Email marketing is the process of sending electronic mails to groups of people to promote one’s business. It is vastly used by small companies and retailers because it can target specific markets and is more cost-effective than the usual marketing channels, like a radio spot or a TV commercial. Through e-mail marketing, business owners can easily communicate with their present and potential customers and promote loyalty while increasing sales. To make email marketing easier, there is a software which can help you – MailChimp.
MailChimp will help you create and sort your electronic mailing lists. The software has over 12 million users sending billions of emails every day. Through MailChimp, small businesses and e-commerce retailers grow their businesses and make more money out of it.
MailChimp sends automated campaigns to help you inform, give rewards, and involve your subscribers more. When your store is connected to MailChimp, the software will be able to gather and analyze customer data and movement so that you can create personalized emails and send them to specific subscribers at the right time, automatically. Various triggers such as dates, shopping behaviors, and subscriber inactivity will start the process of sending automated campaigns to encourage subscriber proactivity. Building loyalty among proactive subscribers will help increase the company profit. Here are ten of some of the features you get out of MailChimp.
Ready-to-Use Campaign Templates and Email Designer
MailChimp has a wide selection of predesigned templates to get business owners like you, started. All you need to do is pick one, add your campaign message, and customize the template by changing its colors. With the email designer features, you will be able to design their campaign without any trouble. You can drag and drop photos and content write-ups so they will be placed where you want them to be. You will be able to edit and resize photos with the use of the Mailchimp built-in tools. Once you are done with the customized campaign, you can run a test campaign to your own mobile devices so you can see how it would look like before doing the actual distribution.
Product Recommendations
Through MailChimp’s analysis of customer data and movement, you will be able to increase your sales through a personalized way of communicating with your subscribers. Mailchimp will gather data based on the purchasing patterns of your customers. It will then be able to know the possible future purchases of your customers so you can easily recommend specific products to specific subscribers. Having items which interest the subscribers and which they can buy in just a few clicks, can increase sales significantly. You may add merge tag to your Automation workflows so you can urge subscribers to revisit your stores, and show products which are popular presently and other information relevant to the subscribers.
Merge Tags
Whenever you collect personal data from your subscribers when they signup, each information gathered will have a unique label. This is called the merge tag. Merge tags are super useful if business owners are to send, let’s say, a hundred emails to a hundred subscribers. But these emails should be personalized – to contain each and every subscriber’s name and email address. With the use of merge tags, that is going to be easy. All that is needed to is to include the right merge tag in the campaign to be sent. After that, Mailchimp will work to replace those merge tags with a stored content.
For example, if you want your campaign to greet each and every subscriber individually with their first name, you need to put the following:
Hello *|FNAME|*
Wherein *|FNAME|* is the merge tag and the whole phrase, in the individual email will look as follows, for a subscriber whose first name is Jane:
Hello Jane
There are quite a lot of merge tags in Mailchimp and it may look complicated as first but you will be amazed with its uses once you get the hang of it.
Advanced Segmentation
The Advanced Segmentation features allow business owners to communicate with their subscribers in an even more personalized way. Available in Mailchimp Pro, this feature will allow you to create more complex segments because there are more segmenting criteria available than before. Segments can be built using purchase history, website movements, and more. This will allow business owners like you to send their campaigns to target subscribers more precisely.
Distribution by Time Zone
The use of Mailchimp is for the business owners to expand their business in a global scale in seconds. That means, your target market may be living in different countries with different time zones. With the Timewarp feature, you will be able to send your campaigns during the time when your subscribers are awake. Using this feature, you will be able to set a schedule when your campaign should go out at the same time, but in different time zones.
Comparative Data Report
As a business owner, you will want to know how to improve your campaigns by gathering comparative reports so that you will be able to explore the behavior of your subscribers better. In comparing campaign results, you will be able to analyze each campaign’s performance quickly. Doing this can take a lot of time so Mailchimp has decided to include this feature so you need not to do the manual exporting and combining of all the reports. You will just have to find the campaigns whose performance you would like to see, and have these campaigns compared with the other ones.
Campaign Sharing on Social Media
Sharing campaigns across leading social networking sites is easy with MailChimp. You just have to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to Mailchimp so your campaign can be automatically posted on the said websites. You can also customize your templates with sharing merge tags. These merge tags will give the readers of the campaign the chance to share it to their friends. Tumblr and Google +1 merge tags can be used so readers will be able to share campaigns in their own blogs, and to their circles in Google+. With this feature, after sharing your campaign, you will be able to track what’s happening on the different networking sites. You can find out who are tweeting, sharing, and liking the campaign on the sites.
Email marketing is not an easy task, but when done correctly, can expand your business and increase your profit.
