This is an article “Why Marketers Go Bananas Over Mailchimp” by Marc Primo Warren
It’s already 2021 yet many marketers are still unaware of how e-mail marketing remains to be one of the most effective channels out there. It helps businesses reach the right targets and turn up high ROI yields. For over a decade now, this form of marketing has contributed to a 66% conversion rate and earns up to $44 for every $1 return on ad spend (ROAS). So what’s not to like?
While investing in paid ads on social media is still significant today, email marketing is around 40 times more effective when it comes to your conversion and re-marketing efforts as it also gets you more click-throughs.
If you want to significantly increase your marketing numbers and online traffic fast, knowing more about the premier e-mail marketing automation platform Mailchimp is most essential. With its holistic menu of tools that can give you reliable insights, fast results, and a free hand to customize whichever type of mailer you send out, Mailchimp offers many advantages and is arguably your best bet for your current email marketing efforts.
How email marketing has evolved so far
It always helps to know where you’ll be coming from, so let’s first discuss how e-mail marketing has evolved so far and what it’s really all about.
Since American marketer Gary Thuerk sent the first commercial e-mail message on 3 May 1978, digital communications and marketing have never been the same. Thuerk successfully sent out over a hundred emails, which translated to a sales revenue of $12 million for Digital Equipment Corp and earned him the rightful title ‘Father of Spam’.
These days, email marketing campaigns have evolved from the spammy content they used to be to more agile and engaging messages that target specific audiences for better lead nurturing and customer relations management. Mailers have also transformed into several types, with different objectives such as welcoming new customers, selling products, building a brand, sharing updates, or even greeting someone on your mailing list with a ‘happy birthday’, among others. However, most marketers use it to re-market and improve both cart abandonment and email bounce rates.
With the birth of Mailchimp at the turn of the new millennium, more small businesses have discovered easier and more reliable ways to create various campaign mailers via the platform’s onsite templates and other high-end automation tools. What’s best about Mailchimp is that it’s able to cover just about every possible channel online with its multitude of functions. With the platform, you can schedule postings of your digital ads on social media, link your email to your landing pages, create websites, track data, improve your overall customer management, and more.
How easy it is to use Mailchimp
With millions of users on Mailchimp ranging from emerging startups to Fortune 500 companies, the platform tracks a lot of data. According to one of the platform’s insights, the current average email open rate is 21.33%, which is pretty high considering the highest open rate is at 28.77 for federal e-mails.
By simply improving your content management from your subject line to your online profile details and core message, determining the right audience for your products and services, and sending out just the right number of mailers that neither borders on being spam nor falls short in following up with customers, you can now improve your open rates--fast!
Here’s a brief overview of how Mailchimp works.
Account set-up
Signing up for a free Mailchimp account is as easy as entering your unique username, e-mail address, and password. Once you receive an activation prompt, click on it and start filling out the form by providing your profile details, website links, and physical business address (avoid entering a fake one as this could create business issues that will give you a headache later on). You will also be asked to answer a few questions about your company so the platform can generate relevant content for you later on.
Once you’re done setting up your account, you can now upload your social media pages and mailing lists and connect your store links to redirect your target customers to your desired landing pages.
Start creating a Mailchimp account here.
Create an email list and tap new audiences
As a rule of thumb in email marketing, always update your contacts and mailing lists to the right audience categories to gain the best results. There’s no point in sending follow-up mailers to an audience that has previously shown no interest in your product or service, so focus on the ones that matter.
On Mailchimp, you may either upload contacts manually or let the platform automatically generate a target audience for you based on your set-up information. You may then separate contacts using the platform’s audience management tools so you can create multiple audiences for your mailing lists.
Easy sign-up forms
Some marketers dive into Mailchimp without any contacts. What users can do in instances like these is customize a sign-up form which they can post on social media or other marketing channels to accumulate potential audiences.
There are available templates with fundamental designs which you can use or create yourself to bring visuals closer to your brand’s unique designs. To access the feature, simply go to the ‘audience’ icon on the homepage, then click on ‘audience dashboard’ wherein you can select ‘current audience’ from a drop-down menu, then go to ’manage audience’ and access ‘signup forms’.
From there, you can choose from a long list of available templates to work on depending on what message category you need to send out, then proceed to design the entire email message.
Learning how to work with the various sign-up form elements is easy enough–- from fixing your layout to assigning colors and adding more customizations from the tabs. Don’t forget to save your work before you leave the page and return to it if you think more edits are necessary.
Mailchimp’s plus factors
Aside from offering various customizable features that can help you create and automate social media and web ads, landing pages, surveys, and postcards, Mailchimp also allows you to easily manage your e-mail marketing campaigns and provide you with helpful reports.
Perhaps one of the most useful features of this web-based platform is how it can track your email data and let you see which contacts opened, clicked, or unsubscribed from your campaigns for better insights.
There’s plenty of useful features you can get from such an all-in-one e-mail marketing platform that ranks high when compared to other such available applications in the market. However, the best about Mailchimp is that it’s free if you have less than 2,000 subscribers on your mailing list. That’s staying true to the platform’s mission of helping out the small businesses and grooming them to be champions of their respective industries through big-time email marketing.
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