We hope you all enjoyed our latest post about Canva. It’s a powerful tool in this content heavy world. This week we want to look at MailChimp – our go to for email marketing campaigns.
WHY EMAIL MARKETING?
Email marketing is still a powerful way to connect with people and definitely is an important tool in today’s marketing. Every business and company can grow its revenue and expand its reach by targeting a vaster audience. Just to put it in numbers, more than 34% of the people in the world use email: that’s about 2.5 billion people. Daily, the world sends about 196 billion emails: of those, 109 billion are business emails.
So the potential of email marketing is enormous, fortunately today there are plenty of tools that can help you succeed. There are numerous different email marketing platforms, the one we have had the most success with however is MailChimp.
MAILCHIMP
MailChimp is an online marketing platform which gives you the possibility to create and manage mailing lists, newsletters, landing pages, automated campaigns and more. MailChimp is one of the most recognisable and well branded platforms, it is free to use if have up to 2,000 subscribers, it also gives you the opportunity to send up to 12,000 emails per month, and, last but not least, it is easy to navigate both on mobile and desktop. Obviously, if you have a greater number of subscribers, you can upgrade to Grow or Pro plans, or think about other platforms. But if you are at the beginning of your email marketing plan, MailChimp is what you need to look at.
DESIGN
Designing with MailChimp couldn’t be easier. You just have to Create a Template, and you’ll be redirected to a page where you’ll have to “Select a starting point for your template”. You could start with blank layouts, but initially we suggest you look at the Themes, where you will find almost 90 ready-made templates, divided per categories (Featured, E-Commerce, Events, Holiday, Newsletters, Notifications, Photography, Stationery, Subscriber Alerts). Just browse and find 2 or 3 Themes that you like, and click on them.
Ok, now it is time to design! On MailChimp you are able to customise everything about your content using their builder: colours, fonts, images, header, footer, social media links etc. We suggest you start with the colours of your brand, set your logo as a header, choose your font and build up your email. Give yourself time, try to experiment with different solutions and layouts.
The footer could look a bit weird with all those strange symbols, but if you set up your account properly, it will work fine. If you try to remove the email footer, MailChimp will auto select one of its own, to allow customers the ability to unsubscribe from your newsletter.
At the end, remember to preview your email: click on the top right corner on “Preview” and test to see how it is displayed also on mobile. MailChimp team suggests that 26.6% of the viewers are from a mobile device, while PC users are the 64%. It could be tricky to find the right balance between PC and smartphone designs, but it is worth to work on it.
AUDIENCE
Ok, now you have designed your email, but what about the audience? There are many ways, but remember that this is a process that will take you a bit of time, so don’t expect immediate results but focus on a mid-term targets.
You should start designing a landing page, a standalone web page whose aim is to call to action your audience and make them to subscribe. Fortunately, MailChimp also offers you the possibility to design landing pages in the same way you design newsletters.
The point now is: why people should subscribe to your newsletter? You should find a way to offer them incentives: discounts, access to member only content, free samples, how-to-guides, demo versions of your product are some of the right tools.
CAMPAIGN AND PUBLISH
When you have your audience and your newsletter is designed, is time to create a campaign. You just have to name it (this name will only be displayed to you, so it could be helpful to put a date or the topic of the newsletter). Once you name it, you’ll find four sections:
• To section: add your recipients.
• From section: add your from name and from email address.
• Subject section: add your subject line.
• Content section: design your email or use your saved designs.
When each task is completed, a green checkmark will appear next to the corresponding section. After you’ve completed the To, From, Subject, and Content sections of the Campaign Builder, you can choose to Schedule or Send your campaign.
CONCLUSIONS
Thanks to detailed reports full of data about open and click rates, you will be able to monitor how your Campaign is going on and the behaviour of the audience.
Finally, we suggest you to visit MailChimp tutorial and help page for more detailed and specific guides on how to better design your newsletter and make them work to fulfil your targets!
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Rapid Agency – Digital Marketing in Belfast
Donegall Square West Belfast BT1 6JH
james@rapidmarketing.co.uk
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