Last week, we talked about the extreme return on investment that email marketing yields and the fact that it is still a powerful marketing strategy despite that some question its relevancy. Not only can email marketing make a significant impact in terms of ROI, but it is also easy to use and allows you to effortlessly target specific demographics of users. At McNutt & Partners, we use a MailChimp for email marketing to effectively help our clients communicate their brands’ messages to current and potential followers.
What is MailChimp?
You may have seen the insignia at the bottom of an email in your inbox, or perhaps you’re familiar with the chimpanzee-themed logo. MailChimp is an email service provider that is useful for bulk email initiatives like sending monthly newsletters, product updates, special offers and more.
MailChimp offers a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier allows users to have 2,000 subscribers across all lists and to send up to 12,000 emails per month. The paid tier is determined by the number of subscribers a user has, and it allows users to send unlimited emails.
Why do we use MailChimp for email marketing?
MailChimp is our email service provider of choice because it is incredibly easy to use for those who have less experience with the technical side of email; however, at the same time it provides a number of integrations with other services for our development team to use in more complex web applications. Therefore, it is a win-win for both our clients and our developers.
The service offers a host of premade templates into which you can drag and drop your own content, or you can start from scratch and create your own templates—adding text, graphics, video, etc. MailChimp also supports completely custom templates coded outside of the program for developers and other advanced users.
What are some of MailChimp’s notable features?
Automation tools
One of MailChimp’s relatively new features is its automation tools. These are available at no additional cost to paid plan subscribers. They can be used for anything from sales funnels to sending follow-up emails on purchases, to welcoming new subscribers to your lists using personalized messages that are tailored to their specific demographic.
For example, we have a client who invites users to sign up for a newsletter upon requesting information from the company. The client wanted to specifically welcome that group to the list while providing further information about their service offering and what makes it different than their competitors’.
By using MailChimp’s automation tools and gravity form features (our preferred forms package for WordPress), we were easily able to differentiate between those who only signed up for the newsletter and those who requested the product information package specifically.
Segmentation tools
MailChimp offers fairly powerful, yet easy-to-create segmentation tools, which allow users to quickly and easily create detailed segments of lists to specifically target the customers and prospects that they wish to receive their messages. Segments can be static, or they can be set up to dynamically update themselves every time you get new subscribers.
These segmentation tools are available to MailChimp’s free tier users, as are most of its other tools besides automation, making MailChimp an incredibly powerful platform for businesses with limited marketing budgets.
Detailed reporting
Statistics are available on any campaign sent using MailChimp. Users can get detailed reporting on all potential statistics including open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, etc., and can share these reports with other members of their organizations or with their clients using simple links.
One type of campaign for which MailChimp’s efficient reporting is useful is A/B testing. This campaign involves creating two different email messages and sending the first to one group and the second to another group. MailChimp will automatically collect statistics to determine which of the two versions of your messaging performed better, allowing you to better plan for future messaging.
Email list maintenance
Maintaining a clean email list is important to make sure your communications are being sent to credible leads—not spam addresses or email users who have opted out of your messaging. MailChimp auto sorts your lists and removes duplicate and bounced addresses to keep your email list clean.
MailChimp is very strict about its anti-spam policies—another reason why we use MailChimp for email marketing. It provides advanced tools to keep users’ lists clean, organized and filled with only those users interested in receiving those users’ messaging. In other words, it helps ensure your messages actually reach your end users’ inboxes instead of going to spam.
At McNutt & Partners, we choose MailChimp because it is useful for people with limited technical knowledge, but it is still customizable for more advanced users or organizations with development teams. If you are interested in getting your business set up with a MailChimp account, contact the McNutt & Partners team today at 334-521-1010, or visit our contact page.
