Fact Sheet

The name may bring a smile to your face, but this application is one of the most powerful and professional of email marketing platforms.

In use by more than 7 million people and businesses around the world – sending more than 500 million emails per day!

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a cloud based email marketing service, which offers subscribers the ability to design professional looking email newsletters and campaigns. It easily automates and streamlines the previously arduous task of email marketing.

Before the emergence of online services such as MailChimp; email marketing campaigns were typically sent from a desktop PC, often from an individual’s email address. Unless recipients responded directly, senders had no way of being able to monitor and track how successful their campaign had been.

Alongside many other popular email marketing services, MailChimp was developed to provide a robust and efficient platform. This enables email marketing and communication to be handled far more professionally, efficiently and effectively.

How much does MailChimp cost?

MailChimp offers a range of different plans, but if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers and send less than 12,000 emails a month, it is free

July 2015

of charge - and you do not require a contract.

Monthly plans, starting from around £7, depend on the number of subscribers you have, but will allow you to send an unlimited number of emails per month.

Higher volume plans are also available for larger organisations sending in excess of 1,000,000 emails per month and costs start around the £300 mark for subscribers lists of 80,000 or more.

MailChimp Features

MailChimp offer a wide range of features, and integrations, allowing users to send marketing emails, automated messages and targeted campaigns. It has detailed reports to help you keep improving your marketing over time.

The MailChimp platform guides users of all abilities through setting up an email newsletter or campaign. It helps by making sure that your subscriber list is fully compliant, (which helps avoid spam filters). This gives your campaign the very best chance of a successful delivery and desired outcome.

Approved Bulk Emailer

Typically many email services and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) still limit the number of emails you can send at one time, with the main aim of preventing spamming.

MailChimp allows you to create campaigns and send to an unlimited number of recipients, ensuring greater deliverability and confidence that your messages are reaching your subscribers email Inbox.

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MailChimp emails are recognised by many ISPs as being safe and approved. If there is a problem with delivery, MailChimp will attempt to re-send the email and when it fails, will provide an insight into why the email may be bouncing.

Adherence to privacy laws

Email marketing campaigners are required by law to provide an “unsubscribe” link in every email, allowing subscribers the option to decide not to receive any further email communication from you.

MailChimp is one of a number of professional email marketing platforms, which automatically includes an “unsubscribe” link. This allows recipients to make the choice; when selected, it automatically updates their record on MailChimp to remove them from future lists.

MailChimp also asks recipients why they are removing themselves from the list. This is useful information to help you understand whether your content is relevant to your subscriber base.

A note of warning with subscriber lists

When MailChimp receives an “unsubscribe” request from any of your campaigns, subscribers may say that “they did not agree to receive email marketing messages” from you.

This can happen from time to time as not everyone remembers signing up to an email newsletter! If you are sending “unsolicited” emails on a regular basis and your subscribers confirm they did not give you permission, MailChimp considers the as “abuse”.

They will not hesitate to close your account and prevent you from continuing with future email campaigns – you are “spamming” and they cannot allow that to continue.

You should therefore always ensure that your recipients have explicitly opted into any email campaigns, rather than just sending to anyone that you feel may be interested in your marketing messages.

Importing and Creating Subscriber Lists

MailChimp allows you to import as many subscriber lists as you may need in CSV or tab delimited text file, even from third party applications such as Salesforce or Google Docs.

Imports are not restricted to a single list, but they can be segmented lists or perhaps different interest groups. This allows you the option to target your campaigns more effectively.

Another great feature of MailChimp is that it enables you the ability to create a “sign-up” form to help you create new subscriber lists. You can customise the form, and share and post on your website or Facebook page.

MailChimp is serious about security and reputation and the “sign-up” form requires a subscriber to “opt-in”, which ensures the integrity of your mailing lists. This is ultimately to the benefit of all, improving the chance of deliverability and overall success.

Creating Templates and Campaigns

The MailChimp “campaign builder” allows you to use existing templates and design layouts.

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It has the additional benefit of being able to customise and brand them to match your own company or organisational requirements.

MailChimp allows you to save your own templates too, so once you are happy with your customised design, this can be saved as a template.

All future email marketing campaigns can then be branded and presented in the same professional manner.

MailChimp allows campaigns to be built using three different methods:

HTML emails – the most popular type with formatting, styling and inclusion of images

Plain Text emails – the simplest form of message, without formatting, styling or graphical content

A/B Split campaigns – useful for testing subject lines, sending two different versions of your email to a small number of recipients in your subscriber list.

This is useful to help you to track the performance of your email and then send the “winning” version to all remaining subscribers

Preview and Testing your Campaign

MailChimp allows you to preview your campaign before it is sent out to your subscribers.

This allows you to visualise how your campaign will render on desktop and mobile devices.

The Preview and Test facility also allows you to send a “test” email to your own personal email address. This lets you check all the links and ensure that you are happy with the campaign before it is sent to your subscriber list.

Inbox Inspector

One of the features of the Preview and Testing tools is the Inbox Inspector, which is a useful feature to determine how your campaign will render across different email software applications.

This feature also runs a spam filter to help identify any potential issues with your campaign (e.g. words to avoid, etc.).

This is a paid service for “free” plans, but is included in monthly paid accounts as part of this service.

Sending your Campaign

When you have checked and tested your email campaign, MailChimp runs through to make sure all the steps have been completed and if anything untoward is identified, you will be alerted so you can resolve it before sending.

When you are ready to send, there are a number of different options to choose from, including the facility to schedule your campaign for a specific date and time.

There is also the facility of “batch delivery” which sends the campaign out to small numbers of recipients, rather than the whole list at one.

MailChimp can also be set to analyse the activity of past subscribers, allowing it to automatically determine the optimal sending

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time.

For international subscriber campaigns, the “timewarp” feature will automatically deliver a campaign based on the recipient time zone, rather than your own.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

MailChimp provides an intuitive and easy to use platform, full of tips and guidance as you build your subscriber list, build your campaign template and send off your first emails.

Your knowledge and skill in using MailChimp will quickly develop as you begin to use it, but there are some useful tips to help you avoid some of the more common mistakes:

Avoid sending to recipients who have never “subscribed” to receive emails from you (this is classed by MailChimp as abuse)

Keep your lists current and avoid sending to inactive or stale recipient lists.

Avoid including words such as “free”, “special offer”, “discount”, “money back guarantee”, etc. as these keywords and phrases are often blocked by spam filters and therefore never reach Inboxes

Avoid including any badly written code (for those who are comfortable customising the HTML code further), as this could potentially cause issues with links to your website, etc.

Images – use them wisely, rather than filling the entire email campaign with

images, balance the layout with text

MailChimp Campaign Reporting

Once your campaign has been sent, MailChimp will get to work recording and analysing the performance of your campaign.

The reports function provides a comprehensive summary of how your campaign has performed, identifying a wide range of useful information to help you review the success and outcomes of your email marketing:

Overview provides summary of how your campaign has performed, including details of:

Opens Clicks Social engagement Un-subscribes Bounces

Activity provides a more comprehensive report:

How many subscribers opened How many didn’t How many clicked a link Which addresses bounced Who unsubscribed Who filed an abuse complaint

Links provides details about how each tracked link in your campaign has performed.

With details of all tracked URLs, along with the number of total and unique clicks for each one.

Further information: www.mailchimp.com

Fact Sheet

Disclaimer:

We have no commercial links with these companies or their products, and their appearance in this fact sheet is not an endorsement.

This Fact Sheet does not constitute legal advice.

© John Owens 2015