The last guide to MailChimp you'll ever need… pinky promise
Go from being a total Noob to an Email Marketing Expert with these completely free Step‑By‑Step Tutorials for professional Bloggers & Online Businesses
This comprehensive guide will take you by the hand and get you up and running in no time if you are just starting out with Email Marketing. And even if you are already an intermediate or expert MailChimp user, you should still find some secret tips & tricks, examples and best practices about your favorite Email marketing provider.
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Let me explain it with an analogy.
Imagine the current airplane industry, with one key difference: Airplanes could be used only a single time and had to be destroyed afterward.
After each flight, once everyone has left the airplane, the airline would be forced by regulations to take the airplane and tear it completely apart.
For the next flight to another destination, they would have to build a completely new airplane.
They would start from zero every time.
Every airplane would be used exactly once.
Of course, this doesn't make any sense!
Air travel would be impossible. Or just way too expensive for anyone to enjoy.
But that's exactly what you do with your existing Traffic if you are not building an email list.
You are starting from zero – again and again and again.
Every time you are trying to gain a new reader, a new customer or a new fan, you have to start from zero. All the traffic you generate for your website is lost if you can't get back in contact with a visitor after he has left your site.
An Email List is the single best way to drive continuously traffic back to your website and business.
And the best thing?
You own it.
Because if you invest into building a Facebook Page, Facebook could decide at any moment to delete it and take all the likes you have built so painfully over the years with it. The same is true for Twitter Followers or Google Rankings.
Only an email list is something nobody can take away from you. And it will give you better results than all the other platforms combined:
MailChimp is the best solution for you if you are just starting out and have a tight budget. It is as well a great option if you are not very technical, as it has a beautiful, easy to use and yet intuitive User Interface.
There are a few use cases where it might not be the right choice for you.
But first of all let's get a basic Idea of what MailChimp has to offer in comparison with some other popular Email Marketing Providers:
| MailChimp | Aweber | Convertkit | Drip | GetResponse | CampaignMonitor | Infusionsoft | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Autoresponders 4 | |||||||
| Signup Forms 5 | |||||||
| Drag & Drop Editor 6 | |||||||
| Segmentation 7 | |||||||
| A/B Testing 8 | |||||||
| Tracking 9 | |||||||
| Free Plan 10 | |||||||
| Automation Rules 11 | |||||||
| Campaign Builder 12 | |||||||
| Landing pages |
MailChimp is the only service that offers a free version for up to 2.000 subscribers and 12.000 sent emails per month. If you are a small business, a non-profit or want to give email marketing a try without breaking the bank it's clearly your best option.
MailChimp is as well great in providing visually appealing and complex templates for your emails. If you like to make your newsletter look more corporate than it's a good decision to go with MailChimp. They make it easy to use different types of templates and edit them with their build in drag & drop editor, where other email marketing providers focus more on simple plain text emails that look and feel like a normal email from a friend.
Beside that, you can see that MailChimp lacks especially a few more complex functionalities like a campaign builder.
So here a few Use Cases where I would recommend out of my personal experience a different Email Marketing Provider:
MailChimp still doesn’t allow you to tag subscribers. You can only add Subscribers to different Interest Groups, but this can get really messy if you have a lot of different data points you want to track about a subscriber. A Service like Drip or Infusionsoft is maybe better suited in this case.
MailChimp gives you the ability to use Merge Tags (or subscriber information) within your emails and even show conditional content depending on the value of these merge tags. For example display the first name if the information exists and display "Friend" if not. But it's hard to get more granular than that, because it's lacking an email templating language. Like for Example: Display the Date in Format DD/MM/YYYY of the next Monday 90 days into the future.
Additionally MailChimp lacks the ability to create complex Email Campaigns that are customized to the individual subscriber. These Email Campaigns are usually build within a Campaign Builder and let subscribers go down multiple paths depending on different Circumstances. With MailChimp you can only create linear paths that all subscribers follow from top to bottom.
MailChimp is a list based Email Marketing Provider. Basic things like the confirmation email, the final signup thank you email or your signup thank you page are configured once, for the whole list. That means you need to create a new list everytime you want to send a different confirmation email depending on where your subscriber signed up for your email list. The same is true for a different thank you page or final welcome email.
Although you can have different lists for these use cases, it can create a lot of trouble as you may will have a subscriber at several lists at once and you can only send a newsletter to one list at a time. Other Email Marketing Providers like Drip, Convertkit or Infusionsoft are more subscriber focused and give you more flexibility.
Bryan Harris has written extensively about why the list based approach is pretty bad.
MailChimp is by far the most accessible Email Marketing Provider out there. It is the only email marketing provider that offers a free plan for up to 2,000 email subscribers. And that alone has been a huge driver of its success with so many small businesses and non profits.
A few of its advanced functionality is only available for paid customers, but even than it's still quite accessible. For up to 500 subscribers for example you pay only $ 10 per month to access the paid features.
These are some of the functions that are only available to paid customers:
Third Party Integrations are especially helpful if you are selling products online. You could for example import customers that come from your Shopping Cart Software (like Shopify or Woocommerce) into MailChimp and send them a specific Follow Up Sequence depending on the Product they bought.
Segmentation is helpful if you don't want to send an email to your whole list, but only parts of it. For example sending a promotion to people on their birthdate or sending a newsletter only to subscribers who have opened your last Campaign. This is especially helpful if your list grows bigger and bigger as you can tailor the content you send to different interest groups.
With this feature you can create different MailChimp Accounts for Team Members and give them access to various parts of your MailChimp Account.
This is a killer feature if your subscribers live around the globe. You can let MailChimp deliver your email based on the time zone of the subscriber, so that it always arrives at a specific time. For example always at 9 in the morning, no matter if the subscriber is based in the USA or Australia.
If you know HTML & CSS or have a developer at hand, than you can completely customize the hosted MailChimp Signup Forms and default Emails & Pages like the Confirmation or Thank You Emails.
| MailChimp | Aweber | Convertkit | Drip | GetResponse | CampaignMonitor | Infusionsoft | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per month | $ 0 | $ 29 | $ 49 | $ 49 | $ 25 | $ 29 | $ 199 |
| Per subscriber | $ 0 | $ 0.015 | $ 0.025 | $ 0.025 | $ 0.013 | $ 0.015 | $ 0.1 |
Please note: It's not entirely fair to compare different email marketing providers only on their price. The features can differ significantly, some offer discounts on yearly plans, require you to sign up for a full year, pay setup costs or limit the amount of emails you can send. This tool only tries to give you a rough idea of the monthly costs for different list sizes. Additionally, these prices are subject to frequent changes – so always consult the current price for your list size directly with the Software you are interested in.
Like most of the email marketing providers you pay more per month, the larger your email list gets. But simultaneously, the more subscribers you have, the less you pay relatively for each subscriber on your list.
That can be a good reason why it makes sense to have multiple of your businesses or projects running within a single account.
Expert Tip:Regina Anaejionu"With a paid MailChimp account, you’ll unlock extra features such as Automation (so you can send out super helpful emails as soon as someone subscribes; you can even set up whole email courses), Delivery by Time Zone (so everyone can get your email at 9 a.m. no matter what time zone they’re in), and chat and email support with the MailChimp team. That’s pretty epic in my opinion."
Regina Anaejionu
One special thing about MailChimp is that you can decide to pay as you go instead of a monthly basis. Meaning that you pay each time you actually send an email.
But this only makes financial sense if you send very unfrequently emails to your subscribers. (Less than once per month) In General, sending infrequently is not recommended as you should stay in contact with your subscribers to keep them engaged and interested in your content.
It is really easy to signup for MailChimp, as it is free for up to 2,000 subscribers. That means you don’t have to worry about entering your payment information and can get started almost immediately.
Follow these steps to set up your Account:
Before you can get started using MailChimp, you first need a place to save your subscribers to. This will be your list.
Although you can have multiple list within MailChimp, its best to seperate different types of subscribers with Interest Groups. A good rule of thumb is to only create a seperate list for completely different projects or businesses. This way you prevent from paying twice for the same subscriber that is signed up on both email lists.
So lets get started creating your first List:
You will have to define a public name for your new list. The name will be shown on all your mailchimp pages, like the signup confirmation page or thank you page. This should be your Business or Website Name.
Next you have to define your default from email and from name. This should be an email you check frequently and that is ideally hosted on your own domain name (e.G. hello@growtheme.com). Studies have shown that personal "From Names" get higher Open Rates than generic Business or Website Names. So use your own name if possible.
Last but not least you have to fill in your physical address. As already mentioned this is required by international anti-spam laws.
Expert Tip:Melyssa Griffin"I highly recommend getting a P.O. Box. They are surprisingly cheap and will give you the peace of mind that A) you’re not sending your mailing address out into the world, and B) you’re not breaking any laws (which include hefty fines)."
Melyssa Griffin
Don't worry to much about these settings right now, as you can always change them later as well.
Once you have successfully filled in your List Details, you will be taken to a new page: Your List Dashboard.
This is the right place to do everything related to a specific List. Here you will find all the subscribers your list contains, you will be able to edit your Default List Settings (the ones you just entered in the previous step) and configure some additional Settings like Merge Fields and Signup Forms.
Before we can continue setting up a Signup Form to get subscribers into your brand new list, you will have to confirm your sending Domain. This is just a security mechanism from MailChimp to make sure that you have permission to send from that particular Domain.
A Signup Form is the place where people sign up for your list. It's basically just an input field that asks your visitors for their email address, just like this one:
MailChimp gives you different options to create a Signup Form depending on your needs and there are as well a lot of third party integrations available, helping you to integrate MailChimp with common applications like Wordpress or Squarespace.
To get started lets configure the most basic one: A hosted MailChimp Signup Form. This will live on your unique mailchimp subdomain and can work as a Landingpage you can promote.
To do so, just select your List and than go to "Signup Forms" » "General Forms"
This is as well the right place where you can edit all of MailChimp's "default" pages and emails. Like the confirmation email if you use Double Optin (See next Section), your Signup Thank You Page, or your Final Welcome Email (That is sended after someone successfully joined your Email List). If you are just starting out it's best to not stress out about all of this & just leave things as they are. You have always time to customize all of these emails and pages over time.
You will now see the drag and drop MailChimp Form Builder. It's best to keep this form as simple as possible. The more information you request from your visitors, the less likely they are to sign up.
So the first thing you should do is clicking on the "Last Name" Field and set the Field Visibility to "Hidden" so it doesn't show up anymore in your Signup Form. You can remove the field and its information completely from your list by clicking on the round button with a minus sign and confirming by typing "Delete".
Next you can upload an Image for your Signup Form and add some text that should explain what visitors can get out of subscribing to your newsletter.
Don't make this about yourself, think about the benefits a possible subscriber gains from receiving your emails.
Maybe its high quality content that helps them with their challanges, maybe it's special discount or limited product editions only available to your email subscribers.
The important thing is that you make sure to describe exactly why it is relevant and beneficial for your subscribers.
You are on the right track if you are avoiding words like "Newsletter", "My" or "Our".
The next thing a lot of people skip, is changing the text of the Signup Button.
The call to action button is one of the most important pieces of your signup form. If you leave it to the default and very boring "Subscribe to list" text, people will think twice before actually doing so.
To change the text to something more exciting that fits your text, just click on "Translate" and than scroll down to the "Subscribe to List" Field. You can change the text to anything you like and it will show up in your signup form once you click on "Save Translation Settings".
Once you are happy with the text you can click on the "Design" Tab and change background colors, text colors, fonts and a few other settings so it fits your brand.
After you have finished customizing the Design, you can scroll up and copy the "Sign up URL".
This is the URL where you can find your MailChimp Signup Form. You can use it as Landingpage by sharing it for example on socialmedia.
While it's good to have a MailChimp basic Signup Form in place, you probably would like to display a MailChimp Signup Form in other places as well. For example by intergrating it directly into a webpage or showing it somewhere on your Blog like in the Sidebar or Footer.
MailChimp offers an embed form code for basic needs and if you need a more sophisticated solution you can easily use a third party software. We will look at a couple of options in the next section.
For now here is how to use the MailChimp embed form code to insert it into a Wordpress Blog Sidebar.
If you don't like to handle code skip this and check out the third party integrations instead. They make it way easier to embed MailChimp Signup Forms anywhere on your Website, giving you more options without having to touch any code yourself.
MailChimp's embedded form codes are fine if you just want to use a basic Form on your HTML Webpage or Wordpress Blog, and maybe have the ability to style them yourself with a bit of CSS.
But chances are that a simple signup form that gets lost in your sidebar or footer is not enough to get more visitors to subscribe to your email list. If you would like to include signup forms in a lot of different places on your website, using various listbuilding techniques and using different styling – it's best to use a third party tool.
Of course we are a bit biased here, as our conversion optimized Wordpress Theme integrates seemlessly with MailChimp and allows you to implement an unlimited amount of customizable Signup Forms in any Place on your Blog with just a few clicks. But depending on your needs there are other options as well that can be enough for your needs or work well together with the Growtheme.
The Growtheme is made for professional Bloggers. You can connect it to your MailChimp account within less than 30 seconds. It gives you the ability to enable a wide range of proven listbuilding techniques within seconds with just a few clicks.
It comes with a wide range of pre-configured & carefully designed landing pages that will help you to grow your email list more effectively. It has been the number #1 reason for building our own Blog from 0 to 100.000 monthly visitors and 40.000 subscribers.
Click here to learn how the Growtheme can help you to grow your Blog.
MailChimp for WP is the most popular MailChimp Plugin for Wordpress. It comes with a free version that allows you to easily embed a single MailChimp Form into your Wordpress Site. It gives you a couple of options that are not available with MailChimp itself, like for example using a Single Optin Process.
If you want to use unlimited forms and customize the look and feel of them you can get the optional premium version.
Popup Alley is a great free alternative to the very popular Sumo Listbuilder. The focus is on creating Signup Popups that can easily be integrated with your Wordpress Website.
If you don't use WordPress there are other options available depending on the Platform you use.
MailChimp has a great step by step tutorial on how you can integrate a MailChimp form in your Facebook Page.
Beside that you can easily post as well every now and than the link to your MailChimp Landingpage.
Up to the 01. Feburary 2017 it was possible to integrate Twitter Lead Cards directly with MailChimp. Unfortunately Twitter has discontinued that functionality.
For now, the best way to turn twitter followers to Email Subscribers is linking occasionally to your MailChimp Signup Form or another Landingpage and using that URL as well within your Twitter Bio.
If you use Squarespace you have different options to integrate with your MailChimp Account. You can either use a Form or Newsletter Block or add a subscribe option to your checkout form.
In the next Section you will learn the differences between a Single- and Double Optin Process. It doesn't really matter for which you decide, but its worth to understand how the signup process looks like in each of them.
If you are using the build-in MailChimp Signup Forms, you are required to use a Double Optin Process. The only way to use Single Optin Process with MailChimp is through a third party integration.
Single Optin means that once a visitor has entered his email address in one of your signup forms he is automatically subscribed to your email list. No further step is required beside submitting the optin form. While this helps to grow your email list faster, it can as well effect the overall quality and responsiveness of your email subscribers.
Double Optin means that visitors have to confirm their email address before they are successfully subscribed to your email list. Basically they have to follow two steps: 1. they have to fill in their email & submit the optin form. 2. They have to go to their email programm & click on a confirmation link to validate that the email address is real and that it was really them who made the request.
MailChimp comes with a couple of default emails and pages that you should customize for your own needs. This will as well make sure that you get the most out of your Email Marketing Efforts.
You can edit all of these emails and pages within your "MailChimp Dashboard" » "Lists" » "Signup Forms" » "General Forms" Section.
Please note: If you are using a third party Integration together with a Single Optin Process you don't need the first two of these emails and pages. That's why we have marked these pages with a "Double Optin Only" tag.
The Optin Confirmation Page is shown after a visitor has submitted an optin form. This page should explain him that he is not yet successfully subscribed, but has to go to his email programm, find your confirmation email and click on the confirmation link.
The better you can explain this process, laying it out step by step, the more of your subscribers will actually confirm their email. You can even include a screenshot of your confirmation email, using this very simple Screenshot Generator:
To edit the Optin Confirmation Page choose the "Signup thank you page" from the Dropdown List on the "Signup Forms" Page.
You can check out the Examples Section to get some more inspiration.
If you would like to use a page that is hosted on your own website, you can simply copy and paste the URL of your custom Optin Confirmation Page into the field that says "Instead of showing this thank you page, send subscribers to another URL".
The Confirmation Email is sended to a subscriber once he has submitted an optin form and asks him to confirm his request by clicking on a confirmation link. Only when the visitor has clicked on the confirmation link he is successfully subscribed to your list. (Hence the Double Optin – The subscriber has to optin two times).
Choose the "Opt-in confirmation email" from the Dropdown List to edit your Confirmation Email.
A good practice for your Confirmation Email is to restate the benefits your subscriber will gain from subscribing to your email list. Remember: The subscriber is not yet successfully subscribed, so you still have to convince him with a compelling reason. Depending on your Blog Topic that can be a giveaway, a coupon code or just the valuable and helpful content you publish on a regular basis.
Make clear again that the subscribers will not receive anything if they don’t confirm their email.
If you need some inspiration here is a simple template that has worked really well for us:
Subject: Action required - Confirm your request
Hey *|FNAME|*,
You're almost done!
Before I can send you the free PDF - that will help you to grow your Blog from 0 to 1000 subscribers - you MUST verify your email.
Also, after you click the link, you'll get access to a few of my personal, private and exclusive resources.
These have been extremely helpful to growing my list and you can start using them immediately.
I can't send you anything without confirming your email right now.
Are you ready?
Just click the link below:
Click here to confirm your Email
See you inside,
This is the page people land on after they have confirmed their email address (if you use Double Optin) or after they have subscribed through a Singup Form (If you use Single Optin).
Most people actually overlook this key page, putting only a generic and boring confirmation message on it.
But I am a huge advocate of getting everything you can, out of all you’ve got.
What does that mean?
If you get 5 subscribers out of 100 visitors than that is already great. But if you can get these 5 new subscribers to share your website with their peers, you could get an additionall 2 to 3 subscribers for each 100 visitors.
Your Thank You Page is the perfect place to do that.
The simplest thing you can do is asking your new subscribers to share something valuable like a free Ebook and making it as easy as possible for them by implementing some simple share buttons, or by embedding a tweet or facebook post.
If you would like to use a page that is hosted on your own website, you can simply copy and paste the URL of your custom Thank You Page into the field that says "Instead of showing this thank you page, send subscribers to another URL".
This Email is not enabled by default, but it’s one of the first things you should set up. This email is sended after someone has been added to your email list. Meaning that if you are using Single Optin than right after he has submitted an Optin Form. If you are using Double Optin the subscriber will receive this email immediately after he has clicked on the confirmation Link within the Confirmation Email.
In this Email you should welcome your subscriber and thank him for having joined your list. A common best practice is to surprise new subscribers with something valuable, for example a list to your three most popular Blog Posts. It’s as well recommendable that you explain what kind of emails he can expect in the future from you.
The Final Welcome Email is as well the perfect opportunity to learn more about your subscribers and target group. If you know their problems and challanges, it will be easy for you to resolve them in the future with content.
This basic user research will come in as well very handy when you are thinking about creating new products and offers.
Expert Tip:Derek Halpern"When people sign up to my mailing list, they receive a »Welcome« email. In that email, after telling people exactly what to expect from their email subscription, I tell them to reply to the email and tell me what they’re struggling with right now. [It] is the PERFECT tactic for figuring out what people buy."
Derek Halpern
Campaigns are the main component of MailChimp. This is the right place to send most of your emails.
You can think of a Campaign as a one off email that is sended to your whole list or a segment of it. Such as a weekly newsletter, your latest blogpost, a black friday promotion or something similar.
Campaigns shouldn't be used for Emails that will be send out frequently or on an automated basis, such like a Welcome Sequence every subscriber gets or a 7 Day free Email Course.
There exists 4 different types of Campaign within MailChimp:
This should be the Campaign you will most use. It gives you the ability to use different templates, edit all of the email contents, edit various sending settings like the subject line or from name and email address.
A/B Testing or Split Testing is used to determine which of two competing versions works better than the other one. You can use this Campaign Type to test various variables against each other and than send the winning variation to the whole list.
Things to test include for example which subject lines, from names or sending time get a better open and click rate. Or you could test different types of content and see to which your subscribers respond better to.
Please take in mind that you shouldn't care about A/B Testing until you have at least a few thousands subscribers on your List. Before that it will be a waste of time and the results won't be meaningful.
This type of campaign is as near as possible to sending an email through your normal Email Programm like Gmail or Outlook. The emails makes no use of images, links or text formatting.
Plain text campaigns can help to improve devilarability, open and click rates for important emails. But for most use cases you should go with a regular old campaign that generates automatically a plain text version for subscribers with old email programms that can not see rich HTML Emails.
This is an exception to the rule that Campaigns are usually "one off" emails. With a RSS Campaign you can send your latest Blog Posts automatically to your Email Subscribers.
Although this is a nice feature that is easy to setup and can save you some considerable amount of time, you should think twice about using it.
Most professional Bloggers should create a specific Campaign for each new Blog Post, writing a Subject Line that is a bit different from the Headline you use on your Blog and some extra copy that will get readers to click through to your website.
We will take a look at the two most important ones, Regular old Campaigns and RSS Campaigns. A/B Testing is handled thoroughly later in this Guide.
To create a new Campaign loginto your MailChimp Dashboard and go to "Campaigns" » "Create Campaign".
Next you have to define a Name for your Campaign. This is only a descriptive name for yourself and can be changed later as well.
If this is an email you send out on a regular basis I like to add a Number to it. If it is only a one time promotion email I usually just give it the name of the promotion, such as "Black Friday Promotion".
Once you have done that click on the "Create" Button
In the next screen you can define the recipients of your Campaign.
We will see in a later section how you can segment subscribers into different interest groups or depending on variables such as merge fields.
If you are just starting out and have less than 10.000 subscribers just send your Campaign to your entire list.
In the next screen you can define your basic Campaign Settings.
Everything we really need to care about is the Subject Line, From Name and From Email Address.
The last two should already be defined by your standard MailChimp Account Settings, but you can adjust them for each campaign if you would like.
The other interesting setting is "Personalize the To Field". Enabling this setting only makes sense if you ask your subscribers additionally to their email address for their first name. It can help to improve the email deliverability and get past SPAM Filters.
To enable it just click the Checkbox and fill the Input Field with "*|FNAME|*", which will automatically fill in the Merge Field Value for each subscriber.
On the next page you can now select a Template for your Email Campaign.
This depends really on the subject and topic of your email, but a general recommendation is not to go to fancy. People love receiving emails from real people, and thats why most professional Bloggers try to make look their emails as they were personal emails. The "Basic" 1 Column Template should accomplish that (You can find it by scrolling down in the "Layouts" Tab)
If you are sending a Campaign for an E-Commerce Store or something similar, you can take a look at the other available themes and choose any one you like.
Now you will see the MailChimp Drag and Drop Campaign Builder.
This Tool makes it really easy for you to create good looking emails. If this is the first time you are using it, MailChimp will display some really useful explanations you should just follow along.
You can just drag and drop a building block from the right of the screen to your email on the left.
Once you are happy with the Content, you can change to the "Design" Tab and adjust the Settings such as Fonts and Colors for the Template you choosed.
A good idea is to save your Email as a Template so you emails look always similar and you don't have to repeat every step the next time.
Once you feel ready, you can click on "Preview and Test" within the Top Navigation.
Now you can either send yourself a Preview Email to see how it looks like in your Email Programm, or you can use the build in MailChimp Preview Feature.
If you are using Merge Tags within your Email and entered the "Preview Mode" you can click on "Enable live merge tag info" and see how an individual subscriber would see your email. This is a great way to make sure that your Merge Tags are displaying correctly.
The Final Step is actually sending the Email. MailChimp gives you a Checklist that everything is alright, but of course you should always make sure that you have tested everything yourself within the preview before.
You can send out the email immediately or plan it for some date and time in the future.
If you are planning to send an email at least 24 hours in the future, and you are on a paid account you have as well the option to send it depending on the subscribers time zone.
That simply means that if you have a subscriber in New York and one in Tokio and plan to send the email at 9:00 in the morning, both subscriber will get it at 9:00 in the morning in their time zone.
There are a lot of different techniques you can use to build your email list – going way beyond placing a simple signup form within your Blog Sidebar.
Placing only a signup form in your sidebar is actually the worst strategy.
And you will fail to reach 1000 subscribers if that's the only Strategy you are using.
So in the following I will show you a few of the proven listbuilding techniques that have worked well for ourself and others.
Just take one thing in mind:
Expert Tip:Paul Jarvis"So, how do you grow your list? One person at a time. One right person at a time using your own style. And then you start communicating with them, like a human being, and hopefully creating something they want to share with the human beings that they know."
Paul Jarvis
Whenever you think about using a particular list building technique, make sure that it's aligned with your style, your voice and your goals. It doesn't help to trick people into signing up for your email list, as your unsubscribe rates will go up and you will engagement will go down. Both things which will ultimately effect negative your delivery rates and overall Business.
Getting someone to subscribe to your email list is only the fist step in a very long relationship.
Beside that note, you can take as well a look at our continous updated list of listbuilding techniques to get some more inspiration.
As I said, having a boring Signup Form hidden at the top or bottom of your Blog Sidebar will not make a difference.
Listbuilding boils down to two things. Traffic and Conversion Rates. The more traffic you get and the more of these visitors subscribe to your email list, the faster you will grow your email list.
So you have essentially two ways to grow your list faster:
Get more traffic or Get a higher percentage of your existing traffic to subscribe.
I favor first taking care of your overall conversion rate and than increasing the traffic to your website.
Doing it the other way arround would be like filling water into a leaking bucket.
If you take care of your conversion rate first, you will double or triple the amount of email subscribers you get for each 100 visitors.
Unfortunately, most Blog Themes are multi purpose themes that try to serve everyone and don't make listbuilding a priority. Thats one of the mayor reasons why we have developed the Growtheme.
Whether or not you are already using it, these are the places where you should have a Signup Form on your Blog.
You don't need every single one of them, as that would be silly and annoying. But you should test which of these work best for your audience.
And in addition to these places here is an excellent Article form Melyissa Griffin about how to write Blog Posts that convert
Free Email Courses are a great way to grow your audience and build your expert status.
One of the reasons they work so well, is because people are naturally more inclined to give away their email address to join them. The course content is delivered via email, so you have to provide your email address if you want to receive it.
A huge benefit is as well that you can set up a couple of viral loops on your Thank You and Confirmation Page that will help you get additional participants for every subscriber.
You can take a look at the example section to see a few great landingpages and thank you pages for email courses.
With MailChimp it is a bit cumbersome to set up an automation that will send out the lessons automatically at a specific date, but it is absolutely possible. Click here to learn how.
Depending on the niche you are in, giveaways can still work pretty well to grow your Email List.
The best moment to use this tactic is when you already have a couple of hundred of subscribers, to help your Giveaway get inital traction.
Viral Giveaway works like this:
People who join your Contest have the chance to win something extremely valuable for free.
To enter the contest they have to enter their email address.
Now here is the catch:
For most giveaways it makes no sense to share it with friends or acquaintances. Because the more people join the giveaway, the lower your individual chances of winning the price.
Viral Giveaways work against this natural instinct to keep the giveaway to yourself, by giving you more entries the more you share the giveaway.
These are a couple of options to set up these kind of giveaways that integrate directly with MaiLChimp
Content Upgrades are one of the best and easiest way to grow your Email list.
Think about it:
Most Optin Forms are pretty generic.
They try to target all website visitors with the same free ressource or copy.
But you can increase your Conversion Rate significantly by individualizing the Optin Offer to the page or posts where it is displayed.
Let me give you an example:
If you are already reading a post about how to start exercising, a PDF that gives you 10 simple exercises you can do at home without any equipment will be a lot more valuable than something generic for all your website visitors.
A Content Upgrade does exactly that. You give something valuable that extents on your free Content away in exchange for an Email Address.
We have doubled and sometimes tripled our conversion rates for Blog Posts which included a Content Upgrade.
This is an advanced Listbuilding Technique and not as easy to pull of than the previous ones.
But thats as well one of the reasons why they can do incredible well.
The basic Idea is that you team up with someone else who already has a big audience and create a webinar promotion together with this person.
It is like guestposting on steroids.
Both Bryan Harris and Joseph Michaels have written extensively about how to do it.
There is one huge problem with normal websites and blog posts:
They offer to many options.
There are so many things a visitor can click on and navigate away from your optin form, that they usually not convert very well.
While a 5% conversion rate for a Blog can be pretty good, you can see on individual Landingpages conversionrates that are sometimes as high as 70%.
The reason they work so well is that they remove everything else that is not relevant to subscribing. No Navigation, no latest or popular Blog Posts, no sidebar, no irrelevant links.
All you can do is reading the Content on the Landingpage and decide if you would like to subscribe.
Whenever you control where you send traffic, you should send it to a landingpage. For example, within paid Ads or the link within your guestposts author biography.
If you use Facebook and Twitter Ads together with Landingpages or Webinars you can grow your Email List significantly in less time.
Although Prices per Click have increased significantly over the past few years, depending on the niche you are in you can still get great results.
If you have a product to sell after someone has opted in to your Email List, than this can be one of the fastest growing aquisition channel for you.
To make effective use of this strategy you have to know your numbers.
That means you should know how many of your subscribers end up becoming a customer and how much the average order value is for each customer. Than you will know the profit you can generate for each subscriber on your list.
For example: 1 out of every 20 subscribers becomes a customer and buys a product for 40$. That means that each of your subscribers is worth 2$.
Now your only goal is to get subscribers via paid advertising for less than $2 per subscriber. As long as you turn in a profit you will be paid for growing your email list.
Here is an excellent article to get you started with Facebook Ads
MailChimp only has a few bulk edit features build-in. For example: It is possible to bulk unsubscribe a huge list of subscribers all at once. But if you want to edit the custom field value for a big group of subscribers, you will have to export them first and than edit the exported .csv file yourself.
Exporting your list and editing the .csv file directly can feel a bit intimidating at first, but once you know how it works, it's actually pretty straight forward.
The Export Feature is as well helpful to save a backup of your subscribers for yourself or to move to a different email marketing provider.
Once you have finished exporting or bulk editing the exported .csv file, you can continue to import your changes.
Like most email marketing providers, MailChimp makes it really easy for you to import an existing Contact List.
All you need is a .csv or excel file. You can either upload it directly to MailChimp, deciding step by step which information you would like to import, or copy and paste them directly from excel to MailChimp.
If you have exported your list to bulk edit your subscribers than this is as way the right way to update all the subscribers you have edited.
While Most other Email Marketing Providers have moved away from a List based approach to Tags, MailChimp hasn't introduced them yet.
But that doesn't mean you can't tag subscribers based on their interest or the actions they take on your website, for example when they download a Content Upgrade.
Let's first take a look at the difference between a list based approach and interest groups.
If you maintain different lists for different interest, it means that the same person can be subscribed to multiple lists at once. In MailChimp you always pay per subscriber on each list, meaning that you would pay multiple times for one and the same person.
Beside that it can be really cumbersome to keep two different lists synced together.
Thats why its better to just have a single list, that has different interest groups for each subscriber. This way you will always only have one person with one email address, that can be subscribed to various interest groups.
It's really simple to add Subscribers into different Interest Groups.
All you have to do is adding a hidden input field to your signup forms that will add a subscriber to one of your Interest Groups.
But first we have to create a Interest Groups within our MailChimp List.
Login to your MailChimp Account, go to "Lists" and click on the name of the list you want to edit.
Next click on "Manage Contacts" » "Groups" and click on the "Create Groups" Button on the new page.
For most use cases it makes most sense to hide the Interest Groups to your subscribers and apply them automatically depending on the Signup Form.
So for now select "Don't show groups on my signup form".
Next define a Group Category for your Interest Groups. This should be the Name of the category you are dividing subscribers into. So if you want to use Interest Groups for Content Upgrades for example, it makes sense to call the Group Category "Content Upgrades". But you can use as well simply "Interests" or something similar.
The Name of each Group can than be the name of the Interest or Content Upgrade itself.
Please note that MailChimp limits the number of Interest Groups to a maximum of 60 per List. That means you can never have more than 60 different interest groups in total for your list.
Once you have created the different interest groups, you can add new subscribers to these groups through your signup forms. How to do that depends on how you have integrated the signup forms on your website.
The Growtheme for example gives you the ability to simply choose an interest group from a drop down field for each signup form. If you have build your Integration with one of the recommended services you should find the ability as well somewhere in the Settings.
If you want to work with Interest Groups I absolutely recommended to use a third party integration. The implementation of them will be otherwise lacking functionality and cumbersome.
As already said in the Listbuilding Section: Content Upgrades or "Post Specific Bonuses" are still one of the best and easiest way to grow your email list.
To deliver the downloads properly with MailChimp you will need a paid account that allows you to use Automations.
Than you can simply set up an automation that sends out your Content Upgrade when a subscribers joins an interest group. Just make sure that you have actually created Interest Groups before you create the Automation Workflow.
Once you have upgraded your Account (even the 10$ per month plan will be enough) you can head to "Automation" and click on "Add Automation".
Now you will see a whole list of different triggers that can start your Automation Workflow. You can use the search field to search for "list group". The one we need is called "Join List Group" – this will start the automation once someone joins a specific interest group. Just click on "Add Automation".
Each Content Ugprade will need its own Automation workflow, so you should give each Automation the name of the Content Upgrade. Than click on "New".
MailChimp will now populate the Automation automatically with two emails. We will only need one email to deliver the Content Upgrade, so you can delete the other one by selecting the option and typing in "DELETE".
Next we have to edit the Trigger of the Automation Email. Change the "Delay" to immediately, so the Content Upgrade gets send out directly after someone opts in through one of our Signup Forms that has the Interest Group applied. Than choose from "Settings" the Interest Group you want to send the Content Upgrade to. Once you are finished click on "Update Trigger".
Now all you have left to do is edit your email. The process is almost exactly the same as when you create a new campaign. The only thing you have to do is adding a link to your Content Upgrade within the Email. You can simply upload the Content Upgrade to your Wordpress Dashboard and copy and paste the link of it directly into the Email.
Once you are happy with your email just go back to your workflow and click on "Next". You will be taken to the "Confirm" Page where you can review the settings one last time. To start the workflow click on the blue button in the bottom right corner that says "Start workflow".
The largest advantage of an online business is that you can automate things. Scaling becomes effortless.
With our Blogs we get up to 200 new subscribers per day. Imagine if I would have to send to each and single one of them an email that contains their Content Upgrades or would try to check manually who has looked at a product and than send them a reminder email that they haven't finished the checkout process.
Thats impossible.
And thats the number 1 reason why you should make use of automation processes in your Blog and Business.
Automations allow you to scale processes that you can do manually if you are just starting out, but won't be able to repeat once you've reached a certain size.
While it can be a bit cumbersome to set up automations that especially professional Blogger need, like Content Upgrades or Email Courses, thats not the case with Automations for Online Stores. Taking a look at the amount of triggers MailChimp offers for E-Commerce Businesses you will notice that MailChimp has build a lot of its automation feature especially with them in mind.
To get started with E-Commerce Automations you will need to use one of the Following Shopping Cart Systems:
Independetly from the Shopping Cart System you use, MailChimp Automations always work the same way.
They always get started by a trigger. This is the criteria that starts an automation, such as on a specific date, if a Merge Field value changes, if someone is added to an Interest Groups or if someone has done a specific action within your E-Commerce store.
After an Automation Sequence is triggered for a specific subscriber, he than receives a single or series of email which are sended out in a variable Interval you can define.
Additionally MailChimp gives you the ability to segment each of the emails within an automation. Meaning that you can define for example to stop sending promotion emails to subscribers that already have joined the interest group "Customers".
List Fields contain additional information about a specific Subscriber on your Email List.
By default MailChimp only saves the email address, the first name and the last name information.
But you can save a lot more than that if you would like. For example if a subscriber is male or female, his country or billing address, his profession, or everything else you can think of.
The great thing about these List Fields is that you can use the information stored in them to personalize your emails and additionally have the ability to apply conditional logic to them. Meaning that you could show a paragraph of text in your email only if a subscriber has a merge field with a specific value (such as "Customer").
Please note that if you want to save information about where a subscriber is coming from, you should use Interest Groups instead. List Field only can hold one value at a time for each subscriber. Meaning that they will be overwritten if a subscriber opts-in again through a different signup form that has a new value of the list field you are trying to change.
In the past people have overcome that limitation by creating a new text merge field for each signup form, but that gets messy really fast. Additionally, Mailchimp limits you to a maximum of 30 list fields per subscriber. The only way to raise this limit to up to 80 merge fields is with a Pro Account that costs 199$ per month.
So lets se how merge tags and list fields work.
To save additional information about your subscribers, you first have to create a new list field that will hold the information.
To do so go to your MailChimp Dashboard, click on "Lists" and than click on the name of the list you want to edit. Next choose "List Fields and Merge Tags" from the "Settings" Dropdown Menu.
Once you have created a Merge Field you can than fill it with data. You can either do this manual by editing a subscriber individually, exporting, bulk editing and than importing again or by using one of the third party integrations to add a hidden field to your signup forms that gets populated once someone subscribes to your email list.
Let's take a look on how you can individualize your Emails using Merge Fields
MailChimps Merge Field logic always starts and ends with these symbols: *||*. Between the two symbols goes the name of the merge tag or the logic you want to use. If you are unsure about the name of a specific merge tag you can always go back to the list fields settings page where the name is displayed.
Let's start with a simple example you are probabbly already familiar with. Using the first name merge tag *|FNAME|* of a subscriber within your email:
Hey *|FNAME|*,
hope you are doing well.
This is just a sample email, so please don't waste more time in reading it.
Best regards,
MailChimp will replace the *|FNAME|* tag with the value for each subscriber when sending out the actual email.
But what happens if not all of your subscribers have a value for a particular merge field? For example because you only ask optional for the first name.
That's when conditional logic comes into play:
Hey*|IF:FNAME|* *|FNAME|**|END:IF|*,
hope you are doing well.
This is just a sample email, so please don't waste more time in reading it.
Cheers,
Conditional Logic always starts with *|IF:|* and ends with *|END:IF|*. So in this example MailChimp would only display the content between the two tags if the FNAME Merge Field has a saved value for a particular subscriber.
You can even extend the code, showing something different in case that the if statement is not true:
Hey*|IF:FNAME|* *|FNAME|**|ELSE:|* Friend*|END:IF|*,
hope you are doing well.
This is just a sample email, so please don't waste more time in reading it.
Cheers,
The Merge Field Logic doesn't only work with List Fields, but can be extended to a whole set of different things.
For Example: If you are sending out a normal Newsletter and want to run a promotion to non customers, you can use the Following Conditional Logic depending on the name of your groups:
Hey there,
I just wanted to share my latest Blog Post.
*|INTERESTED:Role:Customers|*Additionally: Thanks for being a Customer!*|ELSE:|*Additionally: Remember that we are running a 50% Discount Promotion on all Products until Sunday.*|END:INTERESTED|*
This is just a sample email, so please don't waste more time in reading it.
Cheers,
You can modify the *|INTERESTED:Group Category:Group Name|* Merge Tag to check if a subscriber is part of a specific Interest Group. In this Case your Interest Group Category would be named "Role" and "Customers", editing the tag so it reads *|INTERESTED:Role:Customers|*
If you are just starting out you probabbly just send emails to your whole email list.
But at some point you may want to send specific emails just to a segment of your subscribers. For example only subscribers who have bought a specific product, downloaded a specific Content Upgrade or that haven't opened or clicked any of your emails for a while.
The process of cutting your list into smaller chunks based on several conditions is called Segmenting.
Let's look at a couple of examples when this can be useful.
If you are using Content Upgrades you could send a presale email to only those subscribers who have shown interest in the same topic before by downloading a related Content Upgrade.
Or you could send a reengagement campaign to all those subscribers who haven't opened or clicked any of your emails in the past 30 days.
Segmenting works in both Campaigns and Automations and you should make use of it whenever it makes sense.
To save yourself some time you can save frequently used segments to your list, so you don't have to always configure the same filters if you want to send another email to the same segment.
But before we actually create our first Segment, you should know that here are two types of segments.
Auto Updated Segements will be updated once a subscriber fits into the criteria you have selected. These Segments are somehow dynamic as people can fall into the segment or be removed depending on the criteria you choosed.
Static Segments are like a Snapshot of your current List. They are great for Product Launches or any other activity where you want to create a snapshot of your list at a specific point of time. Subscribers that are saved to a static segment will stay in the segment even when they don't fullfill the conditions anymore.
You have the option to decide between static and auto updated segments when you save a segment to your list.
Email Deliverability means how many of your emails actually get into the inbox of your subscribers. Most Email Marketing Providers have a pretty good handle on that and try everything they can to keep constant high numbers in Email Deliverability.
This is typicall an issue you should start caring about once you get to tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers and therefore have a very high volume. It is as well way more important for people who send transactional emails (Think individualized Notifcations, Password forgot Emails or Receipts).
If you still want to look into this topic, than there are a few quick things you can do to improve your delivery rate.
First of all: It's important that you keep a healthy list. You should never buy or rent a list or import contacts from social networks that have not agreed to receive information from you. But thats only half of the equation. It's as well important to check every few months which subscribers haven't opened or clicked an email in the past 60 to 90 days and remove these subscribers from your list.
I know out of personal experience that this is very painful as you've worked hard for building your list in the first place. But sending emails to people who are not longer interested in them can cause that people who do want to receive your emails don't receive them anymore.
Next you should set up DKIM and SPF Keys. This is simply a verification method that shows Email Service Provider that you are authenticated and allowed to send from the domain you are using for your newsletters. It goes beyond the simple email verification process of MailChimp, but is worthwile if you wan't to improve your deliverability rates singificant.
To add DKIM and SPF Key to your Account, you will need access to the DNS Settings of your Domainname. You can usually find them within the Settings of your Webhoster or wherever you bought your Domainname.
Did you know that Buzzfeed, one of the largest publishers with over 20 million pageviews per month tests 20 different headlines for every single post?
They do it because there can be a 300% difference or more in Click Through Rates between different Headlines.
Meaning that a headline can decide between 300 or 900 clicks. You could get 3x as much traffic with a simple change in the Headline.
That's why a common copywriting wisdom is that the Headline is the most important piece of copy on any website.
But the same holds true for your email subject lines.
It is the number one thing you can test to improve your email open rates.
But you are not limited to only testing different subject lines. Split Testing or A/B Testing is the process of testing two different variations against each other and seeing which one performs better for a given objective.
MailChimp makes this process very easy and intuitive.
You should start testing once you have a large email list of at least 10.000 subscribers so the results are significant.
For Example: You could send two different subject lines to just 20% of your subscribers, wait for the results to roll in and than automatically send the winning variation to the rest of your subscribers.
Additionally you can test the sending time and the content of your emails.
Testing different sending times is great to get a general feel for what time of the day and which day of the week your subscribers are more likely to open and click your emails.
Testing the Content of your Emails is especially important for Sales related emails. You could check which testimonials, which story angle or which product pictures work better – resulting in more click throughs and ultimately more sales.
You should take in mind that even small gains can compound to something important over the course of a year:
Expert Tip:Peep Laja"If you increase your conversion rate 5% each month, that’s going to be an 80% lift over 12 months. That’s compounding interest. That’s just how the math works. 80% is a lot. So keep getting those small wins. It will all add up in the end."
Peep Laja
So lets take a look on how A/B Testing works within MailChimp.
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You should start testing different days and times of the week. You only have to test this once every year because it usually stays the same across your list, even if it grows.
Once you have determined the best sending time, you can try testing different from names. What works better, the name of your Business or Blog, or something more personal like your full or only first name.
Afterwards you can test on a continous basis the subject line of every important campaign you send out.
Just one more thing: Before you get to excited about the results you should make sure that you are actually testing with a big enough sample size and really understand how split testing works. 12 A/B Split Testing Mistakes I See Businesses Make All The Time by Peep Laja is a good start.
Expert Tip:David Kadavy"Running reliable tests that will give you definitive answers is hard. Meanwhile, a 300% increase on a conversion rate of 0% is still 0%. Ship the damn product. Your energy is likely better used elsewhere, and you can start testing when it actually [matters]. It’s okay to not want to be a statistics expert."
David Kadavy
An Email Course is simply a series of emails educating your subscribers that go out over a variable time frame. They are a great way to grow your email list and even to sell products with an Evergreen Product Funnel.
Within MailChimp it's easy to set up an Email Course that goes out to every new subscriber.
I will show you exactly how to do it in this section.
Just one word of caution: Unfortunately it's almost impossible to trigger an email course on a specific date and than turning it into a recurring course. Meaning that once the start date of the course is reached, it starts again each Monday for every new subscriber that joins after the course has initaly started.
Other Email Marketing Providers have that functionality build in, but to accomplish it with MailChimp we have to find a little workaround.
You will find how to accomplish it hidden at the end of this section, as it is possible – but not easy to set this up.
If you can live with the case that the email course always starts right away when a subscriber joins your list, than you can skip the complicated setup and just go ahead following these steps.
Give your Automation a meaningful name and click on "Next".
This Automation will be triggered whenever a new subscriber joins your list. If you want to start the Course on a specific date for your existing Subscribers, check out the end of this section.
Thats basically it. MailChimp will have created automatically a couple of emails that you can fill in with your own Content.
You may want to change the delay of each Email, sending it out every few days instead of one email per week. You can simply do that by clicking on "Edit Trigger" for each Email.
Click here to learn how to set up a recurring email course that starts for example every Monday
In the Internet Marketing World of Information Products, one strategy continous to work incredible well:
Product Launches.
They usually start with a sequence of educational Content that you publish to your Email List and than transition into a limited time frame where a product is available to buy.
Even if you have never heared of these type of product launches, you will most likely have already taken part in it.
Great places to learn more about it is the Blog of Bryan Harris and Jeff Walker (The inventor of the Email Product Launch Model)
In this Section we want to focus on how a traditional email based product launch can be accomplished with MailChimp.
And its actually pretty easy.
You can decide if you would like to use an automation sequence or just regular Campaign Emails. As we have seen in the Email Course Section, MailChimp makes it a bit hard to start an automation at a specific date.
Thats why we preferred keeping it simple and used pre scheduled Campaigns for our first product launch with MailChimp.
The important thing within a Product Launch is that the emails get sended out at the right time, and that you can engage as much subscribers as possible. So it makes sense to resend important emails to the subscribers who haven't opened the previous email and if you have a lot of subscribers across different time zones using MailChimps "timewarp" feature.
Beside that it is important that you segment your subscribers.
If someone has already bought your Product, you don't want to send them any more promotional emails.
It depends a bit on the Shopping Cart Integration you use on how to set this up, but in most of the integration there is the option to add customers to an interest group that you than exclude from the promotional Campaigns.
Let's see how to set up a Product Launch Step-by-Step
Before we start creating our Product Launch Campaign, we want to give subscribers the possibility to opt-out of our promotion emails, without being unsubscribed from the whole email list.
MailChimp allows us to segment subscribers based on their activity on our Website.
To do that we have to set up the "Goal Integration".
You can do that by clicking your Profile Picture » "Account" and than going to the "Integrations" Tab.
On the next Screen you have to scroll down to the "Goal" Integration and enable it.
To make this integration work properly, you will have to copy and paste the code into your website. It is important that the Code appears on all webpages of your Website. For Example in Wordpress you can accomplish that easily with the Header and Footer Code Plugin.
Once the Code is implemented on your Website, you have to create a new webpage with a unique URL like http://example.org/less-emails/ and a text that says for example: "Thank you. You will no longer receive information about this product."
This gives you the opportunity to segment subscribers who have visited that specific page and thus will no longer receive your promotional emails.
Going through this step will help lower your unsubscribe rate that is usually higher during a product launch because of the increased frequency you are sending emails during a product launch.
After we have successfully integrated our Website with "Goals", we have to create a regular Campaign for each Email we are planning to send out during our product launch.
To do that just go to "Campaigns" » "Create Campaign", give your Email a meaningful name and select "Regular" Campaign Type.
On the next screen we want to make sure that only subscribers who are not customers yet and who have not opted-out of our promotional emails will receive the campaign email.
Which conditions to use for this segmentation depends a bit on how you are marking customers within your MailChimp Account. But it is most likely by either excluding "VIPs", excluding subscribers that have a custom field with a specific value or subscribers who are members of a specific "Customers" Interest Group.
Pay attention to the "Goal Activity" Condition. This excludes subscribers who have visited any page on our website which URL contains "less-emails" and is targeting the "http://example.com/less-emails" page we have created in the previous step.
Once you have segmented your email, you can click on "Save and Exit" at the top right corner and go back to your Campaign Dashboard.
Before editing the Content of each Email, we want to replicate the Campaign we already have and add one more segmentation condition.
Most Product Launch Emails are building on top of each other. That's why you want to make sure that only subscribers who have received the first of all the promotional emails will receive as well the following ones.
This way people who have just subscribed to your email list or do so during the product launch will not receive the promotional campaigns.
Now you can simply replicate the second campaign until you have one campaign for each of your Product Launch Email and edit the content accordingly for each email.
One thing you want to add at the bottom of your emails, right before the unsubscribe link is something like the following text:
Note: Because of the long awaited launch of "PRODUCT NAME" during this week you will receive a bit more emails than normal. We want to make sure that nobody misses out on this opportunity, but if you wish to receive less emails click here.
And the link of that text should go to the "opt-out" page you created and segmented for in the previous steps. Subscribers who click on the link will not receive any more emails of your launch, but stay on your list.
Once you are finished editing your email, the only thing left to do is programming each for date and time you want to send it out.
As mentioned before: When you have a lot of subscribers in different time zones, it makes sense to use MailChimps Timewarp Feature, so each subscriber receives the email at the same time in their respective time zone.
An Evergreen Launch Funnel is basically an automated Product Launch.
But instead of manually programming the emails to get send out once or twice per year at a specific date, subscribers join the Evergreen Funnel and get an automated sequence of emails that end up in the Sell of your Product.
Setting Evergreen Funnels up with MailChimp is fairly easy. You basically just have to follow the same steps of setting up a recurring email course.
The main difference is that you want to add a few more promotional emails to the end of your "Specific Date" Automation Sequence, promoting your Product and introducing a Deadline in which it is available.
Further more you want to segment these last few promotional emails, so that subscribers who have already decided to buy won't receive more of them. Just follow the segmentation steps within the Product Launch Section.
You can not use your gmail, yahoo or hotmail email address to send emails through MailChimp. To send emails through MailChimp you will have to set up an email at your own domain.
If you don't have a custom domain name yet, you will first have to purchase one. My favorite provider for DomainNames is namecheap.com
Once you've got a domain name, you will have to setup the email address with your Webhost. Just write to the support or check out their documentation. Usually you just create an email redirect so that for example hello@growtheme.com goes to your personal email account.
Once you have done that you can verify your new email with MailChimp.
You can check out these numbers for yourself on SimilarWeb ↩
See: MailChimp Anual Report 2016 and previous anual reports ↩
Source: Mailmunch Email Marketing vs. Social Media Performance in 2016 ↩
An Autoresponder is a sequence of emails scheduled to go out automatically, for example depending on a condition or within a specific time interval. ↩
Sign up Forms are used to gather email subscribers. Its basically just an input field asking a visitor of your site for his email address. ↩
If you want to send fancy newsletter that have a lot of different sections and feel more corporate like you likely need as well a more complicated email template. If you don't know how to code, having a simple drag & drop campaign builder can help you to easily edit templates. ↩
Segmentation means that you can segment your subscribers depending on various characteristics. For example if you only want to send an email to women, or subscribers who have not opened an email in the last 14 days. ↩
A/B Testing or "Split Testing" is used to determine which of two version works better. You could for example test which subject line or which time of the day gets more email opens from your subscribers. ↩
Some Email Marketing Provider permit you to track actions your subscribers take on your website within the Software. So you could see for example if someone has visit a specific page or how often they have visited in the past 30 days. ↩
Most Email Marketing Providers don't offer a completely free version, so if you are on a tight budget this is an important consideration to take. ↩
Automation Rules permit you to execute a command or action when something specific occurs. You could for example subscribe someone to a autoresponder if he buys a specific product from you or send an email if a subscriber visits a specific page. ↩
A campaign builder works a bit like an automation rule, but it allows more complex chaining of various steps. You can chain specific conditions together and have several tracks subscribers could follow depending on the conditions. This is a highly advanced feature most users don't need. ↩
The Conversion Rate simply says the percentage of your visitors who subscribe to your email list. So if you get 3 new subscribers out of every 100 visitors, you will have a 3% conversion rate.
A Welcome Gate replaces your usual Blog Homepage for first time visitor. That means that people who click through to your Blog Homepage from a Blog Post, will see a conversion optimized Landingpage instead.
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