Why should you build a mailing list with MailChimp?

At Delenta, we are extremely grateful for our lovely community of friends and famous life coaches. We love learning and hearing from industry professionals.

Our Delenta Insider Anke Herrmann - Taming the Tech Monster (Business coach & Tech Mentor) teaches us all about how to use Mailchimp with confidence and how it's integrated with Delenta. Anke works with coaches, creatives, authors, healers and other passionate solopreneurs to make sure online tech struggles won't stop them from bringing their business ideas to life.

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service that has all the marketing tools in one place to help you launch and grow your dream business. With Delenta, building your mailing list is straightforward and you can automate your marketing activities all under one roof! Our Mailchimp integration allows you to connect your Mailchimp account and easily add your clients, prospects and even your leads to your Mailchimp audience directly from Delenta.

Why should you build a mailing list?

Building a mailing list along with online coaching platforms allows you to be in control and own your list, you will be able to have a direct way of contacting your clients, prospects and leads without having to rely on social media like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Building an email list also allows you to send emails out to large groups of people in a way that would be a difficult and tedious process via Gmail or Hotmail. With an email marketing service like Mailchimp, you can also ensure that the emails you are spending time creating and sending are being received by those who want them aren’t being seen as spam.

Using a service like Mailchimp helps with deliverability and trust, making sure that your email recipients have actively signed up to receive them, can see where this email is being sent from and the reason why (they signed up to the mailing list) it also makes sure that recipients can unsubscribe at any time.

Let’s quickly cover the basics of understanding how to use Mailchimp...

The first step to understanding Mailchimp

The first step to understanding how to use Mailchimp would be understanding key terminology. Here are a few terms you should understand:

• Audience - a list of contacts, including their details, preferences and other data
• Campaign - something that is sent to your audience, this could be an email, landing page, automation or social media post
• Automation - a type of campaign with one or more emails, that have been set up and runs automatically. It is defined by particular triggers such as actions, events or dates for example an individual inputting their information into a sign-up form and subscribing to your mailing list can trigger a welcome email.
• Signup form - a form people submit their name and email address to be added to your list in return for a lead magnet,
• Lead magnet - a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details, it can be anything from a pdf to a checklist or access to a video
• Landing page - a web page with only one action to take, this is usually submitting their information into a sign-up form in return for a lead magnet.

Mailchimp has a glossary with their commonly used marketing terms which you can check out here, so you can understand other terms and jargon. It’ll also help you recognise and make the most of their features.

Getting Set Up

Getting set up and ready to use Mailchimp can be pretty simple as long as you don’t skip through the settings.

Be sure to include your contact information, memberships in any association for coaching and include an address as this will be shown at the bottom of the emails you send.

You’ll also need to verify your account and answer security questions to protect your account.

Creating a mailing list

There are different ways to create a mailing list, the most common being via a signup form or landing page where individuals submit their name and email. Whilst creating your mailing list you can also add individuals by importing their information via a CSV file.

When building your mailing list it is preferred that individuals sign up themselves and confirm they would like to be included to receive emails and other content.  

When individuals sign up for your mailing list, they may be asked to confirm this action in order to be added to the list. This is referred to as double opt-in and this method is beneficial for ensuring the email address used is valid, that those who sign up genuinely want to receive promotional emails and are interested in your business. It is also good practice to ensure you adhere to regulations in particular countries or markets.

With Mailchimp, you can choose the opt-in settings you want to use, which can be different if you have multiple audiences (eg: Signup forms, life coach directory, different types of consultant, etc).

You can also build your mailing list with integrations. Mailchimp has many apps and service integrations available and it is also an integration on various platforms and online applications.

Like mentioned above, Delenta’s Mailchimp integration allows you to easily build your mailing list with your clients, prospects and leads from Delenta’s My Contact area.

Organising your audience

Organising your audience is important. With Mailchimp, you can segment your audience based on various factors like interests and activity. You can tailor your emails so that you are sending relevant emails to the right individuals, keeping your audience interested and subscribed for longer.

Your audience can also be organised using groups, segments and tags to label your contacts. When sending your campaigns you can then use these as filters to send only to particular individuals in your audience.

Here is a guide for best practices for Audiences in Mailchimp.

Campaigns

Now you have your mailing list and have organised your contacts the next step would be to send out your emails, newsletters and other marketing content.

There are different types of campaigns:

• Standard: which are the write and send now
• Scheduled: which is in the name, write now but send at a later scheduled date
• Automation: this can be a single welcome email or multiple emails. Automated campaigns are those you set up once and run automatically depending on triggers. The triggers can be an event, time or action.
  

When creating your emails you can use templates and make your emails personal using merge tags.

Merge tags are unique identifiers that correspond to the data and information collected from your audience. When you use a merge tag in a campaign, the tag is replaced with the stored content such as the individual's first name.

You can find a cheat sheet for merge tags here.

Tracking & reporting

Reports in Mailchimp allows you to get to know your audience by providing detailed information on your contacts activity with your campaigns.

With open rates and click-through rates, you can receive statistics on the number of people who opened an email and how many clicked on a link in an email. This can help you understand which type of content resonates well with your audience. You’ll also be able to see who your most engaged and active contacts are and monitor your growth.

You can learn more about Mailchimp reports here

Watch the full episode to learn more about how to use Mailchimp confidently

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