How to use Mailchimp to create email campaigns
What is MailChimp?
Mailchimp is a powerful marketing platform that mainly utilizes email campaigns to grow your brand or reach certain audiences.
What can I use it for?
Mailchimp can be used for many things ranging from web design, to ad creation, and even to design and send physical post cards. However Mailchimp’s main and strongest function is being able to create custom mailing groups to be used in your marketing campaign. You can even create sign-up forms and landing pages that are targeted at specific audiences to build your subscriber list.
My experience with MailChimp.
I recently worked with a large engineering company called SBSA to create a marketing campaign to help them recruit young engineers. As part of the original campaign plan, I had planned to use Mailchimp to create a mailing list aimed at college students in the area with updated job/training offers. It was eventually decided that the mailing list wouldn’t be used in our initial campaign due to the fact that it wasn’t necessary for the campaign to be successful. However I still spent time learning to use Mailchimp to create emails, sign-up forms, and mailing lists.
How do I create an email campaign?
Firstly you will need to create a contact list - From the dashboard go to audience and click view contacts.
You will be presented with this page
From here if you already have a list of contacts you want to add to Mailchimp, you can import contacts from a text document.
If you don’t have an audience yet and want to develop one, create a signup form.
Next you will need to chose the type of form you want to create
The two easiest to use are Form builder which I will explain shortly, and Embedded forms which are minimalistic and simple.
Here’s a video showcasing how easy it is to create an embedded form. All you do is put the name of your campaign in and it gives you coding that you can plug into your website.
Make sure that as you’re gaining new subscribers they are being added to a mailing group. Do this by going to Audience then clicking on the dropdown menu labeled and select Manage audience then Manage contacts. From here select Groups to create a mailing group.
Next it’s time to create a mailing campaign. The video below explains how to draft an email for a specific mailing group under a campaign name, as well as showcasing the Form builder.
This is a very quick showcase of how to draft your emails within Mailchimp. If you want a more detailed tutorial I suggest checking out Naturalvita Tutorials’ video on YouTube.
Conclusion
Although this is only one of the many things that Mailchimp is capable of, it’s definitely one of it’s most powerful components. For anyone launching a marketing campaign for your startup or business I recommend taking some time to learn Mailchimp and all that it has to offer.