Mailchimp is a platform for email marketing and marketing automations. Mailchimp is widely used to send simple newsletters and is very user-friendly. Recently, Mailchimp has also added more options to create journeys and thus automate emails.
Mailchimp is known for its ease of use and sending emails. If we look at creating an e-mail within Mailchimp, it is quite easy. They have a large template library that you can use for inspiration. They have emails in here for most situations: Weekly newsletter, Invitation, new product launch, thank you, discount code email, welcome, upcoming events and much more.
Mailchimp journeys are actually the automated emails that are sent based on a trigger point. This can be a certain type of action such as leaving the shopping cart, signing up for the newsletter or placing an order. Here Mailchimp also has a large library of so-called pre-built journeys. They have divided these Journeys into some major topics such as: E-commerce, Events, Feedback, General, Order Confirmation, Special Dates, Split test and Audience Management. Within these categories you will find quite a few pre-built journeys. This is where Mailchimp has been expanding a lot lately and this can be very easy if you are not yet very experienced in the world of email marketing.
Do you have a WordPress site and want to link your Mailchimp account to WordPress? You can! You can do that with a WordPress plugin called Mailchimp for WordPress (MC4WP). Go to your WordPress site and click on Plugins, click here on new plugin and search for: MC4WP.
Click “Activate Now” on the first plugin (MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress) and follow the steps provided to properly install Mailchimp with your WordPress website. Don’t forget to activate the plugin after downloading!
If you have Mailchimp linked to your WordPress site then you can add a block in the WordPress Editor. This block is called “Mailchimp” and looks like this:
Next, you can adjust the signup form settings in the Mailchimp block. Here you can adjust the following things:
Most people have a WordPress.org website, the difference here is in the hosting. If you host your website yourself, then you most likely have a WordPress.org website. How to add a sign-up form to your WordPress website?
Mailchimp allows you to create signup forms in many ways. You’ll find those under “Audience” and then “signup forms. There you get four different choices for collecting email addresses.
This allows you to craft your own form in Mailchimp. This form gets its own web address (URL) and you can send people to it to sign up for your newsletter.
This creates a subscription form that you place on your own site with HTML code. You design your form, copy the code and paste it where you want it. Make sure you really put the code as code and not as plain text.
Subscriber Pop-up This option allows you to create a pop-up that appears on your website when and how you want it to. But then you have to have linked your website to Mailchimp first.
This is a form that allows people to contact you. However, you can add a sign up option to it so that people can sign up right away.
Mailchimp also works with other parties that sometimes offer even more options. For example, if you want a very specific sign-up form, such a third party may have exactly what you are looking for.
Do you have a WooCommerce store on your website? By following the steps indicated when installing the plugin, you will automatically connect your WooCommerce store with Mailchimp. Then the email marketing party can really begin.
To make sure your data is synchronized you can go to settings and click on “complete the data sync process”, this will ensure that all your data ends up in Mailchimp. You can then use this data to send marketing emails such as product recommendations, shopping cart abandonment and order confirmations.
To check this, you can go to the contact that last placed an order and subscribed to your newsletter. If you see this person’s WooCommerce information such as what products were purchased and when the order was placed, then the installation is successful.
A/B testing is the perfect way to continually optimize your campaigns and get the maximum results from your email marketing. But how to do an A/B test in Mailchimp? First, you click on “create campaign” and then under the heading “Email” you will see the following.
Next, give your A/B test a clear name so you immediately know what the test target is. Then click on the desired audience for the test. In the next step, you can set the distribution.
When running an A/B test, you must first specify exactly what you want to test, what outcome is most important and what distribution you want to use. I recommend using a 50/50 split because that is when the results are most measurable.
Think carefully about the “Winning combination.” For example, if you changed your “Call to Action” (CTA) as a test, it doesn’t make sense to use the “open rate” as a measure. The ‘open rate’ is not related to the CTA because recipients have not yet seen it. For this test, you need to measure the ‘click rate’ since the CTA affects that. If you are testing the subject line of your email, then ‘open rate’ is relevant. Make sure you pay close attention to this or your results won’t be reliable.
Next, design two different emails and set them up as you normally do with a campaign.
Note: try not to change three things at once in an A/B test, or you won’t know which factor actually makes the difference. Always adjust only one element relative to the other test.
There are a lot of alternatives in the market that you can consider instead of Mailchimp. But the most important question is therefore what exactly do you want to do with your email marketing. If you have any questions about this, of course I am happy to help you and you can feel free to send me a message. I will outline some alternatives and situations. Maybe you recognize yourself in one of the following situations and you can rely on my advice.
Situation 1: You have just started as a freelancer and want to send out an occasional email, let’s say 1x a month. You still have a small list of less than 500 people and don’t have a webshop. This is the situation where Mailchimp can be interesting for you. You can use the user-friendly system of Mailchimp and the free plan. This allows you to quietly build your list and learn the basics of email marketing.
Situation 2: You have an online store running on WooCommerce or Shopify and want to make the right choice in email marketing software. Then I recommend that you consider nothing more and go for Klaviyo. Klaviyo is currently one of the strongest email marketing software in the world and they have a free starter plan. This allows you to take advantage of a tremendously powerful system without paying a lot.
Situation 3: Say you run a B2B company and you are looking for a powerful email marketing platform where you can easily create customer segments, send automated emails and use a convenient internal CRM system. Then I would recommend ActiveCampaign to you. With ActiveCampaign, you can go big with email marketing thanks to the robust system they offer. With versatile options to segment, personalize and automate, it is the ideal platform for larger B2B companies looking to leverage email marketing as a sales funnel.
Now if you don’t fit into any of these situations, send me a message with your situation and I’ll recommend a suitable software.