How to Use MailChimp to Enrich Your Email Marketing Strategies

Email marketing has been recognized as a low-cost and useful way to promote business, with which you can send emails to customers and that has included the information about certain products. In this way, it is easy to arouse people’s interest and let them focus on your website.

Maybe now, you have tried many email marketing strategies to make a kill in the market and wish to get better results. In this post, we would like to introduce an effective way to achieve the goal, namely, enrich your email marketing strategies by using MailChimp.

What Is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a great email marketing manager and has been trusted by over 7 million businesses worldwide since 2001. The developers of MailChimp make every effort to create various products so as to help users reach the target easily. Once getting started to use this tool, there are numerous advanced features available for you, such as subscriber profiles, Workflows, Send Time Optimization, Email Genome Project, and so on.

In addition, MailChimp empowers Email Designer to customers and enable flexible email design. Besides, a suite of applications are designed for easier email edit and management, including MailChimp Editor, Chimpadeedoo, MailChimp Mobile, etc. Having given you a rough idea about MailChimp, we are going to let you know how to make full use of this powerful tool.

How to Use MailChimp?

MailChimp for WordPress is the plugin used to enable MailChimp on your website, which can be installed and activated via WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Add New. Once completing the installation, you are required to go to Dashboard > MailChimp for WordPress > MailChimp Settings. Click “Get you API key here” to sign up an account on MailChimp and get an API key.

If you have had a MailChimp account, you just need to log in with username and password. If not, you should create an account at first. Go to the sign up page and fill out your email, username and password. Click Create My Account button to confirm all information.

Once turning to the next page, you are required to go to your email box and check if there is an email from MailChimp. If so, click Activate Account and take your account into effect. Note that, the “getting started guide” includes various useful tips that help you move forward smoothly.

And now, you need to fill out the specific phrase correctly and click Confirm Signup button. Later, you will come to the “Let’s Get Started” page that asks you to make out your personal information including first name, last name and email address as well as the organization information. Make sure that all details are real and effective. Click the “Save and Get Started” button to access to the next page.

You have successfully signed up an account and come to MailChimp dashboard. This is where to import your list, create a campaign, create a list, and do something more to promote the email marketing. If you wish to make certain how to make full use of those functions, you can refer to the “Read our Guide”. Besides, the following guide can also make a big difference.

Go back to your WordPress Dashboard > MailChimp for WordPress and click the “Get your API key here” again. This time, you come to a page that asks you to create an API key. Comply with the prompt and then you will get your API key under the “Your API Key” section.

Copy and paste it to the MailChimp API Key filed on your website backend. Click Save Changes. And then, you will find that the MailChimp API Settings has been connected. That is to say, your website has been integrated with MailChimp successfully.

Log into the MailChimp Dashboard and let’s get started to make a good of those options. First of all, you need to import your list where stores all subscribers’ contact information. Fill out the information as required.

• “List name” should be an appropriate name that will be seen by subscribers. For example, “xxx company newsletter” is a good option.
• “Default ‘from’ email” should be an email address that visitors can reply to.
• “Default ‘from’ name” indicates who your email comes from, which should be easy to recognize and lets people know who you are at the first glance.
• “Remind people how they got on your list” is where to write a reminder that will be sent to the subscribers included in the email list.

Besides, you are also allowed to modify your contact information and determine which kind of notifications need to be sent to you. Lastly, click “Create List And Go To Import” and go to the account verification page that asks you to enter your mobile phone. Click Verify button and enter the verification code you have received just now.

You should select the way to import subscribers. Here, we pitch on Copy/Paste from Excel. And then click “Import List button”. From now on, you can add more subscribers to the list or export someone who will no longer receive your email.

The second option on the dashboard is “Create and Send a Campaign”. Click the “Create A Campaign” button and determine whether to receive the email to yourself or send it to the subscriber list. And now, you are in the Campaign Info page that requires you to fill out campaign name, email subject, from name and from email address.
Fill in each blank carefully and check the needed options under Tracking, Social Media and More Options. Click “Next” on the bottom right corner and go to the next page.

Select a template from various options. Here, we pitch on the 1 Column template and access to an interface available for email customization. There are three blocks existing in the left column by default. If you wish to add something more to this place, you just need to drag and drop the given blocks to the left column, including Footer, Code, Social Share, and so on.

Once you move the mouse onto a block, you can move, edit, duplicate or delete this block as you want. Edit the block and then click Save & Close button. After completing the customization, you should click the “Next” button.

This is where to confirm all settings that you have modified just now. To check if there is something wrong with the information, if not, you are required to click Send button.

And then, all subscribers included in the email list will receive your email.

Go back to WordPress Dashboard > MailChimp for WordPress where shows you the latest MailChimp list clearly.

Maybe now, you have successfully sent out the first email and wish to know if there are more customizable settings available for you. The main options of MailChimp for WordPress are Checkboxes, Forms and Upgrade to Pro.

• Checkboxes – This is where to enable or disable sign-up checkboxes and determine which forms should be used to include the checkboxes.
• Forms – This is where to allow sign-up form on certain pages or posts. Once settling down all settings, you need to copy and paste the given shortcode to a page/post that will include sign-up forms.
• Upgrade to Pro – This is where to upgrade the existing plugin version to an advanced one.

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