Growing Your Email list with MailChimp?
So, you’ve been growing an email list for your business — that’s great!
Building an email list is a keyway to connect your business with a targeted audience of interested followers and potential customers, with whom you can share information about your products and services via email marketing.
The first step in effective email marketing is, of course, creating your email list and encouraging “the right” people to sign up for it.
It’s helpful to encourage email sign-ups with a special opt-in gift also known as a freebie or lead magnet, gifts for growing your mailing list! or with an interactive quiz relevant to your audience’s interests — these help to target people who are interested in your specific content and business services.
The second (and equally important!) step in growing your email list is to engage it. That means sending reasonably regular content of value to your readers.
I’ll refer to these regular messages as ‘newsletters’, but you can think of them as ‘updates’, ‘emails’, ‘notes’, or whatever makes sense for your business purposes and the relationship you’ll be cultivating with your email subscribers.
Benefits of sending regular email newsletters to your mailing list.
Sending regular, quality communication to your email list helps to keep them informed and engaged with your business and the content you create.
For example, your email newsletter can help to:
provide educational content relevant to your audience
establish your business and brand as an industry expert
share important updates about your business, products, or services
provide examples of relevant content your audience will enjoy or may have missed (such as previous popular blog posts)
share reminders about the products or services you offer and how to access them
let your readers know how to get in touch with you (or engage with your business in additional ways if they’re interested)
further establish your brand personality
share special offers exclusive to your list
And the list goes on! Your newsletter is an opportunity to incorporate whichever of these strategies is beneficial for your business.
The best email marketing tools for small business owners.
While there are many, many email marketing platforms out there to choose from, Mailchimp is one of the tools I most often recommend to the small business owners and entrepreneurs, and here’s why:
it integrates seamlessly with your Squarespace website (which, as you may know is our bag) allowing you to easily collect email addresses on your website and send them directly into your Mailchimp list(s)
its simple drag-and-drop editing interface is easy to learn and use
it offers a wide range of email templates that can be branded to match your business’ needs and create a seamless user experience
it offers a free plan for your first 2,000 subscribers (yay!).
Whichever email marketing platform you choose, you can apply the same principles.
How Does MailChimp Work?
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, our 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:
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.
MailChimp has been a critical tool in growing our audience and our business and is easy to use. We highly recommend.
