MailChimp is a very powerful email marketing service. They have an amazing knowledge base to help you learn how to use it or faq. Please read Getting Started if you are new. Also with a paid plan you will have access to 24/7 support. You can also take a look at these free resources/books from MailChimp to imporve your marketing skills.

Users

Read the details on MailChimp users types here.

Lists, Groups & Segments

You have a paid (or free) account based on subscribers and # of emails sent per month. At launch and then every 1-2 years after it is a good idea to reconfirm the subscribers on your contact list - so that you are paying for only active & engaged readers.

(Login) A look for your ‘lists’ area - this is where all email subscribers are managed. They can subscribe to the list directly from your website or on a mailchimp hosted form.

If you target multiple interest groups, use one list and set up multiple groups within it. When you create a campaign, you can select 1 group from your list, or all of your list to send an email to. Learn more about groups and segments here.

Groups and segments let you filter your list so that users can choose the content or frequency they would like to receive.

If you have a subscribe form embedded on your website - do not ever set up a new List! or else you will need to re-connect it to the website. A new list would only be necessary if you wanted to start a separate business or organization.

Using Templates With MailChimp

Ask Paone Creative to design/ build you preformatted (drag-n-drop) templates to use in your campaigns. You can also setup your own. Templates are used only for the layout of your campaign. They are just the building blocks - do not add the actual content that will be sent out.

You can duplicate the Master Template and then add/ remove content blocks to create more templates. Try to keep your list of templates organized and below 5 different options.

Send A Campaign With MailChimp

This is how you send out emails to subscribers! Here are general instructions on how to setup a regular-old-campaign. You will want to see the notes below on how to setup specific campaign types.

Important Notes

• Choose a group or segment to send to
• Use an existing template to start with - add or remove content blocks in the campaign editor (not in the template editor)
• Be sure to follow spam guidelines
• Once you have setup a successful campaign > replicate it for the next time you want to send a similar one (rather than starting from scratch). Then edit the content.

RSS Campaign With MailChimp

For an automated daily summary you can setup an RSS Campaign. If this is already setup on your account it will automatically keep sending to the specifications when new posts are published. To edit a live rss campaign you need to pause it (see details here).