject lines, this is the part where you need to type all of them out!

From this point onwards, you’ll be able to set your email up as if it were a regular campaign. Choose your template and edit the content until you’re happy with it. If your variable is your content, you’ll have the option to edit and preview each variation before sending.

For each version of your email, you can set a brief description to remind yourself of the changes you’ve made – don’t worry, though. Your subscribers won’t see this part!

The last thing to do is confirm and send, or schedule, your A/B test and wait for the results to come rolling in! You can check all of your data and stats for your tests in the report for the campaign you were testing. This is also where you can select a winner underneath the ‘Finalize your test’ section. Mailchimp will then automatically send the winning variation to all of your recipients.

How to Use Mailchimp: Summary

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Phew! Well done for making it through to the end of our beginner’s guide to Mailchimp. You now have everything you need to create your own Mailchimp account and start shaping your email marketing strategy. Here’s a quick overview of everything we’ve covered in this article:

1. Registering With Mailchimp
2. Integrating Mailchimp With Your Website
3. Building Lists and Creating Signup Forms
4. Creating an Email Template
5. Creating a Campaign
6. Using Automation
7. Setting up A/B Testing

Email marketing takes patience and a lot of hard work, but the rewards are well worth the effort. We wish you the best of luck building your email list and creating campaigns that represent your business and brand. Make sure to come back and let us know about your experiences in the comments section below!