we’re going to be talking about automated emails through MailChimp. Sounds like fun? Stayed tuned, it’s coming up next. One of the best ways that you can communicate to your email list, especially a person who’s just signed up, is with automated emails.
It’s a very unique experience that you can control the messaging to that particular person or persons when they sign up. So MailChimp does a great job of organizing that into a system that you can pretty easily follow.
So some of the examples of an email sequence in our case, that we use it for, are an onboarding system. So a person joins our association as a member, and we have a sequence of emails that they receive over a period of about three or four weeks that they get messaging that allows them to take action on certain things so that they feel comfortable and know their way around the membership website.
So that’s one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is, and I’ve seen this done, is a person, after a seven-week automated sequence, you get one email per week, at the end of the seven weeks, you get a test.
So you can use it as a self-study test exam type of situation. So those are just a couple of examples, you can use your imagination, but the key point here is that you communicate effectively to the people that are on your email list.
And once you set it, you can forget it. You might be able to, you might want to tweak it from time to time, especially if the content that you’re sharing changes or is outdated, but for the most part, it is a set it and forget it type of situation.
So, let’s dig in and set up some automated emails on MailChimp. So to create our automated emails sequence or automation emails, you got to first select the email list that you want to set this up for.
So I’m going to select this list here, and I’m going to go to Create Campaign. So I’m going to click on an email, and then from the list up here, in this horizontal list, I’m going to select Automated, and it’s going to say, what type of Automation Email do you want to create? These are things that are preselected for you.
You can certainly go in and edit these. So you can welcome new subscribers. If you have E-Commerce, you can thank first-time customers. You can enable order notifications, and I’m going to go back to Featured, and I’m going to click on Welcome new subscribers.
Going to keep the Campaign Name, Welcome message. You can change that to anything, it won’t be seen by your email list. I’m going to select my list again. Click Begin. Now you’re presented with a trigger, so it’s called a workflow recipe.
So it has a trigger and then an action. So the trigger is, one day after subscribers join your list they will get this email. And that’s fine, if you wanted to edit that, you click on the Edit next to the one day trigger, and select how many days, weeks, hours, or immediately, or trigger when subscribers are imported.
So if you’ve got people outside your mail list, and you import them in, they’ll start that sequence when they come in. But I’m going to cancel that, I want to do the one day after. So we’ve got a summary here.
We have a schedule, every day, all day. So if you wanted to only do specific days, you can edit that. You can filter by segment or tag. Now, I’ve talked about segments, I haven’t talked about tags, because that’s relatively new to MailChimp, but if you’re familiar with that, you can edit it there.
And you can do post-send action. So from here, if that’s all set and ready to go, we can click on Design Email. And again, with the name of your email, you can name it to anything you want. So I can do SMS Welcome.
My email subject is Welcome to Strategic Marketing Solutions. I really usually don’t do a preview text. The name is from Larry Snow, and it’s from a verified email domain, carry snow. me. And for Google Analytics, you definitely want to include something here, so you probably want to do SMS, Welcome, I like to do underscores, Welcome_Message.
Now at the very bottom, on the bottom-right, you want to click Next. Now you have a choice of selecting a template. So you have different layouts. Of course, if you’re familiar with MailChimp, this is second nature to you, but you have different layouts.
You can do basic one column, simple text, you can do a themed type of thing. They have a choice of some themes here that you can pick out. Or you can do saved templates, I’ve saved a few through the years, always changing things.
And you can select from one of your campaigns, which is really neat. So we’ve sent out several campaigns, and we can select from one of those. Or you could code your own. So you can import, update, import from a zip, import from a URL, or paste in the code.
I usually stick with the layouts, and it’s usually either Tell A Story or Educate. I’m going to go with Educate. And of course, you want to design it so it matches your brand, and your style, and colors, and all that, and of course, you want to share your message for whatever automated email you’re going to be sending.
I’ll just insert my logo. Alright, we have our logo in there, and we can cinch this up a little bit to give more room to text, so people don’t have to scroll that much. And we can put in some information here, something like Welcome to SMS.
I’m not going to finish this in this video, but this is just to give you an idea. So you want to say something like hello and welcome to Strategic Marketing Solutions So I won’t bore you with going into any more of the details here, but, the thing I’m trying to communicate here is that with these automated emails, you want to make sure that you’re communicating effectively and precisely so people just don’t get bored and click Delete.
One of the things that I recommend is that you put in who you are, what you’re all about, what do you do, what qualifies you to do it, why did they join this email list? Thank them for joining this email list, set the expectations of the type of emails that they will be receiving.
If you have other automated emails, let them know that they’ll be coming along in the next coming weeks, they’ll be getting a series of automated emails. And put in your contact information, everything that you can do so that they have all the answers that they need, and make sure to include, to click the ability to click reply, so they can reply to you and get their questions answered, okay? I’m not going to do any of that here, because I’d be here for an hour trying to go through all that for you, but I just want to communicate that out to you that that’s the type of content that I would put in and I would recommend for you.
So I’m going to eliminate all this stuff that we’re not going to be using. Alright. Okay, and then I’m just going to click on Save and Continue. And here’s where you can add on other emails, so if I click on Add Email, it’ll save Automation Email #2, and you can edit that.
You can also edit the trigger. So right here, it says one day after subscribers are sent the previous email, so you probably want to change that and say maybe a week, one week later they’ll get another email, it’s entirely up to you.
And then you just click on Update Trigger. And when you want to schedule it, so the same application as the first trigger, and of course you want to go in and design your email again. So I’m just going to delete that now, so we don’t get stuck with anything here, and I’m going to click on Next.
It’s going to say, ready to send, review your workflow, and I’m not going to click on Start Sending just yet. As you can tell, I’m not ready to send it to my email list, but that’s something I’ll be working on.
And if you want to subscribe to my email list, you can click on the link below in the description and fill out the form, and you’ll be on the list, and pretty soon, you’ll probably get these automated emails.