Let’s start here: what not to touch.
When you log in to your Mailchimp dashboard, you’ll see a few tabs at the top: Campaigns, Templates, Lists (or Audience), Reports, and File Manager.
We’ll focus on the Campaigns tab, but first – if you click on the Templates page, stop right there.
We recommend navigating to the Templates tab only if you want to download a backup copy of your template, just in case (select Templates, click the
Back to Campaigns
Click Campaigns > Create Campaign > Email > Regular (we recommend starting with regular emails at first, then experimenting with A/B testing & automations when you’re more comfortable in Mailchimp) > Enter the Campaign Name. The Campaign Name will be for your team’s internal reference. Your subscriber list will never see this, but make the name descriptive to quickly find it later.
Complete your email checklist.
On the next screen, you’ll see a list of items to setup your email campaign. Start from the top: Click “Add Recipients” to the right of the first section, “To.”
Select the list you’re going to send the emails to. Mailchimp prefers you have your audience all on one list (with optional groups and tags for segmentation if you like) this prevents duplicate email addresses and having to make multiple campaigns to send an email to your whole audience.
Personalize who you’re sending the email to.
Next, if you collect First Name data for your list we recommend selecting the “Personalize the “To” field” with the *|FNAME|* Merge Tag.
Instead of sending an email to evan@luckyredpixel.com, Mailchimp will customize this field to pull “Evan” if the first name is included in the list, which looks a lot better from the customer’s standpoint.
Send the email from your business or from a person within your company.
Your From Name and Email Address may automatically be filled in automatically, you can update these defaults in your list settings or you can easily change this by clicking “Edit From” and adjusting each field.
We recommend sending from a business name, such as “LuckyRedPixel,” or a person, such as “Evan at LuckyRedPixel.” You can test your From Name with A/B Testing to see which performs better with customer open rates.
Customers need to reply to a person. No one likes a “no reply” address.
Since your From Name and Address will be coming from a business or a person, your reply address should also reflect that, it doesn’t have to be your personal email address, but do make the Reply Name and Address something friendly, such as hello@yourcompany.com or name@yourcompany.com.
Don’t use a noreply@yourcompany.com email address (unless your legal team is particularly insistent on it, financial services for instance) a real, monitored email address is much more welcoming. Customers need an inbox to send their questions to, so make it easy for them to respond to the email.
The Most Important Part™ brainstorm a strong subject line for higher open rates.
Since the majority of your subscribers won’t be opening any given email, the largest lever you can pull to engage them is the subject line. The rule of thumb we recommend is: if it takes you 2-3 hours to put together the content of your email, spend at least that much time thinking about a subject line. Most people will just write whatever comes to their mind first, don’t do that!
Write down at least 10, or even up to 20 subject line ideas. Test them out internally, which ones make people smile, generate curiosity, or otherwise stand out? Consider this: if you received this email, would you open this? Think about your audience, who will see this email in their inbox, and what they’re looking for.
Don’t be afraid to use emojis.
Something that is criminally underused are the emojis. Yes, there are the standard goofy faces if you’re into that, but there are also animals, business icons, abstract icons and more. Check out the emojis to select one or a few that best suit your business. For example, if you want to celebrate a new season of sales, use the leaf emoji with a dollar emoji. “Fall into savings with these deals.”
This is another opportunity to use A/B Testing to determine which subject lines perform best in terms of using emojis, the subject length, and description.
Remember to add preview text.
If your subject line is the Headline of your email, think of the preview text as the subheading. Many email clients will automatically display the first sentence or so of the body content, before your email is even opened.
Don’t let subscribers see a message such as “View in Browser,” “Images not showing up?” or even the “Unsubscribe” before they even open the email. Enter preview text to further entice subscribers to open the email.
Schedule your email campaign.
Select Design Email > Saved Templates > Double-click the template you want to use. Mailchimp will open the Campaign Builder in the next screen.
Send yourself a test email to check out the email layout and links. Once everything looks good to go, return to the Campaign Builder page and select Save & Close in the bottom right corner of the page.
Finally, click “Schedule” in the top right corner of the next page. Select a date and time to send the email campaign.
Don’t send the email right away. Schedule the email to deploy first thing in the morning, between 5 and 6 a.m., or right before lunch around 11 a.m. for greater email engagement.
Congrats! You’ve successfully scheduled your email campaign.
Next: Working with your template & Designing a great email!