Introduction to Email Marketing with MailChimp

MailChimp is Awesome

Sometimes it makes sense to send an old fashioned email to potential or current customers. So why not make it the coolest, most desirable and beautiful email ever to grace an inbox? To do this I this recommend using a service such as Mailchimp which will snazz up your email no end.

Choose the “forever free” option which allows 12,000 emails per month to 2,000 subscribers and if you want more then you can pay for extra services.

There are lots of tutorial videos on the MailChimp site and the interface is simple and intuitive. Also, the monkey likes to make jokes!

You can link up your website and they grab the colour scheme from your website as the starting point for the email template, or upload your email header image and if you opt for ‘Design Genius” the template will also come in matching colours. Maybe you want your logo to be your header – then you can choose to make the image clickable so that it brings the reader directly on to your site. Don’t worry, all the coding is done for you so all you need to do is fill in the boxes. It’s really straightforward.

Integrate Social Media

You may also want to link your Twitter and Facebook account to MailChimp so that your latest mail out gets linked to from these sites, you tick a box to opt in or out of this option as you go along.

You can also add a sign up form to your Facebook page and you can learn how to do it here. The trick is to write your form in MailChimp first and then go directly to the app page on Facebook and click on “add to my page” on the bottom left of the MailChimp Facebook page.

Customise your mail out

If you are an international business mogul then you can time the emails to be sent out at different times depending on the recipients time zone, this is for paid accounts only. There are lots of other extras available, for example “Social Pro” which layers the information on your users from Facebook and Twitter and allows you to make targeted mail-outs to your subscriber list.