Mail Chimp Email Marketing, Part Two

After setting up my MailChimp account I thought it would be a good idea to use it. The first thing to do would be to ensure my contact list was up to date. I’d input a couple of names as a test but had a few more listed in Outlook.

Unfortunately you can’t import a .CSV document to MailChimp so I had a couple of hoops to jump through first. I exported my list as a .CSV and then opened in Excel. This gave me a lot of extra data I didn’t need so I had to make some adjustments. All MailChimp wants is (in this order) email, first name, last name, website. Obviously ‘website’ isn’t that important an option but the email address certainly is.

Once I’d messed around in Excel setting everything up I had to save as a tab delimited file (basically a .txt). That done I could import to MailChimp. All went fairly well apart from 6 addresses. When I checked why it was because they were ‘enquiries@’ or ‘info@’. It was a bit of a pain but I input them manually and all was well in the MailChimp world. MailChimp even picked up a duplicate that I had forgotten I’d already set up in their list.

I then proceeded to send out my first campaign. I could have used one of their templates or copied & pasted html code but I chose to import from url. This meant that I could keep copies of my newsletter stored on my site and point links to them – gives me another option for visitors to be able to view them.

All I did for my newsletter was strip down the html/CSS I use on my website and use that template as a basis for the newsletter. I wanted something that still gave a flavour of my website but in a sparser format more suitable for email.

Once you have set everything up you can sneak a preview or send a test to your own email to view it and tweak it before sending out to your subscriber list. Again, there’s plenty of help links to make sure you get the best experience from the service. As an added bonus, once everything’s sent out you can post your newsletter to various social networks to get the message out to even more people (and hopefully pick up some new subscribers). I sent mine to my Twitter account and it worked great.