Getting Started with MailChimp and Email Marketing
Email marketing is the key to converting your visitors to customers.
Let’s start with a simple question. Why is email marketing worth pursuing? We’re all surrounded by a sea of options for reaching our future customers, everything from creating YouTube videos to creating a visual brand on Instagram and of course the range of traditional media from radio to television. So, why email?
Firstly, ownership. When you engage in email marketing, you are working with an audience you own and with a channel you own. This is not the case for any of the alternatives mentioned above. To examine this further, if you were to invest in Facebook advertising for a year and then felt you had grown your audience to a reasonable size and wished to throttle back on your ad spend, you would no longer be able to reach your existing followers. If you rely on monetization of YouTube videos, you could wake up one day to find that they have overhauled their advertising program and you no longer qualify or meet their standard. These nightmare scenarios do not exist in the realm of email marketing.
Great, so you’ve decided you want to work with an audience you own. Next, you may feel a pang of anxiety that you’ll miss out on the boom of social media and the traffic it could drive to your site. Well, fortunately for us email marketers, email converts readers to customers much more efficiently than other channels. A relatively recent McKinsey study shows that email converts about 40x better than either Facebook or Twitter. There are many other studies which demonstrate the superiority of email over other channels, I recommend you do some research before investing your time in any new marketing channel.
Apart from the benefits above, email affords marketers a greater ability to quantify the outcome of a campaign. This is especially true when the email drives to landing pages which correspond to the campaign and email engagement reporting is corroborated with the website usage analytics.
Why MailChimp?
MailChimp is not the only email service provider (ESP) to choose. There are many. However, MailChimp is particularly well suited for the small business owner or the new entrepreneur as they first endeavor to implement email marketing as a revenue driver for their business. Additionally, they provide free accounts for contact databases under 2000 email addresses in size, which allows for low-cost experimentation as you get started.
So, is getting setup with an ESP a challenging process? No, it isn’t. If you’re bright enough to register for a Facebook account or have figured out how to register for a business license, you’re certainly capable of setting up an account with MailChimp.
As you get started, you’ll want to wander over to their site, which is, https://mailchimp.com.
Once there, you’ll click on the soothing blue button which says “Sign Up Free”
After you click that button, you’ll be invited to enter some standard account information.
There’s nothing particularly special about the process here. You’ll be prompted to include a blend of character types to beef up your password security. We wouldn’t want anyone nefarious getting their hands on your emails now would we?
After creating an account with the form above, you’ll be prompted to verify your email address via a link they’ll send you and to verify your humanity via a standard CAPTCHA test.
You’ll then go through a form which will ask you to supply your full name, company name, physical address, and some optional selections regarding e-commerce analytics and marketing communications. Your physical address is required to comply with CAN-SPAM compliance in the US and CASL in Canada.
After completing those forms, you’ll be brought to your dashboard, which will look like this one here:
Over time, you will build lists and manage your subscribers here. You will have moments of anal-retentiveness as you watch the open rates and click rates of your emails like a crazed stock investor. And you will sleep contentedly as the sales roll in. Stay tuned for the next post in this series in which I’ll show you how to design your subscriber database and how to avoid some common mistakes people make when they first start with contact database management.
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Jonathan Escaliér is the Director of Business Development at EmailSorcery.com. In his free time, he enjoys SCUBA diving and hiking with his Aussie, Winston.
