What is MailChimp?
MailChimp is an email marketing tool for small and large businesses.
With MailChimp, a person or a business can send one email to many people at one time. MailChimp is used by businesses of all sizes, non-profits, and individuals. Fortunately, if you are not sure if MailChimp is a good fit for you, MailChimp offers a Forever Free account that has most of MailChimp’s features available for use at no fee. Read more about MailChimp’s Forever Free account here.
The email that gets sent can then be monitored by the sender. Some things you can find out about an email you send through MailChimp are:
- The number of times the email was opened by each person.
- Which links inside the email were clicked.
- The number of sales and quantity of sales that were generated as a result of the email (if MailChimp is connected to an online shopping cart).
Learning what people really want from you or your organization is a large part of marketing. All of the stats mentioned above (and more that aren’t mentioned here) will allow you to grow faster because you’ll know what people respond to the most. This means you’ll find out how to be of better service to your community of readers and develop better products and services. You can’t get this sort of information when you send emails the traditional way through Gmail or Outlook.
Researching email marketing software? CLICK HERE to download a free cheat sheet comparing the top email marketing providers!
How Does MailChimp Work?
This is a high-level overview of how MailChimp works. My upcoming MailChimp tutorial articles will give you step-by-step instructions on how to set up MailChimp and use it to send email campaigns.
MailChimp is a program that you access through your web browser; it isn’t installed on your computer.
MailChimp’s foundation consists of
- Lists
- Campaigns
A MailChimp list holds the email addresses of the people who have given you permission to send them emails. The lists can be segmented based on people’s interests. For instance, my MailChimp list is broken down into groups that tell me who wants to know about MailChimp and who want to know about web design.
A MailChimp campaign is an email that is sent to a list of subscribers.
Subscribers are added to your list either by
- You importing the email addresses into your list after people have given you permission to email them.
- People signing up to your list through an online form that connects to your MailChimp list.Some places where people might access your sign-up form include on your website or a link you share in emails and on social media.I will show how to work with MailChimp’s list sign-up form in an upcoming tutorial.
MailChimp has been a critical tool in growing my audience and my business. The MailChimp tutorial series I am creating on my blog is designed to show you how to work with MailChimp, from start to finish, including some strategies I’ve used. My hope is to show you how you can grow your audience as well and get shortcuts from someone who uses MailChimp daily.
I am a booking agent for Latin music. Don’t know NOTHING s to how to work MailChip. I use traditional e mail to offer artists but I am afraid that 90% of my e mails go to the “Spam” list of the receiver. Questions:
1. how can I get a list of “subscribers?
2. how can I “import” e-mail addresses from potential subscribers?
3. How can I get people to sign up?
4. Do I need to provide a list of e-mail addresses to start a campign with mailChip?
Hi there, Eddie!
You will need email addresses within your MailChimp account to send a MailChimp campaign.
To get people to sign up to your email list, you will want to provide valuable content and tell people you will give them more valuable content if they sign up.