In this article I want to show what you can do with a free email marketing platform that’s smart and considers all your other engagement activity.

MailChimp is based on the three main tasks of email marketing: manage subscriber lists, build email campaigns, and monitor activity. The impact of the emails should be about engagement.

MailChimp can be used for news distribution, and a more practical use is to feature content you have developed for your social platforms, ensuring your audience won’t miss what you’ve got to say, directly to their inbox. Further down I also include 10 steps to RSS feed emails.

For small businesses with small lists, MailChimp is free to use, but if you go beyond 2,000 subscribers, there is a payment plan, which is value.

MailChimp is customizable and its easy-to-use interface is great for changing and adding content. You can also remove the MailChimp logo from the bottom of the email.

Subscriber lists

You may have databases on other platforms or Excel sheets. Gone are the days when you need to spend time manually updating information; nowadays, subscribers do it themselves.

ploading from a CSV file is made simple as long as your columns are consistent e.g. name, surname, email. You can export from another platform and import straight into MailChimp. The platform can manage lists as simple or as complicated as you like, it depends on your needs.

MailChimp is also available as a plugin and widget for Wordpress, which means you can get people to sign up directly through your website, very easily.

So now your lists are set up and there’s easy sign-ups signposted, you’re ready to think about the design and content and timing of the email.

The basic steps for manually designing, automated or RSS feed emails are:

  1. Send a campaign
  2. Choose which type of campaign to send (see below image)
  3. Choose which list to send it to
  4. Set up – name the campaign and complete information about the visible subject and name of sender. Here you also have the opportunity to connect to Twitter and Facebook accounts and attach Google Analytics link tracking
  5. Then you go on to choose a template for the layout and start adding content

Email campaigns: manual by design

Your design will depend on your content, for example if you intend to include several stories or just one piece of information. It’s always recommended you keep copy to a minimum, include an image where possible and link through to a web page with further information such as a blog post or a news page.

Emails should be kept to four or five points maximum and the content should be relevant and shareable.

You can create a template in MailChimp, which means you can use this every time you come to design an email campaign. This is a good thing to set up from the start if you’re going to send the same style and design of email every time.

If you’re not, you can always replicate an email that you’ve already sent and write over the copy, adding in copy and images or taking away to suit.

Email campaigns: RSS feeds

Using RSS feeds to populate your email is a smart move as it automatically pulls content from your blog; you can also pick the frequency for sending emails. 10 easy steps to follow below:

  1. Create a new list
  2. Click Create Campaign from the Dashboard.
  3. Choose RSS-Driven Campaign.
  4. Put in your RSS feed URL. If you want to combine multiple RSS feeds into your emails (as in you have more than one blog), combine your feeds with ChimpFeedr.
  5. Most WordPress blogs have a feed URL of http://yourdomainhere.com/feed.
  6. Select the frequency you want your emails to send, the days of the week you want them to go out on, and the time of day you want them to send.
  7. Choose the list you created (on the next screen) as the list your blog posts will be sent to.
  8. Name your campaign (only you will see this), then decide the Email subject your recipients will see, along with other details such as your name.
  9. Choose a MailChimp theme, select a template, go with a basic layout, or code your own design to control how the RSS emails will appear.
  10. Design your email as normal, but make sure to include the RSS Items block in your email so that your most recent posts will be placed in the email.

Monitoring/reports

MailChimp’s reports take the hard work out of monitoring and reporting. It generates reports on the campaigns you send and it goes into detail about who has clicked what links and even gives star ratings to the campaigns, lists and subscribers.