Mailchimp for beginners: your first email to customers
You have customers who liked working with you, and you would like them to remember you next time they need what you sell. Email is one of the cheapest ways to stay in touch. No print bill, no ad slot, and you can see who read it.
I wrote this in 2016. The basics below are still true, but Mailchimp redesigns its screens regularly and changes what the free plan includes, so the button names may not match exactly. Look for the same ideas under whatever they are called today.
What email marketing is good for
- Staying in touch. A short, useful email every so often keeps you in mind when a customer is ready to buy again.
- Building trust. Helpful information, not just offers, is how people come to know, like and trust a business.
- Knowing what works. Unlike sending from your own inbox, an email service shows you who opened a message and who clicked.
- Saving time. Reusable templates and groups of contacts mean you set things up once.
- Staying legal. Anti-spam laws require things like a working unsubscribe link and only emailing people who agreed to hear from you. A service like Mailchimp handles much of that for you.
What Mailchimp is
Mailchimp is a service for designing, sending and tracking email to a list of subscribers. It keeps the list up to date as people sign up and unsubscribe, lets you personalize each email with the reader’s name, and shows you the results.
It has a free plan, and signing up needs only an email address and a password. How many contacts and emails the free plan allows has changed several times since I first wrote this, so check the current limits on their pricing page before you rely on them.
Start with a list of people who said yes
Mailchimp now calls your list an “audience”. Whatever the name, the rule is the same: only add people who agreed to get your emails. That is the law in most places, and it is also what keeps your emails out of spam folders.
Mailchimp gives you a ready-made sign-up form you can share or put on your website. If your site runs WordPress, the free MC4WP plugin connects a sign-up form on your site to your Mailchimp list.
You can add a question or two to the form, a birthday or what they are interested in, so you can send the right email to the right people later. Keep it short. Every extra question loses a few sign-ups.
Write and send your first campaign
A “campaign” is just one email sent to your list. From the dashboard, choose to create one and pick a regular email. Then there are four things to settle:
- Who gets it. Your whole list, or just part of it, such as customers who asked about one service.
- How it looks in the inbox. The subject line, the sender name and the preview text. This is what decides whether it gets opened, so write it like a person would.
- The design. Start from one of Mailchimp’s templates or a blank page. Click any section of the template to change its words or pictures.
- The final check. Send a test to yourself first and read it on your phone as well as your computer. When it looks right, send it now or schedule it for later.
See what happened
Once it is sent, Mailchimp starts recording results on its own: who opened it, who clicked which link, who unsubscribed, who marked it as spam, and roughly where your readers are. Use it to learn. If nobody clicks, try a different subject line or a clearer offer next time.
Send your blog posts out automatically
If you write posts on a WordPress site, Mailchimp can email them to your list for you. Every WordPress site has a feed, a simple list of its latest posts that other services can read. You find it by adding /feed to the end of your address, for example example.com/feed.
In Mailchimp, set up an RSS campaign (it may sit under automations), paste in your feed address, and choose how often it sends. Each time you publish, your subscribers get a neatly formatted email with the start of the post and a link to read the rest. You write once, and your list hears about it without any extra work.
Start small: a sign-up form on your site, a short list of happy customers, and one useful email. You can add the clever parts later.