In the contemporary world of Information Technology, every enterprise wants to establish a direct connection with the customers. Multiple channels can be used for this purpose but there is no better way of promoting your business’ products/services and building customer loyalty than email marketing. By sending out emails to the audience, you can inform them about new offerings, give incentives and keep them engaged with your brand.
Email Marketing is an effective two-way communication in which the businesses can send commercial/promotional emails after the consent of the subscriber. There’s an email list of subscribers that are willing to receive emails or newsletters from the company. Usually, this email list is segmented and contains certain groups of people with their own interests.
Perks of using Email Marketing
The main reason behind the popularity of email marketing is that it can give you an ROI of $42 upon spending $1. You can reach out to a wider audience because there are approximately more than 4.1 billion active email users across the globe. Apart from building a consolidated relationship with the audience, you can also bring more traffic to your website or even the social media accounts. Sending out promotional emails to the target audience can influence their mindset at various stages of sales funnel and ultimately result in higher conversions.
Email has now become an integral part of our everyday life. We receive so many emails in one single day after subscribing to the newsletters. Emails are clicked and then opened more often if they are relevant. That’s why the businesses use a precise communication model and convey a direct message that’s of some value to the subscriber.
Setting Up Email Marketing Campaign
Many email marketing tools are available that can be used to set up full-fledged email marketing campaigns. You can not only create an email by accessing pre-built templates, but also set the time and schedule for sending them out. These tools are automated and save a lot of precious time.
The most important tool regarded in the field of email marketing is Mailchimp. This Atlanta-based tool first started in 2001 and since then it has transformed into the most effective email automation software. You can use it to execute an email marketing campaign on a small, medium and large scale.
It’s very easy to set up and tailor-made for the beginners. However, for your convenience, we have laid out a complete guide and instructions on how to set up a campaign and then track all metrics to check its effectiveness.
- Sign Up And Create Account:
Visit the website of Mailchimp and click on the Sign Up for Free button. Then you will be redirected to a form where you’ll have to enter the details. A confirmation email will be sent to your email. Click on that confirmation link in the email to activate the account.
- Entering The Business Details:
After the account confirmation process, you will be redirected to some of the forms where you’ll have to enter first name, last name, business details such as its name, URL and physical address.
- Building The Email List:
When you enter all the relevant details about the business, Mailchimp will give you the option to integrate and connect your website and social media channels. The primary thing you should do after setting up the Mailchimp account is to build an email list. This list includes all the leads that you have gathered which can directly benefit your business.
The main purpose of email marketing is rightly served by the email list that you create at this step.
Click on the Audience section and go to All contacts. Here the new contacts can be added by clicking on the Add Contacts button. You can upload the email list in the form of a .CSV file or via a spreadsheet.
- Designing the Signup Form:
After filling out the required details in the list form and importing the list of contacts, the next step will take you to signup forms dashboard. It’s quite comprehensive and here you can see the list of different types of signup forms.
To proceed, click on the “Audience” and then “Signup forms”. You will be redirected to a page where the forms can be customized.
Upon clicking any form, you will be taken to a new page where the forms can be customized.
Now that you have designed a signup form, don’t forget to keep an eye on the form URL. Copy the link so that it can be shared on social media or any other platform. This method is quite effective as you can encourage people to subscribe after sharing the link for the custom designed signup form.
- Addition Of A Lead Magnet In Welcome Email:
If you have created an email list for the first time, then it’s a wise option to add a lead magnet in the welcome email sent to the subscribers. A lead magnet is a marketing terminology which means offering a product / service to the audience in return for collecting their email address.
Here, you should try to be innovative and offer unique giveaways to the audience to encourage further expansion of the email list. Many things can be offered as a lead magnet such as mini catalogue or an e-book which can give the subscribers complete instructions about the product or even some information about the company.
Whatever you offer as a lead magnet, the end goal should be to give more value to the audience so that they remain hooked to your email marketing campaign. The helpful tip of adding a lead magnet is that you should convert it into a PDF form and then simply upload it on the website.
Go back to the “Lists” section in Mailchimp and select the list that you’d like to send the lead magnet to. Press “Signup Form” and then click on “General Forms”. A dropdown will open where you’ll select the option of Send a final welcome email.
Include the link of lead magnet in the email and give warm greetings to the subscribers.
- Creation Of Email Campaign:
For sending an email campaign, it’s important to have a list of subscribers so you can send them emails on a regular basis. Another crucial point at this stage is to check whether the email domain is verified or not.
To initiate a regular email campaign, click on the Create icon in the top left.
A new popup window will open. Now, you click on Email.
Enter the name of the campaign here under the Regular tab. Here, the name of the campaign is entered for internal usage. You can edit it at any point in time. After typing the name, press the Begin button.
A checklist will appear where you’ll enter the list of recipients, email of the sender, subject line of the campaign along with the content section which includes adding the body text, image or embedded videos.
Let us go through each of these sections one by one and set up the full-fledged Email campaign.
To
By clicking on the Add Recipients button you’ll be redirected to a page where it will ask you to add contacts for the campaign. Click on the Import Contacts button.
Here you can upload the contacts through a CSV file or copy them directly from a spreadsheet. Here the email list of recipients uploaded can be tagged. You can put them in a Subscribed or Unsubscribed category as well for better management of campaigns.
From
In this section, you’ll enter the name and email address of the sender which will be visible to the recipients.
Subject
Enter the subject and also some preview text. Remember one thing that the subject line of your campaign should be tempting so that the audience clicks and then opens the email. The character limit here is 150 words. Try to make the subject as concise as possible.
Content
Upon clicking the Design Email button parallel to the content section, a pop-up screen will appear.
Classic Builder and New Builder (Beta Version) option is available. The classic one is a traditional email builder whereas the new builder section comes with an improved user interface where all the content can be edited inside the email.
These templates can be selected based on your campaign objective. You can select the Sell Products template if you want to boost product sales, use education template for selling any course or make an announcement template for creating a buzz etc.
By clicking on any template, you can edit its design as well as the text according to your business requirements and campaign’s objective,
After filling all the pertinent information, click on the Send button in the top right.
And there you go, an email is sent as part of the regular email campaign that you’ve set up.
- Applying The Segmentation Filter:
Customers only want to read relevant emails. They already receive so many emails a day so it won’t be convenient for them to read all sorts of emails that you have designed.
Therefore, you can create segments of the audience based on interests. For selecting the segment, click on the Edit button next to Filter by segment or tag. Then tick the Choose segment or tag option.
Now you can easily select whether the segment that you have selected meets certain conditions or not.
- Analyzing The Email Campaign:
Now that you have set up the whole email campaign process, the job doesn’t end here. Now is the time to track the progress of the campaign and see how the subscribers are reacting to your email or the newsletter that you are sending as part of this campaign.
Keeping a close eye on the statistics is important as it can ultimately determine the direction of your business and the user involvement level. The great thing about Mailchimp is that it creates automatic reports by presenting the data in a simple yet meaningful way.
To check the campaign progress, go to Reports tab in the upper navigation and then press Automation and the campaign that you’d like to assess.
As you can see in the aforementioned image that Mailchimp provides data about some important metrics like Email open rate, click rate, bounce rate and how many people unsubscribed.
In case of alarming statistics, you can redesign the email/newsletter by making some alterations in the content, images and embedded videos. If the open rate for the email is quite low then you can improvise with the subject line and try to make it more captivating.
- Integration With Other Apps:
Mailchimp can be integrated with other applications such as Facebook, Google Sheets and Hubspot. In this way, you can import the leads into your Mailchimp email list and expand the audience base.
You can integrate more than 1,000 other apps into Mailchimp and add more subscribers to the list. A complete directory of all the Mailchimp integrations can be accessed on their website.
The list includes social media platforms, designing tools such as Canva, Photoshop, survey building applications like SurveyMonkey, Typeform as well as Content Management Systems like WordPress and much more. These valuable integrations boost customer traffic and play a key role in driving the company sales.
Conclusion
Hence, we can say that MailChimp has made email marketing a lot easier nowadays. All of the campaign process is automated. You can reach out to the audience and connect with them in an effective way. All you need to do is craft an attractive email with a tempting message and then set the right trigger and schedule. MailChimp will do the rest of the stuff and present an analytics report so you can make crucial business decisions based on facts.
