How To Effectively Use Mailchimp For Email Marketing

Businesses can choose from a wide range of services to help them implement a successful email marketing campaign, but probably the best-known is MailChimp. An intuitive and easy-to-use system, businesses can send emails to their contact list in a few easy clicks, while at the same time advertising their products or services and building their brand.

What’s more, it’s totally free, providing you have 2,000 subscribers or less and you send less than 12,000 emails per month, which, let’s face it, is the case for most small businesses. Email marketing tools like MailChimp are one of the best ways to increase a business’s return on investment, providing they are used correctly.

In this blog post, we will outline how to effectively use MailChimp for email marketing.

Build Your Email List

Before you can even start creating email marketing campaigns, you need to build a list of subscribers, that is, a list of people who want to receive and read your emails. If you’re picturing a day spent manually adding names and email addresses into a database, fear not.

With MailChimp, you can add a form to your website homepage where visitors can enter their email addresses and subscribe to receive your emails automatically. The even better news is that if and when people wish to unsubscribe, you don’t need to manually remove them from your list since they can unsubscribe or change their subscription information at any time.

If you’re having trouble building your email list, you may need to reconsider where you place your sign-up form on your website to ensure it is easy to find. You should also ensure your signup form is concise and quick to fill out since long-winded jargon will deter potential subscribers from signing up to receive your emails.

Once you have your list of subscribers, it’s a good idea to segment it into targeted groups. You can choose to segment by demographic, purchase history, or by your own categories. Once your list is segmented, you can then send specific emails to targeted groups who may find a particular subject more appealing than other groups.

Make Subscribers Want To Open Your Email

It’s all well and good having a long list of subscribers, but if no one is reading your emails, the whole process seems rather pointless. To ensure subscribers open your emails, you need to make everything engaging, from the subject line and the content, to the layout and imagery.

According to research, 33 percent of subscribers open emails based on the subject line alone, so you’ll need to make sure you come up with something enticing. It should show the reader you are offering them something valuable while being simple and focused, but above all, it should be short.

Providing you’ve created an engaging subject line, your reader will be expecting something pretty great when they open up your email, and the next thing they will notice is the layout. MailChimp offers users a wide variety of preset email templates and layouts, or you can customize your own by adding your logo, changing the color scheme and adding images to make it more personalized.

Last but not least is the stuff inside the email, i.e. the content. As with the subject line, subscribers need to be immediately engaged, so it is essential that your mission, or the purpose of your email, is written in the opening line before you go on to talk about anything else.

Analyze Your Data

So how do you tell if your content is hitting the mark? Just as businesses pay attention to statistics around their Facebook and Twitter followers, MailChimp can provide businesses with a ton of valuable information, including open rates, unsubscribes, and click-through rates.

Making the effort to review your email marketing statistics will allow you to fine-tune your campaigns and therefore reach a wider audience and secure a better return on investment. By looking at your statistics, you might find your last email campaign had an open rate of 75%, while the previous campaign had an open rate of just 20%.

By comparing the two, you can figure out what made the difference and why one campaign worked better than the other. Perhaps one had a more engaging subject line, or a more colorful image, for example.

Analyzing your data on MailChimp can also help you to determine the best time to send your email campaign. MailChimp found that emails sent Tuesday through Thursday around 4 pm generally have the best open rates, but this won’t necessarily be the case with your email campaigns.

The best way to determine when to hit the big red launch button is to simply experiment and find your sweet spot. Track the success rate of emails sent, comparing times and days until you hit a large enough audience.

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