Email Marketing With Mailchimp: Blogging, Branding, & Content Writing on Mailchimp

1. Why Use Mailchimp?: 200 billion. That's how many emails are sent every day. And to tap into what continues to be the best way to reach out to customers, all you need is the right tool. And that's Mailchimp, the number one email marketing platform in the world. My name is Adam Taylor, and I've used Mailchimp for over half a decade to build an email list, market to it, and grow my agency. It was the same agency that took me from a Broke college student to a six figure business owner. And in this course, I'm going to teach you exactly how to do the same. We'll start with the absolute basics. Setting up your Mailchimp account the right way understanding your audience and making sure your first campaigns actually get opened. Then we'll dive deep into writing emails that get results, subject lines that get clicked, and body copy that drives action, even if you're not a professional writer. I'll also walk you through building powerful automations, customer journeys, welcome sequences, SMS follow ups, and more. Also you can market on autopilot while you sleep. We'll explore how to personalize your emails to an extreme level. Use Mailchimp's AI to boost your conversion rates and analyze custom reports to keep improving. If you don't have an audience yet, no problem. I'll show you how to build beautiful landing pages with MailChimp, set up lead magnets like quizzes and eBooks and drive traffic from blogs, SEO, YouTube, and even Facebook ads. Of this integrated with Mailchimp. By the end of this course, you'll know exactly how to squeeze the juices out of Mailchimp. Simply the most powerful email marketing software available. Email marketing changed the way that I do business forever. Now it's your turn. Take action and join the course right now. 2. Pick the Right Mailchimp Plan for You: Now before we actually get into the software, I think right now, it's important to go ahead and cover all the different plans that we can use because there's two situations that we really don't want. First, we don't want to be spending too little on the software. When if we spend more, it can be returning us much more revenue. And on the other hand, we don't want to spend too much on a certain pricing plan when we really don't need everything that is kind of within that pricing plan, and something that is a little bit more basic, let's say, an essential or even a free plan will do the job Okay, so now the first one maybe what's going to be most appealing when we're looking at it just on the surface level. Let's go over this free plan right here. So, the free plan, obviously, because we're not going to be paying for it, it's not going to have all the kind of bells and whistles and all the features that we'll get with the more expensive plans. But the simple free plan might be all that you need because at the end of the day, it still does a good amount. First off, with this free plan to maintain it and to keep it something that's going to be free for us, we first have to make sure that we are going to be sending under 1,000 email. So if you know that your 1,000 monthly cents is going to be something that is in no way going to work for you, then a free plan is immediately going to be cut out of course, there's going to be so much that you don't get within this free plan, but I'm not going to be covering all of that because I'll be covering it when we're looking at these essentials and standard about what you get as opposed to speaking about what you don't get here with this free plan. So, the first thing I mentioned, we have to have it with 1,000 monthly cents. So you have to stay under that. Secondly, right here, we have our so, this means how many users are able to access your account. So if you have a larger team and you have multiple people wanting to actually get in and look at your Mailchimp automations or emails that you're sending, then having one seat isn't going to work for you. But if you're one individual and it's just you and you have a kind of smaller business, a smaller setup, then this will be fine. Audiences here, no matter if we're looking at the free essentials or standard, one audience is going to be fine because when we're going to be in the actual software, we're always going to work with one audience. And if you want to have a bunch of different segments within your audience, then we can do that with groups and tags. But it's just going to be a best practice to always stay within one audience, and I'll go over that a little bit more later. So next we have our contact count. So as you can see, this is 500 contacts. So with this 500 contacts and we see our monthly sunlimit being 1,000, that means that you could send maximum two emails to all of your 500 contacts. So again, just keep in mind, if this isn't something that's going to work for you, then you can kind of just disregard this free. Now, as we move on, we get to see customer support differences. So your email support only within your first 30 days of having your account, this one really is going to depend. Sometimes you're going to need this email support, sometimes you're not, but for the most part, it is, I would recommend going with your essential or standard plan just to be getting this support because you don't know how valuable it could come into you in the future. If we're going down to our email marketing and design, a lot of this we do get within our free plan, but there are some stuff that we don't get. For example, our Mailchimp branding. So Mailchimp is going to be branded on all of the emails that we sent with a free plan. And another big downside here is going to be our scheduling. So we can't schedule emails to send out later. We have to send them in the moment that we are creating. So I could go ahead and keep going over all of this in the free plan, but I don't want to waste your basically, if you want to use a free plan, this is going to work best for you if you have something super small going on, and you know that you're not trying to use Mailchimp to kind of maximize your ROI. You're kind of just using it to send out occasional emails to your small base. So for example, if you have a small newsletter, you could use Mailchimp. If you're going to be going ahead and typing up your newsletter every so often, let's say you send one out every week and you have less than 500 people on your newsletter, you could use Mailchimp, and you don't really need to pay for anything because if you're not trying to yet again, maximize your revenue from your newsletter, and you're kind of just doing it as a side gig or a hobby or whatever, then a free plan will be fine for you. Now it's time to move on to our essentials and standard plans. Okay, so as we see with these plans, we have it start at 20 and $13 per month. But if we look here, we see that overages apply. So what are overages? Well, an overage can be charged to our account if we're going to be sending out more emails than our original plan allows us for. So for example, right now, as you can see right here, it's asking me, how many contacts do I have? If I have 500, then this $13 per month and $20 per month is going to stay basically the same. But say I were to increase this to 5,000. Then it's going to adjust the prices based on this. So these are essentially where the overages come from. I come from your contacts that you have and the amount of emails that you're going to be sending. So this is something to kind of just keep in mind with your own business kind of in context. So if you're going to be having 5,000 contacts and 5,000 people you're gonna be sending out emails to, just know that you're going to be paying around $75 per month or $100 per month for your standard plan. Now, if I were to put this up to say 20,000, we could see how that changes. But for now, let's go ahead and stick at the basic $500. So, if we go down, we can see small differences between the essentials and standard. For the first thing that we see here, we have our monthly email sent. So we have 5,000 with an essential plan and then 6,000 with a standard. With their SMS marketing, so marketing through text messages, we have to see that an MMS add on is added to our standard plan where our essential plan does not have that. Now, next, we see a big difference between them, and that's going to be through our automated customer journey. So automated customer journeys are essentially kind of what they sound. They're just essentially automations that we're going to be employing for our marketing. So these can be automations through just email. It can be automations through just SMS, or it can be some automations of a mix of the two with other avenues added as well. Now, this is obviously things that we are going to go over in depth later in this course. But this is kind of just an overview, so you can kind of have an idea about what would best fit for you right now. So, when it says journey points, this essentially means how many steps of the automation are you allowed to employ with these specific plans. So, with an essentials plan, what you can do is you can have four journey points. So this means that you can have four separate steps of an automation. So, for example, this could max out looking something like this. You could have an automation start off when somebody buys a product off your site, and then the next step of that automation is going to be one day, and then they're going to receive an email thanking them for their purchase. And then you could say wait one week, and then it could be following up with some other marketing message. And then depending on their response to that, if they respond or if they click on your website or not, you can then have a last step that is going to be a response to what they did in the so there you have those four steps maxed out. But with our standard plan, we can go ahead and add so many more, honestly, infinite. I've never seen anyone go up to these 200 journey points. But sometimes just sticking to these four journey points can be a little bit restrictive. So, for the most part, when deciding between the essentials and standard plan, I would always go with the standard plan because this isn't just the only difference between the two that we see. There's going to be more as you go down, and some are going to be more important to you. Others maybe not. But you can go through and check it yourself and you can make your decision based on your business. But I'm going to go ahead and scroll down now, and I can highlight a couple key things that are at least very important to me in the businesses that I've run and the automations. For example, one big part of this, the difference between these two plans is the audience management. So this is essentially going to be what can you gather from your audience based on how they act within your site or within your shop or whatever. So as we can see, what Mailchimp is able to do is take this data by the individuals on your site, and they're able to do all these things with it. They can predictive segment them. So this essentially means that they are going to put them in segments based on their predicted behavior. And for example, another kind of extension of this is going to be behavioral targeting. So it can see how each of the users on your website kind of behave, and then we can target them based on their specific behavior. Then another very interesting one here is going to be the purchase likelihood. Assigns a purchase likelihood number to each of your customers, and then this kind of educate the kind of language and the kind of approach that we're going to be taking to the given likelihoods of each individual user from our pages. And as I went over before, we had these automation so not only are you limited to only four points of automation on the essential plan, but you're also not able to branch out. So the branching is also a big part in automation that we'll go over later. But this essentially means that if we have one action on our page or one action that we either want or don't want our users to take, we can then segment it. We can branch it from that point on. So let's say we send an email and then they click a link. We can send a specific email that's going to be a follow up to everyone that clicked that link with that knowledge that they click that link, so it can be very personalized to their or if they didn't click that link, we can also then send an email kind of acknowledging that we saw that they didn't click that link and then we wanted to follow up with more information or things like this. So as you can see, we can have extreme kind of personalizations within these automations when we are given the freedom to branch out from these automations. And then also another thing to mention on this automation part is that we're only able to do cross market automations within this standard plan. We're not able to automate from messaging to email and kind of integrate those two if we're on the essential. Went over all of this between the standard and essentials plan, but I haven't yet mentioned this premium. Now, this premium plan essentially takes the standard plan and just injects it with steroids. This premium plan, if you're just an individual or you have your small business, it's going to be massively overkill. This is essentially just for enterprises, large businesses that need not only a lot of functionality, but also a lot of attention so as you can see, if I scroll down past this email marketing and design section, honestly, the two are essentially identical. So they're going to be exactly the same thing. But if we look up over here, we get to see the main difference. So that's going to be the monthly email sens. We have 150,000 at the premium plan and 6,000 here with the standard plan. And the users and audiences are also going to be unlimited. So that's essentially the scale of this. So with the premium account, if you have a large business, and as I said, if you have a large scale that you're running at and you need many people and many emails to be sent out, also, then where that's going to be in use. Now, most of you are probably going to fall under using this standard plan. But as we go along through this course, what is going to work for you and what you could kind of live without to kind of make your best decision? 3. Email Writing 101: Master Content Writing: Alright, at this point, you know what you're going to be writing about, you know who you're going to be writing for, and you have a general sense of how that is going to turn into good old Benjamins. Now in this lesson, I'm going to give you a crash course into content slash copywriting. So you can take your juicy, valuable expertise and turn them into magnetic newsletters. But first, a thought. And just a thought, this might be the kind of lesson that you might want to come back to as you're writing each one of your first newsletter articles. Okay, now, my first point is drafts. Please don't expect to sit down with some divine inspiration and then write for a few minutes and expect to have a world class article. I'm not sure how much writing you've done before, but that's how you get the infamous writer's block. When you sit down to write your article, the first thing that I recommend is for you to put all your thoughts on some blank document, so you can use that as out. Going to be much, much, much easier to write if you know where you're going. I personally like separating the writing into two processes, thinking on one side and then writing on the other cause I find it super hard to think about content and then think about writing and putting it all together in a concise way at the same time. So my first point about this is to outline. Now, once you have your outline, still don't expect for everything to come out seamlessly eloquent and perfect. Next step is to simply just write until your first draft is done. You might have seen a pretty viral master class ad where Neil Gaiman puts this way better than I could. So yeah, your first draft just has to exist. It's the editing of your first draft that's going to make this look beautiful and look like you knew what you were doing from the get go. Now, of course, this is what works for me, and it's what I recommend to you, but you're going to learn and you're going to experiment more as you continue to write. Some people like to edit as they go, I'm one of them, and others like to have a full page and then refine it until it's perfect. Either way, if you have any sort of writer's blog, don't think, write, and then you can edit afterwards. Now on to point number two, value. Okay, I know we've talked about value a couple times already, but I need this to burn into your mind for the rest of existence. Value is the single most important thing. And again, value is solving a problem either in the form of knowledge or boredom. So as we know, you either entertain or educate. And really, even your education should be entertaining, given that we live in an attention economy, and we'll speak more of that in a second. Point here is that as you edit and read through your newsletter, you should be asking yourself, is this adding value? It's really easy to become attached to your words and your writing. But put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and think, Do I care about this? Does this add to my experience? And does this make me love this newsletter? The key here is to just be brutally honest. If the answer is no to any of these, then you have to do some editing. Now, my third point ties right into this, and it's conciseness. Here's the thing. Everything on the Internet is fighting for your attention and time. You go on YouTube and you're bombarded with titles and thumbnails that are all designed to trigger your deepest instinctual reactions to make you click on them. Or you search something simple on Google, where you're seeing articles and sites that have optimized each and every one of their keywords to show up there, so you'll click. And in all of those, you have apps. Each and every one of these things are competing for your attention. So how do you win in such a competitive landscape? Well, you get to the gold and you do it quickly. Okay, you need to imagine that every single word that you write in your newsletter is costing you money. Assume that nobody cares about you, because as hard as it sounds, frankly, they don't easy for us to romanticize our business and our newsletter because we're thinking about it all the time, but other people just aren't, what would you write if you could only include the best of the best? This is where everything that we've talked about in the lesson so far comes together. You want to first write a draft. You then want to edit, and you want to remove Everything that doesn't add value. Thus, making your writing concise. You want to write in a niche where you'll have personal experience and you'll have an audience that will resonate with you. So the value that you give will be most appreciated, and you can be pumping out content in a nonstop fashion. This is genuinely what people who are killing it with content are doing. Give as much value as possible for free in the smallest amount of time. Like, look at Mr. Beast. Look at Alex Sermosi. There's no fluff there. So essentially, what this means is you should forget all conventionalism and formalism that you've learned no need for intros, no need for outtros. Now, this goes against what most of us have learned in school, but you don't have to write any sentences that are going to be prior to what you're actually going to tell them. And you probably don't need to write anything after what you told them, either. The beauty with something like a newsletter is to build a connection with your audience. So you want to sprinkle your personality throughout it so people like you and connect with you. But there are ways to do that without sacrificing value or conciseness. You can do so by telling stories that illustrate your point, for instance, or quick jokes that enhance entertainment value. As remember, even if it is super educational, people will still click away if they're bored to the other millions of things that are fighting for their attention. Now we're on to our fourth point, which is structuring your newsletter. Now, when it comes to structure, you want to keep it simple, clear, and engaging. People are bombarded with emails. So your goal in your newsletter is to make it easy to digest while still packing a punch. Now, how do you do that? Well, here's a structure that works like a charm. First, we got to look at the subject line. We'll cover these in the next lesson, but Bt people provoke them and get them in a click. Next, we have our opening hook. And for this, I recommend leading with a provocative sentence. This is something that we'll talk about in the subject line lesson, but often framing things in the negative is much more effective. For instance, instead of saying something like, this is how you lose weight, you'd say, This is how you stop being fat. Now, you might not want to say exactly that, but the point is that you want to tease what you're going to be talking about in a provocative way that gets them to keep reading. Next, we have our main content, and here, this is going to be about delivering the value. Whether it's solving a knowledge problem, which is education or solving a boredom problem, which is entertainment, make sure that every single word counts. If you're educating, then break down your ideas into simple and digestible points. If you're entertaining, then tell a quick story or share something relatable. Next, we have our call to action. Every single newsletter should have a purpose. What do you want your readers to do next? Click a link, sign up for something or share your newsletter. Be clear and direct, but just keep it in one sentence. Now, for our fifth piece here, which is kind of just a PS, include something that inspires curiosity and gives your audience a different way to interact and engage. Think of this as if your CTA didn't appeal to your audience, then here, you have this thing that you're insinuating that they can read or watch in a lighthearted way. For instance, how I feel about morning routines. And here, you're going to be slightly teasing some controversial take and inspiring curiosity. Now, you're going to want to keep your newsletters visually appealing. So what I mean by this is to use short paragraphs, bullet points, and bold text to emphasize key ideas. Nobody wants to just read a wall of text. Now, the sixth and last point is newsletter frequency. When I talk about any form of content, one of the most common questions that I get is, how often do I post? My answer? Well, it depends, but more often than you think. Now, one to two times a week is the sweet spot for most newsletters. It's frequent enough to stay top of mine, but not so frequent where you overwhelm your audience or burn yourself out by writing too much. But if your content is quick, valuable and entertaining, then doing these daily can work wonders. Just make sure that you're consistently delivering value because otherwise, people will unsubscribe faster than you can say unsubscribe. This actually works really great for some brands, especially if you're keeping it valuable and concise. For example, one of my clients actually had a daily newsletter for his dating business. Shared some kind of dating anecdote, hot take, or advice, but they kept it short. Now, you can use monthly newsletters if your content is more in depth and it takes time to create. But remember, with these, you're going to risk your audience forgetting about you, especially if you're not engaging with them on some other platform. But it could be the case that your audience expects longer, more detailed work from you, and that's fine. On YouTube channels that post every now and then, where either they'll post and there'll be very long form content, or whatever they're doing, they're working on a project that took a lot of time to create. For example, one of my favorite YouTubers, Mark Rober. He'll only post a couple times a year, but he's one of the most subscribed YouTube channels with 65 million subscribers. So this same concept applies here. You just have to see if it makes sense for you. Now we're moving on to the golden rule. The more valuable and concise that your newsletter is, the more that you can send it out without knowing people. If your readers are consistently getting value from your emails and they could read them in a second, then they'll actually look forward to hearing from you. Whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly, make sure that you're actually sticking to a schedule so your readers can know when they should expect something from you. This is key because it builds trust and it keeps your audience engaged. Now, to wrap it up, value and conciseness are the name of the game. People's inboxes are crowded, so the quicker that you get to the point and deliver value, the more successful your newsletter will be. And the next lesson we'll dive into how to draft attention grabbing subject lines to get your emails opened. I'll see you there. 4. Email Writing 102: Better Subject Lines!: Everyone is tired of you and your subject lines. Okay, that's a little dramatic, but I wanted to get your attention for this one. Let's talk about funneling for a second. Imagine you have the ultimate cold email. It's amazing, and it converts great. 25% of the people who read it schedule a call with you. I kid you not. That would be worth an incalculable amount for absolutely any company. Now, let's say that you followed every other lesson in this course seamlessly, and you have a perfect list of prospects who match your ideal client profile. But let's say that your email is open by only 1% of people. Out of 100, no one would end up scheduling a call. And out of 1,000, only four people. And that's what the ultimate cold email and the perfect list. Now, hopefully you see what I'm getting at. It's that subject lines are crucial. They're the first step of the funneling process, and we want to make sure that we can keep as many people from the list following every single step as the funnel continues. So basically, the more people that open the email, the higher chances of success. We want volume, and we get this through solid, catchy and sticky subject lines. So what exactly makes a good subject line? Well, there are many, many copywriting principles that could be pertinent here, but I'll cover some of the most effective ones in this lesson. Let's go back to the beginning of this lesson. Everyone is tired of you and your subject. Whether you felt attacked, thought I was funny or started to wonder why you bought this course, that comment likely elicited some kind of reaction. And that's exactly what we want. Copyrighting is about getting those emotional reactions which get you to stick around for just a little bit longer. And that's the goal of a subject line. It's to elicit a reaction that's strong enough for it to spark curiosity and want you to open up that email. That's all. So what are these principles that I hinted at? Well, the beginning of the lesson embodies one of the principles of copywriting, which can be extremely useful for writing subject lines. And that's framing something in the negative. So instead of saying something like five ways to get fit and healthy in the gym, instead, you could frame it as five ways to stop being so fat. Because the first one we're used to, it's expected, and it's how most of the world makes statements and even how most of the marketing world operates. It's a promise about something that's desired. However, the second one is triggering. It makes you see yourself in a light that you don't appreciate and want to change. It might even make you dislike whoever is saying that, but that's fine because it elicits an emotional reaction and keeps your attention. The only goal is to get them to the next step, and we'll deal with everything else there. Naturally, there are degrees to this. So depending on your audience and your message, you'll be able to take this to something more extreme. But keep in mind that it's a fine line. If you go too aggressive, then the dislike might trump the curiosity and your email won't be open. Here are some examples of varying degrees of aggression. Why your sales strategy isn't working? The real reason your business isn't growing. Stop losing customers like a. You're wasting money on nonsense. Are you making these mistakes on your ads? The next copyrighting concept is something that you guys have probably fallen for, and really, you will not believe what it is. Okay, see what I did there? I'm having a little too much fun, but the concept is sparking curiosity. If our goal is to get people to click and open the email, then sparking curiosity is one of the strongest things that we can do. And there are countless ways that we can go ahead and do. There are many ways that we can talk about, but the most obvious one is referring to the content of the email in some appealing way. Things like you won't believe what we discovered makes you curious as to what the discovery is, and if you're convinced that it'll be relevant to you, you'll likely open that. In this example, there's some sort of secret that no one else knows, and you're about to be a part of it if you open this little magic email. Now, this concept can be squeezed out more by emphasizing the secretive element to it. So you could say something like what they don't tell you about running ads in 2025. Or if you want to combine it with the previous concept, you could say something like why your competitors are laughing at you. Basically, these sort of subject lines make you want to find out what all the fuss is about. And another way to do this is by apparently giving something away for free. Now, as you're going to see in the following lessons, one of my most successful subject lines was name, you're invited. People love stuff for free. And even though people are growing increasingly skeptical about free stuff online, opening an email takes very little effort to find out what it is, and it has no risk, so it's a good strategy. Of course, you want to make sure that the content is at least somewhat congruent with your subject line. In my case, I invited my prospects to a 15 minute demo call, so it kind of made sense. The other day, I was actually captivated by one of these subject lines. The subject line read all expense paid Bali trip I knew deep down I was falling for something, but I couldn't resist it. I had to open it. Of course, it ended up being a great case study of one of this woman's clients who followed her method and was able to pay for her trip with very few hours of work. Anyways, by the time that I read through the email, which I did in its entirety, I had already forgotten about the subject line. But it was, of course, all congruent and I wasn't promised something that I didn't get. And I ended up dropping almost $10,000 on this woman's program recently after being on her email list for four years. So she knows what she Alright, so this is going to be your last chance to get this next concept because I'm gonna get rid of this lesson soon. Okay, I need to stop. Hey, you get the point. The next concept is something that everyone that's heard the word copyrighting probably knows about, and that's urgency. No one likes missing out on great deals, offers or one in a lifetime opportunities. So, if this is done right, it's a very powerful tool. But, of course, we all know about it. So it has to be done right in order for it not to be corny, cringy or just plainly not easiest way to go about this is for the sense of urgency to come from a real place. So instead of thinking, Oh, I'm going to use that copywriting technique that was taught to me in the course, you should think, W is a natural point in my sequence to highlight the fact that this is urgent? Maybe you're actually running an offer or maybe you only have room for so many clients at once, so you only have one or two spots left. As you'll see in the next lessons, what I found success with was mentioning urgency in my last emails because this was when the sequence was about to be over and I was actually going to stop emailing them. So here are some examples of subject lines that can inspire urgency just to get your brain juices flowing. Last Chance, only a few hours left. Your invitation expires in 37 minutes. This is available to the first 50 respondents. Last call. Are you joining me? In parentheses? Two spots left. Do you have more time to waste name? Okay, now it's time to supercharge these with AI. So far, you've got three powerful techniques, negative framing, curiosity and urgency. But what if you could come up with 20 subject lines like this in under a minute? Well, that's where Chat GPT comes. There's a lot of ways to get this wrong and end up with absolutely terrible subject lines. That's where your knowledge of copywriting that I just gave you is going to come in handy. But let me also give you some specific prompts to make this a whole lot easier. The first prompt that you can use is write ten subject lines that use negative framing. My offer help agencies reduce churn. The next one, give me seven curiosity based subject lines for an email about a free audit for SAS startup. Other one is create five urgent subject lines for a limited time calm the call offer. You could even give it an idea and have Chat EPT rewrite it. So something like rewrite this subject line to be more provocative. Grow your LinkedIn with AI. Or you could even use the prompt. Give me subject lines that mimic the tone of Alex Hermosi. Another way that we can do this is that you can paste in your best performing emails and then say, based on this email, generate ten subject lines using curiosity and urgency. Or, here's my sequence, suggest subject lines for each email that build curiosity and urgency progressively. Now, of course, you don't have to use all of them, but using AI to generate and refine options gives you a powerful head start. I usually like to get ten to 15 examples and then mix and match them to then make my own. So we covered three massive subject line strategies, framing in the negative, sparking curiosity and creating urgency. And now you have the AI tools to generate dozens of options using those principles. This is going to be the first step in your cold outreach funnel, and it might be the most important. If they don't open up your email, then nothing else matters. So take these principles, fire up Cha GPT, test your lines, and start turning strangers into leads. Alright, let's move on. 5. Why Email Marketing is Amazing: Email marketing remains to be one of the most effective ways to reach out to your audience. It Trumps ads social media and basically any other way in countless steps. And not only that, but you get to own your audience as opposed to relying on a platform or an alce So before we jump into creating journeys, campaigns, and everything that we can do in mail sham, I want to give you a sense of the basically limitless options that you have at your disposal. Let's zoom out for a second. What is email marketing? Email marketing is as simple as sending emails to a list with the goal of growing one's business, whether directly or indirectly. This could be cold email newsletter or what we're mainly going to be focusing on campaigns to people who have given you their email to receive messages from me. Now, we won't focus on cold email because that's something that Mailchimp doesn't want. Cold email uses other softwares, and that approach is slightly different to what will be folks know. And newsletters are their own sort of beast. That's where you'll be sending periodic emails about a certain subject that's usually to educate your audience on or something that you're an expert on. Now, this can definitely be done with Mail ship, and I'll even be showing you how to do so in future lessons. But in this lesson, I want to talk about the campaigns that email marketing is no now, one of the most talked about elements of email marketing is for launching and selling one's products direct. For instance, you may have heard of Jeff Walker's PLF, his product launch form. This formula is designed to maximize the conversion out of an audience of any size through emails. The idea is to give value to your audience for free as you tease out a product that you're about to launch. Then you'll eventually be launching sent product to the crowd that is passionately waiting now, this is one of the most effective customer journeys that we can create for our audience. It would look something like this. At the top, we're going to have people that are going to be signing up to our email list to get something for free. We call these lead magnets, and we'll talk a lot about them towards the end of the course. Those people then receive free stuff for a certain period of time, which they find value. And at the end, you're going to launch your product and sell like an absolute magnet. Or this is what modern marketers are still doing to date and are absolutely killing. For instance, Iman Gazi has followed this launch model for years. He launches something slightly different a couple times a year, and he collects emails through a lead magnet. He gives free content leading up to the launch, and then there's the eventual match itself. Now, this is perhaps the most flashy and famous way of collecting and using emails. That's because you can generate outstanding numbers in just a few days, and it sounds really fancy. Now, I've used this method countless times for my courses, products, and even for services. It works wonders, and we'll be talking about it in upcoming lessons. However, this is but one customer journey that you can leverage email marketing. And especially MailchimF. So let's look at some more. Another thing that you can do, and it's something that I've had quite a bit of fun over the years with is a fake launch. It's basically exactly the same. You collect leads at the top in exchange for a led map and you send them free stuff that has value, you tell them that you just launched a new product and that they can only get it over the next couple days, Yaya, ya ya. The only difference? Well, you're not actually launching any. Instead, this is just an ever brreen campaign that is going on all year round. Or something that one of my clients does is you can have a campaign which sends out almost daily emails, which entertain and educate, and all of them have a CTA to book a call or buy your thing. Now, this looks something like this. You have your way of getting traffic, and then you turn part of that traffic into leads with a lead MCA. You have your list of hundreds of emails that you write over the years. Your lead receives those consistently, grows a connection with you, and whenever one hits the mark or they're ready to buy, they do. Again, an evergreen campaign that doesn't necessarily require a launch. What I'm trying to get at is that there are countless journeys that you can explore depending on what your business you're working with looks like. For example, you could have a sequence that triggers when someone buys a certain godle. That sequence could educate the customer on how to best use a product while suggesting complimentary products to use with. Or you could have a sequence for when someone consumes a certain amount of content on your side. Perhaps they watch almost an entire course, and you want them to write a testimonial or join a group chat or signed up for this other these let. Maybe you want to combine the email with text to get the greatest impression. Or maybe you want to link your emails to specific actions they take on your Landed pH. All of these are possibilities that we can explore at Milchin. Again, the possibilities are essentially endless, and you have to find what makes sense for Europe's tests. And that's what we'll do in the next lesson. 6. Import Your Audience Into Mailchimp: Okay, now, before we're able to actually do any marketing within Mailchimp, what we first have to do is actually have contacts, have an audience for us to market to. So that's why the very first thing that I want to cover is how we can actually go ahead and import this audience within our Mailchimp. So, the very first step of this is going to be to come over here to our audience tab. Now, your account may be a completely new one. Mine here is one that I have used in the past. So I already have some contacts imported here, but it's essentially going to be the exact same process. So what I'm going to do is go over here into the Add Contacts tab. I'm going to select it, and we have two options here. So I can either add a single contact manual or I can go ahead and bulk Import contacts. That's what I'm going to do right now in this lesson. So I'm going to click here Import Contacts, and we have three options that we can do. With our copy paste option right here, this one is just going to be if you have a bunch of contacts, say in a Word file, then you could go ahead and copy and paste them in. I typically do not recommend that you go ahead and do this because it's going to be a little bit more difficult for Mailchimp to actually go through and sift through them and organize them properly. What I would recommend is you go ahead and have a CSV file that you're going to upload. And that's what I'm going to be doing in this lesson. Alternatively, you can also import from another service right here. So say you have a CRM platform and you have all of your contacts in there, then with just a few clicks, you can go ahead and integrate this within Mail ChemP. So it's super easy. But for most of you, when you're going to be adding in new leads, let's say, from any VAs that you hired or from any ad campaign that you ran, most likely you're going to be using a CSV file. So I'm going to go ahead and continue with this. So I'm going to click Continue here, and now I'm going to upload my example CSV. Alright, I've now uploaded it, and now I'm just going to continue. Now, from this point, we're introduced to our audiences. So an audience is essentially a group of your contacts. Now, I mentioned this briefly earlier in this course, and now I want to come back to it and discuss it a little bit more. In the fact that audience, we always want to have all of our contacts under one audience. Now, depending on the plan you have, you may already be limited to one audience anyway. So with our free plan, we have one audience with our essentials plan, which is the one right above that, you have three audiences, and then with our standard plan, we have five audiences. So regardless of the plan that you have, I think all of you should always be working under one audience. And there is going to come a time where you may want to segment your audience. So you might want to put your audience into different groups. So some are for a newsletter of yours or some are customers of yours. You can go ahead and segment this within your audience by adding tags. And I'll show you how we can do this later in this course. But for now, just know that we always are going to be working under one single audience. Now I have my current audience, my one audience titled Brand subscribers. So I'm going to have that one selected. Now, next, we see right here, which is update any existing contacts. So this is going to be the case when you're going to be uploading a list with contacts that are already in your audience, but they have slight adjustments to them. So you're going to check this box so we don't have any duplicate contacts that are going to be added to your audience because that's just going to mess things up. You might be sending emails, multiple emails to the same person, and that's just not going to be a good look for your brand. It's just going to be unprofessional. So make sure if you have any peak contacts in this new CSV that you are going to be uploading, then you have this box checked so no issues are going to arise from. Oh, I'm going to go ahead and deselect this, and then I'm going to click Continue. Alright, so now we have the tags that I was just discussing. So here, what we're able to do is segment our lead list. So we can go ahead and add tags to the specific contexts that we're going to be at. So we have some popular tags here that Mailchimp is showing us, customer, the year, staff, influencer member. Now, the tags that you're going to be assigning to your audience is obviously going to be very specific to the business that you are running. Is just going to be something that you want to keep in mind. If you want to send specific marketing messages to specific demographics or specific groups in your audience, then you can create tags for them. So let's go ahead and create a tag right here where I will say newsletter subscribers, and I can click Create. My next one is going to be Mail Chimp course buyers. So I have these two tags. So now I can just click Continue. So here what we're going to be doing is matching our file column names, so the names of the column within the CSV that we imported to the field names that Mailchimp sees as being significant oh, for example, we have stuff that immediately transfer over. For example, we have our first name. So we have that right here as name, and in the software, it's abbreviated as F name. So if we're going to be putting it in our subject lines or in our email body, we are going to type it in as F name, and then it will replace the first name of the person that it is sending it to within that section. So right here, we see company name, and this one is a column name within my CSV, and Mailchimp doesn't recognize this. So right here, we have company name, which is a column name within the CSV that I right here, we have company name, and this is a column within my CSV that is named this. And we can see that there is this exclamation point. And this means that Mailchimp doesn't recognize it. So that means what we have to do is we have to create a new field for it to be listed here because all of these fields here, as you can see in parentheses, email, F Name, SMS phone, these are all basically ways that we can go ahead and import the information from our lead list into our marketing messages. So the exact same way that we would put F our subject or email body. So the exact same way that we have F name if we put it into our subject so the exact same way that we have this F name representing the first name of someone, meaning that when we put that into our subject line or body, then the person that is receiving that email, their name is going to be replaced with this subject. We can have the same thing be done company name. So I can go ahead and create a new field right here and create the field label, and I'll just put it as company. And we want to select the data type, so it is a text data. It's not a number, date, birthday, address, none of that. It is text. So we can go ahead and click Confirm. And now we see that it is recognized by mail chain. And the code that we would essentially use within our email, so our subject line or body would be merge three. And later on, I'll show you how we can edit this to say just have it say company. So whenever we are creating our messages, it will be easier for us to we see another thing here with last name as not being recognized. So we can go ahead and do the same thing here, create a new field, make sure that it's a text data type because it is, and then confirm. Now, as we scroll down, we get to see that I have more column names that are not recognized by mail chain. So we have website, and here, this one is going to be an easy fix because all I have to do is do the same thing as before, create the new field, and then select data type. Instead of doing text, I'm going to scroll down to do web. Now for these Instagram Facebooks LinkedIn, these ones are ones that I wouldn't ever fill out really because I'm never going to put their Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn within an email that I'm going to send to them because that situation is just not something that would help me in my market. Now, the last one that I might create a field for is coaching specialty because this example lead list was a lead list that compiled some coaches. So if I want to have say specific thing to a specific coach, then what I would do is create this new field, and I could name it exactly that coaching specialty. Make sure it's a text data type and add it here we see it's SAM Merge. So now all I have to do is click Continue and we get to move on to the next step. So now when we're at this point, what we want to do is make sure that our email marketing status and our SMS marketing status, if you have this setup is both going to be set to as subscribed because this way we indicate to Mailchimp that they have actually subscribed and they have consented to receiving these marketing messages from us. And then we go ahead and click this checkbox down here and we click Finalize Import. So then we complete this import. Okay, so now we have imported these contacts, but we see here that several errors were encountered. So to view these errors, it's as simple as clicking this, and we can review if there are some things that we actually care about or other things that we don't necessarily care about. So as we can see, the import errors are all derivative of SMS. So some of them have a country that don't have the SMS program that I'm signed up for. Some of them are just invalid and they can't be imported. And then two of them can't be imported because the phone number can't receive SMS messages. So, these ones are all errors that I'm not very concerned about because this is an example list, and I'm not actually going to be marketing towards them. But these are always good things for you to go ahead and check because sometimes, if they are important errors and sometimes they're easy errors for you to go ahead and fix. Okay, so now that we have them imported, we can go ahead and look at them. Let's go here to tags. So I have these two tags that I associated to that list, the Mail Chimp course buyers and the newsletter subscribers. So everyone that I imported from that list is going to be tagged with these two tags. So I can go ahead and view these. So now we see that there's been 19 contacts within this Mailchimp course buyer. So if I click here, I get to see that I have 380 total contacts. But if I come back here, I can check newsletter subscribers, and we are back down to our 19. And you can see if I also select this one, Mailchimp course buyers, it doesn't change. We are still at 19 contacts because I added these exact tags to the same exact list. You can see that they are all imported right here. There's an email address. There's a name. There's a company, and there's a last name and website for all of these contacts that I have added and just those few clicks. Now, if you want to add a single contact manually, then it's super simple. All you have to do is come here, click add a single contact, and then you can just go ahead and import all this information, and you can just type it in yourself. Name, email address, phone number, company, last name, website, and coaching specialty. So you can that this all right here was taken from the last list that I imported. So that's usually how this single contact thing is going to work. And if you scroll down, you also get the option to add some tags manually. You can either add tags from the tags that you've already created or you can add some new ones, and then you also have to check these boxes to make sure that you have the permission to actually market to them, so Mailchimp allows you to send out your messages to them. Alright, that is it for audience Lesson. Now that you have your audience and your people imported within your mail champ, we can actually go ahead and start creating our messages directly to them. 7. Leverage Pre-Built Journeys to Save Time: Alright, now, in this lesson, we are going to be going over customer journeys. The name might not reveal too much to us on the surface level, but what these customer journeys are essentially just automated sequences that Mailchimp helps us run. So it's no surprise that they're under the automations tab right here. Now, in this lesson, we are going to be going over pre built journeys. These are one sequences that Mailchimp has already created for us and they've already given for our use. Now, within these prebuilt journeys, we have SMS automations, we have email automations, and we have a mix of the two. We're going to be going over the SMS integration later in this course. Today in this lesson, we're going to be focused solely on the email automations. What I want to go over first is right here in this AI Power journeys. Now, let's go ahead and select this one right here. It's a welcoming new contacts prebuilt journey for us. You can see, this is going to be done with AI. So it's going to just generate this right here for us, based on our profile. Right here, it says from Adam and the subject is welcome to free SpiritedNss. Now, this is just going to be pulled from your profile. This is something that I just created when I made this account for my client. But regardless, we can see everything that it will do no matter kind of what information that you have B right here, it has this logo that it created for us. This is going to be something that is going to be basic if you don't upload your logo within Mailchimp. Next, we have this welcome image that it also generated for us using AI. The following that, it has some text here. So we have a headline, we have a greeting and another bit of text here of body text. It says, thank you for joining the free spiritedness community. We're excited to have you with us. Stay tuned for more updates, tips, and inspiration to fuel your free spirited journey. And then we have a little footer down here that it also created for us. Can look over here to see the sequence that it created. See that when an individual signs up, they are going to be then sent this email that was AI generated. Now, of course, if we want to change any of the content in here, what we're able to do is click this little button, and then we're able to edit this email. So as you can see, we can edit the two and from. We can edit the subject line, the preview text. We can edit the scheduling, so how often this is going to be sent out and the tracking here. So I'm going to go ahead and click Close. We can see this journey a little bit easier. This is essentially going to be the kind of UI that we're working with when we are creating these customer journeys ourselves or editing the pre built ones that Mailchimp gives us. As you can see, the first step of this journey is contact signs up to brand subscribers. This is essentially meaning that whenever you add anyone to your audience, this automation is then going to begin. Now, of course, this one is just a draft. I haven't actually published it, so nothing's going to happen just about yet. Once someone signs up to brand subscribers, once they are input into my audience, this is going to start, and it's going to go on to the next step, which is then sending this welcome email. We can go ahead and click this, and we get to see the email right here. And if we want to change anything within it, we can just click Edit email content. Now that we are here within the Email Builder, we can go ahead and edit any text right here. We can go ahead and get rid of this and we can say hello from And then we can go ahead and edit any piece of this. We can get rid of certain parts of this, and we can go ahead and edit this email just as we would any other email that we're going to be sending out. Then once we have edited everything that we want to change up, then we can click Save and return to journey. Now, we see that this journey consists of two steps here. It's the contact signs up, so this is the starting step. It has this email that's going to be sent out. And then as we see right here, the contact exits. This is the final step and nothing is going to happen after this unless we go ahead and add something. If I wanted to, I could go ahead and add a journey step right here. I can select any bit of this. In the next lesson, we're going to go ahead and actually build our own product launch sequence. Now, I just want to show you kind of an overview of this functionality. So we're able to grab any part of this right here, this tag. I can put it right here, and then I can select a tag. Let's say I want to set it as a test tag, and then the action is that I'm going to add the test tag once this is all complete. Then I can click Save and we're all good to go here. So now from this point, I could just click Continue. As you can see, that journey that I just created has now been activated. So I can go ahead and click Continue, and it's All Good and setup. Now let's go ahead and take a look at other pre built journeys. We can scroll down here, and we can see that there are so many more for us to work with. We have a welcoming new contact section. So it has all of these integrations that we can see. There's LinkedIn, there's YouTube. There's Intuit QuickBooks. There's Facebook, Slack, all of these integrations that they have. We can scroll down and we can see that they have a nurture lead section. So they can remind contacts about appointments or reservations, and this doesn't require any integration. You can even celebrate customer birthdays. So I'm going to select this one and we can go ahead and take a look at it. You can see, we have now entered this prebuilt journey, and we can see that it consists of three steps. So I can go ahead and click use this journey and then hit Continue. And now we can see that this journey has now populated right here for us to go ahead and edit. Essentially, what this sequence is saying is that right here is the beginning of it. So once a contact's birthday has now been reached, they then are going to start this automation. I'm able to do here is then set days before the day as zero. So they're sent this on the day of their birthday. And then I would select the date field that is going to be within my audience, except with my audience I've uploaded right now, I don't have any birthdays saved for my contacts, but if you weren't you'd be able to select that right here. Then that would start the sequence. And then all we have to do here is click this email, create a birthday email. So we can go ahead and use the Classic Builder or the New Builder. Let's select the new Builder. And then we can go ahead and select any one of these templates for us to use to actually create and just wish the person a happy birthday and put any code or anything like that that you would like. So now let's go ahead and go back and let's go ahead and exit right here. And we'll do another run through of all of these pre built journeys, because, hey, as you can see, there are a lot here within Mailchimp. So, as you can see, there's a lot of integration with Shopify. So this one is going to be kind of the place where you can get the most value from these automations if you actually are running some kind of ecommerce store. As we scroll down, we can see more sections that they have with us. Re engaged contacts, and you can see that this blue section right here, this blue icon means that it's an AI section. This means that AI is going to help us along the way of this journey somehow, someway. So we can go down here. We see that we can support and manage contacts, transactional. If I were to go through every single one of these pre built journeys, then this would be a very, very, very long lesson. But this is mainly to show you how these work and where they exist on Mil chin. These can be huge assets to you because it takes out a lot of the manual labor of your marketing, and this can help us and just do those little automations and do those little menial tasks for us to make our lives that much easier and provide a much better customer experience for our audience. So that's it for this lesson. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to go over how we can actually build one of these customer journeys ourselves. 8. Design Beautiful, High-Converting Emails: This lesson, I want to show you how we can go ahead and create the most visually attractive emails that we can. So what we want to do is come here into the Create tab and then click this drop down email, select Template. Oh, using the email templates within Mailchimp is always the way that I go about creating my own emails within Mailchimp, because these kind of help you in giving you a little bit of inspiration and a kind of guiding star in creating the emails that work best for your brand. Especially for those of you out there who wouldn't deem yourself as being the most creative Templates are great for you. So let's go ahead and click Get started. Now, this is typically where it takes us when we select that, but I want to take you to the new version of Mailchimp's Email Builder, because in the new version, it gives us a little bit more to work with, and it's a more updated and modern UAT. To do so, we actually want to back out of these templates and then come back here and to create. We'll drop down this email tab again, and then we can actually just select regular here, and then we can set this email name to be whatever we want. Let's go ahead and click Begin. So now that we're brought here, we're just going to go ahead and click Design Email. Now, see, it brings us back to this exact same template spot, but it gives us another option here in accessing their new Builder. So we're going to go ahead and click Create Email and New Builder. So we are now in the new and updated Builder. You can see, if we compare this to the basic Builder, these ones are a little bit more aesthetic to say the least. We can go ahead and scroll down, and we can see that there are different sections. There's basic templates. There are templates made to educate and inform, to announce, so we can go ahead and go down here and see sell products. They have invites, sell services, thank yous, welcomes. There's so many that we can work with we want to actually go ahead and filter these, then we can come up here to the industry, and then we can filter them over here. If any of these fit your specifically, then that's going to be great. You're going to have a lot of inspiration to work with. We also have the style right here, and we have the email purpose. Let's go ahead and get into one of these to kind of see how they look and see how we can go ahead and edit them. Um, let's go ahead and preview some. We can look at this email, and we can see that includes some dynamic images. So images that are going to be changing cycling. It has some text here, and it even has some brand colors. Now, I'll show you how to apply your own brand colors later in this course. But we can see that these are very dynamic, and they're going to be changing to the settings that we select. Let's also go down here and we can select another one that we like. Let's go ahead and select this weekly newsletter. We can see these ones right here. As you can see, these templates are extremely professional. They look really good. And to create something like this from scratch is going to be a way bigger *** than using one of these. And we can also see that they have two views. So we see how it looks like on a desktop, and we can also look how it would look on a mobile phone. So let's go ahead and edit this one. The newsletter ones are typically my favorite because they have the best kind of graphic design and digital design to them. Let's go ahead and click Continue to Builder to actually see how we can edit these. Now, one of the first things that we could see here and the first thing that I would do if I were editing this for my own use is actually import a logo here. Now, to import a logo, all you would do is grab it here from the side blog and then drag it, and then you would release right here. And then if you have a logo, it will go ahead and import itself. But for now, since we're working without one, what I would do is go ahead and select this and I would click Delete right here. So now there's only this divider that is going to be surrounding the date. Now, in terms of editing the layout here, it's super simple. For the most part, everything is drag and draw. We can move these blocks to wherever we want them, say I want to put this below the image. Then it's as simple as that. I want to put it above. There we go. Let's say that I wanted to make this an announcement about a new course that I released. Well, first, let's discuss the kind of layout that we want here. So here I would probably put a mail chimp logo, right? A mail chimp logo for this new mail chimp course that I'm releasing. And then below it, I can put in some information here. Let's go ahead and get rid of these two text blocks. And then I could change this button to say B course now. And then I can go ahead and get rid of all of this. And let's say join today for 60% off. Get rid of this one right here and get rid of this section, these two blocks as well, and then I'll get rid of these social links also. So now I'm just left with this very simple layout. So first things first, let's actually replace this image with the Mailchimp logo. All I have to do is click it, click Replace Image, and I already have it uploaded right here. So now once I have this selected, all I have to do is click Insert, and then we can see this image is now inserted. If I want to kind of change how this image appears, then I can do that. With first, the sizing, I can click scale, so I can go ahead and drag this to make this as big or as small as I want. And let's say I want it to be about that size. Then I can also come here into styles, and I can do things like round the corners. So I can make it, let's say, about this rounded. And you can also do stuff like add borders and add image backgrounds as well, like colors. But for now, I'm going to keep this as it is. Now I want to change the title. So I went ahead and changed this title here, check out our new Mailchimp master class. And then I could go ahead and change the date to be more accurate. And then we can go ahead and scroll down to the next part of this. The next thing that I want to do is change these colors. We can see that the main color here to this email is a black background, and then it has this secondary red color. To do this, all I have to do is come over into styles. If I wanted to, I could go ahead and select this background color, and I can change it to be anything I want. Let's say purple, let's say red. But for now, I want to keep it as being this kind of gray, blackish color. To change the color, I just have to select this text color right here, and then I can go ahead and select a color that's as similar to this as I can catch. So let's go ahead and go with that color is about right. So now this has been changed, I can come to this button now, come to styles in this border, and now I can click this one right ahe. And then I can also click this change All button. And as you can see, it also changed the color of this as well. Now this is a much more consistent look. The next thing that I want to do is add other courses right here in these images. All I have to do is select them. I can click Replace Image, and then I can select this Pintrest marketing one. You see it uploaded extremely easily. And then I can do the same thing for this one, replace image, and then I can do this newsletter marketing course. Now the next thing that I want to do is change the text of these binds. Instead of saying read full story, I want to say something like there we go. I've now changed it just by typing in. It's super easy. Now, if I want to do the same thing down here and change this to go to course, all I can do is click Duplicate right here, so I don't have to go ahead and actually edit the text there. I can just go and grab this piece and move the block to be right here below that. And as you can see, it fit in super easily. And now I can do the exact same thing with this one. So I can duplicate the block and then move it over to fit in right I would say that I want this button to align here on the right side to be something that's a little bit more consistent. All I have to do is select the button, then come over here into styles, and then I can scroll down and change the alignment to the right. So now it looks just that much better. So now what I'd want to do is go ahead and change the text right here to say something nice about this Pintrest marketing course that I released and the same thing here on this newsletter marketing course that I released. All right, so I went ahead and just added these little quick blurts. I said, transform your business results by marketing on Pinterest. You could be ignoring millions of eyes that are just waiting to see what you have to offer. And then for my newsletter marketing course, I said, Unlock the true potential of your brand with newsletter marketing. Your audience is already out there, start landing in their inbox and turning casual readers into loyal customers. Now, if we just take a look at this email, we get to see that it looks pretty good in just investing a couple of minutes into doing this. This was going to be a message that I'd actually sent out, then I'd probably have a little bit more informative text, and I'll even probably include a promo code as well. Now, before we end this lesson, I want to bring your attention to other things right here. So we have other things that we're able to stylize. We have our text, so we can select the default text for each kind of heart or aspect of this email. So we have paragraph text right here. We have header one, two, three, and four, as well. So this is just going to be default settings for our text. Then right now we have links. So if we're going to hyperlink anything, we can change the link color. We have our buttons right here. So this is the buttons that we worked with here. So if I were to change the button color, say to make it purple, we see all of the buttons are changing here as well. So I'm going to make that go back to black, and we can also do similar things here and changing the button shape of them, so I can make it a pill, and I can make it a little bit rounded on the edges as well, and I can change the size to be medium or large. I'll keep it small. Then we can also change the font just like we could with the other text. Last thing that I kind of want to show you in this is going to be this optimized feature. This optimized feature is something that I think is pretty fun. As you can see, what it shows us here is ways that we can improve our marketing messages. Here, it says that we should make the images clickable. So I should go ahead and add in an image URL to this. This is me actually sending this out, then I would put the link to my mail chimp course within this clickable photo right here. Okay, now, I know I said that that was the last thing to check, but I also want to show you the mobile views right here. So, you should always check how your marketing messages are going to look mobile because it might be a little bit different than how it's going to show up here, and it's just going to be something that you need to pay attention to because so many people are going to be checking their emails on their phone nowadays. So that is basically it. So if you ever want to save the kind of creation that you made to maybe make different little changes and just have it as a template that you can use in the future, then you could always come up here and you could click Save as a template, and then you're able to name it. That is it for this lesson, and I'll catch you into the next one. 9. Create a Custom Email Journey from Scratch: Now it's time in this lesson to build our own customer journey, our own email automated sequence from scratch. So the first step in doing this would be coming over here into automations, and then clicking Build from scratch. And then we can name this journey whatever we want. Let's say product launch. Then I'm going to go ahead and click Choose starting point. So this starting point is basically the thing that has to happen for our automated sequence, our customer journey to begin. Now, for us, I'm just going to go ahead and click Sign Up for email. So this essentially means that if I add them to my audience, then this sequence will start. So if I go ahead and check this checkbox right here, that means that this sequence is also going to include everyone I have added in the past to my audience, not just the people that I will add from this point on. So I'm going to go ahead and click Save Starting Point. So now we are at a blank slate. So what I'm going to model this journey after is the product launch formula. So essentially, what I want to do in this sequence is start to tease my product. In this case, it's going to be a course. So I'm going to start to tease my product to my audience to then eventually lead up to one big launch, which is going to be the ultimate kind of release of the course. So all the prior emails to that and the teasing emails are going to be little chunks of that course, so individual lessons. So to start the sequence, we already have this. So when I add someone to my audience, now the next step to that is going to be sending that first email. So to do so, I have to grab this, and then I can drag it in. And then now it's going to bring us into this option, which is going to allow us to build our email. So I'm going to go ahead and just do a basic email here because I'm not going to be sending this out, but I'll be giving you the idea of what it's kind of going to look like, at least in theory. So I went ahead and uploaded this template that I have, and I think it works for a very good first email for this sequence. Essentially what this email is saying is it's thanking them for signing up to this free video course. And then there is a link to a private YouTube video for the first lesson of this course that is eventually going to drop. So I go ahead and close this right here, and now I want to put the next step in this. Now, eventually, I want another email to be sent to my contact, but I don't want these emails to consecutively send one after the other super quickly because then that's just going to be spammy and it kind of takes away an aspect of this product launch formula. So to fix this, what I want to do is add in a time delay here. So I can go right here, grab this time delay, add it in. And instead of being one week, I want it to set as one day. And then I can click Save. And then, now I'm able to add in second email of this sequence. So now I've went ahead and uploaded this second email, so we can preview it real quick. It says, Hello. I've truly enjoyed hearing about your performances on our first lesson, and I'm really looking forward to this one. Today, you will learn, once again, a trick that has brought me great success. Blah, blah. And then eventually it's going to say, this will lead you to a private YouTube video, see you inside. And then there would be a linked YouTube video right here for a second lesson of this course that we are eventually going to drop. So now if we go back here, we can then click Close. And then now we're going to send another email after this. But of course, we want to also add in our time delay. So now I can set this for one day and then click Safe. Alright, now, as you guessed it, we are going to send another email in this. Again, I uploaded this template from a prior journey that I created, and we can take a look at it if you're interested. Right here, you can see it's simple copy. There's not too much here, and then below it, there was a YouTube video that was linked to it. So now let's go back here, and we can go ahead and click Close. Okay, so if we go back to review this, we can see that right now we have essentially a three step email process with a couple of delays in between the emails that we are all of these emails are teasing the eventual course that I am going to release. Now that we have these three emails that have been sent out teasing the course, I now want to send an email that is launching the course. Of course, again, I'm going to add another time delay, add this in and change it to one day, and then I'm going to add in an email right here. Now, I'm going to delay on actually putting in any content of this email to show you another functionality of these customer journeys, and that's the IL statement. Now with this IL statement, I'm essentially able to set conditions to then follow what is going to happen next in the sequence. So now let's say that this email contained the launch. It contained my actual course. And there's only one link in this email, and this link was to the course. I have this conditional statement right here. What if in the course in this email, what if I want to send two different emails that follow up this launch email. I can set this if else condition to mean yes, if they click the link and no if they clicked the link. So that means if they clicked the link, I'm going to send them a certain email, and if they didn't click the link, then I'll send them another email. So to actually set that condition of if they click the Link or not, I have to click this. It's going to pop up in the segment Builder. And as you can see, with these conditional statements, there is a lot of things that we can do here, but I'm going to scroll all the way down, and I'm going to select Link going to be LinkClick in any URL. But if I wanted to, I could specify the exact URL because there's only one URL within that email, then I'm just going to have it set in URL because it doesn't matter. Then I'm going to click U segment. So now it has this set. So with this yes statement, if they clicked the link, so if that was a yes, I can now add this email right here. And then I can go ahead and create an email that says something along the lines of thank you for checking out their course. We have so much to cover in. Essentially, I'm leaving it a little bit open ended. Like, I'm not thanking them for a purchase or anything specific like that because if they clicked the link, it doesn't necessarily mean that they bought the course. Now I can go ahead and close this, and then I can add an email right here for the no segment. So if they didn't click the link, then I can send another email, basically saying whatever marketing message that I went to them, saying, Hey, I noticed that you didn't check out this email. Here's some extra information, here's some extra value as to why this course is going to be great. Then from this point, what I would do is add two different tags here. So I can add a tag right here, and then I can essentially create a new tag that says something like check for purchase. And I'll make sure that I add this action, so make sure that it's not removing a tag, but it's adding the tag to these. And then I can click S this end, what I can do is have another conditional statement. So I can put in another link in this email to the course, and then if they checked it out, then I'll have a yes message, and then basically that message is going to say something similar to this one over here. And if they didn't, then I could kind of repeat the process. So, you understand there is so much functionality within these automated sequences that we can create. The possibilities are honestly endless. Alright, well, there you have it. I didn't want to go overboard in this lesson and show way too many things and confuse you. I think this was a good kind of overview of what we have to offer in these automation customer journeys. Remember, if you have any questions throughout this course or even in this lesson individually, do not refrain from asking questions in our Q&A section. Me and my team are there to answer all of your questions 247. So I don't want to get you lost or leave you behind at any point. I want you to make sure that you understand everything here at Mailchimp to the fullest of your capabilities. 10. Run A/B Tests to Find What Actually Works: Alright, now it's time to go over personally, what I think is the most fun part of email marketing. And that's running AB tests. I love AB tests because they're kind of like a little game that we can play with our own assumptions and our own thoughts. And in Mailchimp, to actually run these test, it's super easy. But first thing I want to mention before we actually get into it is that you do need a standard plan to actually run these tests. So a free or essential plan won't give you access to AB tests or what they call in Mailchimp, multivariate tests. Okay, so to actually get in and run one of these tests and to create one, we want to first come over here to create. So we select Create. We come here, and then we'll drop down this email and then select multivariate, and then we can insert the name. So let's say we are going to test subject lines. So my test name is just going to be subject line test. And I'll just click Begin. Now, the first step of this is actually to choose our recipients. So who is going to receive this email? Who's going to receive part of this test? We can select our entire audience. We can select a segment or a tag or a group. I'm going to go ahead and select my entire audience, and then I'm going to click next. Okay. So now we're actually within our test kind of settings. So although I named it subject line test, I'm actually able to test whatever I want. I can test right here as we see the subject line, I can test the from name. I can test content. So some people are going to receive specific content, others are going to receive a different set of content. Or I could do this Cent test. So some people are going to say receive it at 4:00 P.M. And then others are going to receive it at 12:00 P.M. So the next thing that we see here is this slider right here. And it asks us what percentage of your recipients should receive this test combination. As you can see, as we slide this down and up, we see the numbers right here on the right change. So if I have it, say, 75%, this means that 75% of my audience, which is going to be approximately 283 individuals, are going to receive this test segment. So, this means that among these 283 people, some are going to receive one combination, and other are going to receive the other combination. Now this leaves us with 25% in our winning segment. So this is 95 individuals. So, this means that we then have 25% or 95 individuals of our audience are going to receive the winning segment of this test that we run. So essentially, what this means is that this first 75% of our audience is going to be the test some are going to receive option A, and others are going to receive option B. And then the remaining 25% are going to receive only the one option that won this test. So this naturally leads us into our next question, which is, how should Mailchimp determine which of these combinations is the winning one? Well, it gives us a few different options. We get open rate. We can do it by click rate. We can do it by total revenue, and this one actually necessitates you having an ecommerce or some kind of store connected to your Mailchipcco. Lastly, we could have a manual section. So this manual selection basically means that you yourself are going to look at all of the data within Mail chip and then you can determine which one is the winning one. So obviously, the metric that we select here is going to be educated by the kind of variable that we are actually testing. Well, what do I mean by that? I mean that depending on what we are testing here, whether it's subject line or from name or content, we're going to care about a different kind of metric. So say we are doing subject line. That's what I have this test right now as. This is going to be something that I want to look at the open because some people are going to see one subject line in their inbox and other people are going to see another subject line on their inbox. And the people that click through that email to actually see the content and see the email itself is going to be the metric that I care most about because I'm testing that subject line. Now, if I was doing a content test, then I wouldn't care about the open rate necessarily in doing this test because everyone is going to see the same subject line. So the percentage of people that actually open the email isn't going to matter to my test. Now, if I was doing a content test, then in that case, I could do something like a click rate. So this is all to say that the kind of test that you're running should ultimately educate and ultimately inform the kind of metric that you are going to be measuring for in these SPIT tests. Okay, now, the next part is actually deciding how long do we want to wait before we have Malhamhoos our winning segment. Depending on the kind of campaign that you're sending out, for the most part, I would choose 4 hours, but I would never really go under that. So you can choose 4 hours as your minimum, but you could always wait longer. If you have a massive list and you want to have a more kind of robust test with a bigger sample size, then you may want to go ahead and wait a couple days. So let's say three days. Now, let's actually get into choosing the subject lines that we would split test. So to do so, we just have to come up here to subject line and click that button, and now we get to see how many combinations that we are going to have within this test. We can click this plus button to add more combinations or we can add other things that we are going to be testing. So let's say we're also going to be doing sentis as well. Now, when you have a sample size as small as I have with only 378 total recipients, then I would keep it to just running two tests. So right here with the subject line, we have two variants. So this is the only test that I would keep it to. Then from this point, I can go ahead and click Next. Alright, so the first thing that I would do is select this one right here. So this is basically just a setting that we can enable within our campaigns that can help us get to people's inboxes, as opposed to going into their spam folder. So this is all just done by using this Fname merge tag. So this is done when we actually upload our audience through a CSV file or whatever other method, and we actually tagged and we connected the Fname merge tag to the first name in that CSV file that we uploaded to our audience. Now I'm going to move over to our email subject. So here we're going to go ahead and put in the two subject lines that we're going to go ahead and test. So I put in these two subject lines. So as you can see, the subject lines and their words say the exact same thing. It says, Here's our new course just for you. Now, the only difference between the subject line one and two is this emoji that I put in. So this just goes to show that you can have these multivariate tests be extremely specific and extremely simple. The only thing that I'm really testing here is how well does this rock and emoji or just emojis in general, do in having a better or higher now, although this is just an example, this is a completely valid test that you could run yourself. Because remember, your audience and your specific niche is always going to be unique to you and your business. So what might work for someone else's audience that you know might be completely different for your audience. But now, once we have this subject line test complete, all we have to do is make sure that our from email address and name is all good, and then we're going to go ahead and click Next. Now from this point, this is going to be the same as any other email that you're going to be sending out. So if you're going to go ahead and build the email, maybe you already have a template save or maybe you're going to go ahead and create something from scratch, from here or use a theme. Now, before we go ahead and end this lesson, I want to show you that regardless if you do subject lines or sent time, it's all going to be essentially the same setup, and it's all going to be super easy for you to go ahead and do. So I'm going to go ahead and come back here into our setup. I'm going to back out, and I'm going to get rid of this subject line. And then I will change, let's say, the send time here. Now I'm going to click Next. Subject line has saved from the one that we did prior to this, and everything else is still the same here. But if we scroll down, as you can see, we have different suntins right here. So I can just go ahead and make sure that the same days are selected. But instead of doing 3:15 P.M. On this one, I can do 12:00 P.M. These two time zones are then going to be tested. And it's the same thing as before. As we click Next, we're now brought back here into the template, which is a familiar screen for you at this point. So there you have it. This is how we can simply and easily run multivariate or AB tests in Milch. 11. Use Personalization to Increase Engagement: Ever opened your inbox and seen your name in the subject line, then you've already seen the oldest personalization trick in the book. Yeah, it's better than getting a hey there or deer valued customer. But let's be real. It's 2025, that's not impressing anyone. Because personalization today, it's not just about names, but it's also about relevance. And when you're using a platform like Mailchimp, you've got access to a whole suite of tools to make that happen. The kind of tools that help you go from mass email blast to this feels like it was made just for me. Now, let's take a step back. Everyone's inbox is overflowing. Emotions tab, spam folder, and subscriptions that they forgot they even signed up for. So, what makes your email stand out? Well, it's relevance. Difference between this subject. Check out our new product and this. Mark, here's a follow up to the course that you've checked out last week. When your emails match the subscriber's interests, behavior, or timing, then your chances of getting opened, read, and clicked go way up. People pay attention to what feels personal, even when it's automated behind the scenes. Mail Chimp gives you way more options than just putting someone's name in email. We're talking about behavioral triggers, dynamic content, tag based segmentation, and predictive insights. When used right, it stops feeling like email marketing, and it starts feeling like a conversation. A smart, relevant, and a timely one like that. And the best part, once it's set up, a lot of this happens on autopilot. Now, let's break down the main tools that Mailchimp gives you to personalize emails. Access our merge tags within our mail chain, we have to do is first come over here into audience and then come here into settings. Now, once we're in settings, all we have to do is come over here to Audience Fields and Merge tags, and we can click Edit Audience Fields. And now we are brought to this section, which is going to have all of our fields and merge tags. Now, as you can see, a lot of these field labels have different data types associated. So as we can see, things like names, so we have first name here and we have last name down here, these are text data types, but we have phone numbers as well, and these ones are SMS phone data types, and we have email addresses, and they're email data types. Now, these field labels are typically going to be associated with the columns in the CSVs that you're going to be uploading for your audience. Essentially, for all of your audience members, you're going to have these labels associated with them. You're going to have the first name of your audience member. You're going to have the email address to your audience number, and you may have these other fields as well, SMS phone number, company. These are all going to be dependent on the information that you choose to give when you're going to be uploading a CSV or when you're just inputting your contacts into Mailchimp manually. Now, if we want to go ahead and edit one of these merge tags, then what we can do is come up to here and click Create New Field to create a new merge tag. Now, again, the merge tag is going to be what we actually are going to input either in our subject line or in our email body that is then going to replace it with the field label when we are going to be sending these emails out. So, for example, if we put in this ename merge tag, then every time an email is going to be sent out to a specific audience member, then their respective first name is then going to autofill whenever we put this merge tag. If we come back here and to create a new field, we can label it whatever we want it to be. This is just going to be for our own organization purposes. And then for data type, we have all of these options right here. For the most part, you're probably going to be doing text, but as you can see, these other types are self explanator. So if you are going to be putting merge field that is going to be associated with any of these, then you should go ahead and select them. But once you create that field label and you select the kind of data type then you're going to go ahead and name it. So you're going to name the merge tag. So this is going to be the thing that you are going to be typing in either your subject lines or your emails that will then be replaced. And down here, we're also able to check this box if we want to actually require this to save or edit a contact. So now let's actually go ahead and see this in action. We can go over here and click Create, and then we can just do a regular email. So now what I can do is go ahead and edit this text. So let's go ahead and remove this, and I'm going to type something in that has some merge tags. Okay, now, I typed in this little message right here. So I said, Hey, first name, how was the event name webinar? Now, as you can see, these aren't formatted the way the merge tags are. Now, I did this on purpose, just so I can show you how easy it is that we can input these merge tags in without actually going and typing them out ourselves. Now, what I'm going to do is go ahead and get rid of this. Delete, and then I can come up here into merge tags, click this job down, and then select First Name. So now we see it inputted here properly, and we didn't have to type it out ourselves, which leaves room for any personal errors that we can make. And it's just an easier, more efficient way to go ahead and apply these merge tags within our email. Now let's go ahead and do the same thing right here. I can delete this event name, and I can go ahead and put an event right here within my merge tags. Now, this is one that I created myself. Now, there you have it. Once these are going to be sent out to all the people in my audience, then they're going to be sent out with their respective names and the overall event name. And next, we have tags, and tags are sticky notes that you add to contact based on who they are or what they've done. So you could add tags like attended webinar, high value lead, course buyer beginner level, or no response three emails. You can assign them automatically based on signup source, campaign clicks, behavior and a journey, and more. So when looking at tags in our Miltim dashboard, we can come here again under audience and select tags. Now, from this point, if we want to create a new tag, then it's as simple as coming up here, and we can name this whatever we want. Now I went ahead and name this event attendee. Now I can click Create. So once we create this tag and we want to actually associate it with specific people in our audience, what we can do is then go over here into audience, and then we can go ahead and scroll down and we can select any amount of people that we want to associate this tag too. And then I can go over here and click Tag Contacts. And as you can see, my event attendee tag is right here. But I could also choose more tags if I want. But if we're just going to do this event attendee tag, then I can go ahead and select that and click Apply. Next, we have segment. Segments are groups based on shared data. Now, to create a segment, we're going to come here under audience, and we are going to select segments, and then we can come here and click Create segment. Now, from here, we're given all of these options to create these segments of our audience. Now, what I want to focus on are these right here. This is going to be part of Mailchimp's predicted demographics feature. Now, part of this predictive demographics feature is essentially what it does. We're going to cover this more later in this course, but it predicts these kind of demographics from our audience. So, let's say that we want to create a segment that's based on men who live in New York between the ages of 18 to 24. Well, to do so, first, we can set in a predicted location, and let's go ahead and increase this to 50 miles. And then we can just type in New York City then we can validate this location. So essentially, it's just confirming, is this the location that you meant when you type that in. Then we're going to confirm that. So now we can see that it's verified. Then we're going to add an A. So next we're going to come back down here. Now we're going to go to predicted gender, and then we're going to make sure the predicted gender is male. Then lastly, we're going to add one more ad, and then we can come here and we could select a predicted age range. And, yep, right here, it has a default set in to 18 to 24, but we also have all of these other options as well. So there you have it. This was a segment that we've now created of our audience that is super specific. We have men aged 18 to 24 that live within 50 miles of New York City. So once you create a segment, you can then target it with specific messaging or contaent. For example, your segment could be unengaged subscribers, no opens in 90 days. And then your campaign can be something like, We Miss you, still want to hear from us? It's personalized not in tone, but in timing and intention. That's just as powerful. And next, we had dynamic content blocks. And this is where it gets really interesting. Because let's say that you're promoting a product, but your audience includes yoga instructors, marketers, and small business. Send three different emails. Instead, you want to send one email with sections that change based on who is reading. Now, Mailchimp's conditional content blocks let you show or hide sections based on your tags groups or fields. So, for example, if a user is tagged marketer, it'll show a section with Google Ads integration. Or if a user is tagged yoga instructor, then you can show a scheduling integration instead. The same email shell, but with personalized guts. Next is customer journeys with branching logic. And automated journeys are the real magic. These ones are email sequences that react to user behavior, timing, and attributes. Did someone click a link? Then send a follow up. They ignore two emails, switch the approach. They purchase. If yes, you can then move them to a post sale journe. Now, I have an entire lesson dedicated to these customer journeys, so you should go ahead and check that one out. Because here Mailchimp allows us to create branches in the journe. So each person goes down path that's customized to exactly what they had up. Here I do want to mention, if you want to create these branched logic journeys, then you have to have at least a standard plan. So an essential or free plan won't cut at you. Here you're basically giving people different experiences without ever writing another email and once it's bill, it runs on its own. Next, we have predictive demographics and AI. This is one of Mailchimp's newer features, and we're going to cover them in much more detail later in the course. But essentially, based on activity and data patterns, Melhimp is able to guess these things. First, age range, gender, optimal sunt, and engagement probability. Now, it's not always 100% accurate, but it helps. You can use this data to do so much. You can adjust your tone in design, optimize your subject blinds, and choose the best time to send. Here, you're no longer guessing. You're using data to get closer to your customer. Now, bringing this all together, let's say that you're launching a new digital product, an online course on productivity. And the first step in this, you can tag everyone who's downloaded your free productivity guide as interested productivity. You can then segment them based on whether they've clicked on a previous sales email. Then you can use dynamic content to adjust the call to action depending on whether they visited your pricing paint then we can integrate a customer journey in here. So we can set it to if they click, but don't purchase, then they get a testimonial email two days later. And if they ignore the last email, then they'll get a final closing soon reminder with a different toe. All of this is powered by Mailchimp's personalization tools, and all of it makes your emails feel mv it. Lastly, let's talk about testing and optimizing your personalization. Because it's personal, it doesn't mean that it's perfect. So here are a few tips. You should AB test personalized subject lines versus generic wts. You should also track which of your audience segments convert the best, and you should use engagement metrics like open rate, click through rate, and purchase rate to refine your flows. So you're not just sending smarter emails, you're learning what actually works for your audience. Personalization is no longer optional. It's the difference between landing in someone's inbox and getting ignored without a second thought. Mailchimp gives you the tools. Merge tags, segments, dynamic blocks, journeys, and even AI. So you can start simple. Add a tag, personalize the subject blab. Then you can go deeper. You can build journeys, experiment with branching, customizing content blocks. And once you've got all of this dialed in, your emails won't just reach inboxes. They'll resonate. 12. Send High-Converting SMS Campaigns: Alright, now it's time to get into the SMS part of Mailchimp. Now, for the most part, Mailchimp is known as an email marketing software, but they have added integration with SMS with texting. A lot of you who got this course probably didn't enter with any kind of expectation about SMS marketing. And some of you probably didn't know this even existed on Mail Chip. But regardless of all of that, one thing that I want to make clear is that this should be something that you should not ignore. At the very least, SMS marketing should be something that you test out to see how it works with your audience, because connecting with our audience on a whole different touch fot can be something that can be extremely powerful and extremely effective in increasing our conversions. So let's go ahead and get this SMS program on MailChip up and running, and let me show you first step is that we're going to have to import some contacts. So go ahead and do that. Now, once you have your audience with SMS functionality enabled, then it's time to create our first SMS message. Now, what I want to show you is creating a welcome message. So let's go ahead and create this welcome automation with our texts. So I'm going to go ahead and click Use This journey and click Continue. So once you set up your SMS, you have two options here. You can either click this button here, which includes imported contacts. So this means that once you finish this setup, then it's going to send this automation out to everyone that you've already uploaded. Or you could go ahead and uncheck it, and then this automation will only run from the new people that you add to your audience. So I'm going to go ahead and keep it unchecked, and I'm going to click Save Starting Point. So now we have to actually create the welcome message. Let's go ahead and click this and we can see that this sent is the first thing, and then the next thing, which is going to be a little bit more important here is going to be the content. So let's go ahead and click Edit Content. Alright, so now we are here within the Edit SMS layout. Now, we have two options here. We can go ahead and type out our message ourselves or we can go ahead and have AI write it for. So let's go ahead and go with that option. So we can go ahead and click this right here, and then we can type in a little bit of a prompt. So, as you can see, it has some suggestions right here for us, so announcement about an upcoming site. Welcome to new subscribers, invitation to holiday event. So let's go ahead and do a welcome too. And then welcome to new subscribers who just Okay, so I just said, write a welcome to new subscribers who just purchased a course. So I can click Generate and now it gives us three options for us to choose from. So I'm going to go ahead and choose this third one. But what we can always do is click this shorten but so we can have it give us a shortened message. We can change the tone to be more excited, grateful, heartfelt, do all these things. And then we can also click Try again to just give us another batch of that. So let's go ahead and click Apply. Typically, this would be a link to a website, but for now, I'm going to take it out, and we're just going to have this welcome message. So now from this point, I can just click Save and Continue. And now from this point, we can just click Save and we can click Continue. And then all I have to do is click turn this journey on, and then it's going to be ready to go. Okay, now, before we do that and end this intro SMS lesson, one thing I do want to show you is going back into our SMS content, because this is really where all the kind of magic happens. So as I showed you before, we have a few different ways that we can use the AI. Now, this is always going to be super helpful because it kind of just reduces our time and reduces the headspace that this takes and makes us able to put out our marketing messages and all the work in terms of this when it comes to the content and the copy of it to be super fast and optimized. Now, another thing that we can also add to this message are these little tags right here. So when we add someone to our list they are going to receive this message. One thing that we can do is add in their first name through a merge tag. So I can go ahead and click this and put in their first name. Now, as you can see, right now, it was put at the end, and we can just grab it and dry it here to the beginning. So it would then input their first name. Let's again say it's Sarah Sarah. Welcome to our course. Of course, we also want to change this capitalization right here, and then we can also add in a C. I'll say, Sarah, welcome to our course. Start your learning journey today. Another thing that we can do is also add in some media here. So I can go ahead and add in anything that I want to go ahead and upload and also put this within the text messages. Another thing that we're also able to do is add in some promo codes. So this is going to be something that if you have your store connected to your Mailchimp through Shopify or whatever other provider, then you're also able to put in these promo codes that have a certain expiration date to them. Now, lastly but not least, we also have the emojis that we can add in here. So we have all of these emojis to choose from, and you can go ahead and add them with a click of a you can see, the SMS functionality within Mil Chip is super simple and straightforward. So if you are going to be collecting your leads phone numbers, then this is always kind of a good addition to your marketing funnel because why not? There is our intro lesson to SMS within Melhip. Now, the final thing before we go ahead and conclude this lesson is the template. Pits are one thing that I just wanted to show you real quickly here because these are always great things for us to use and kind of get inspiration from. So as you can see, they have a bunch of different ones here. We have some promotions here. We have some welcome messages, welcome discounts. We have some holiday sales. So as you can see, a lot of these kind of templates are mainly designed for online stores and e commerce, and you can still also search up other text templates online. There are many and millions everywhere for you to go ahead and get this inspiration from. But there we have it. There is your overview of SMS on MailChip. 13. Build a Combined SMS + Email Journey: Okay, so now at this point, since we are familiar with the email marketing within Mailchimp, it's now time to put it all together in one customer journey that is going to have touch points on both email and on SMS. So to do this, we are going to go ahead and start with a welcome email automation. So let's go ahead and select this one, and then we're going to go ahead and build upon it. Right now it's doing some AI work and it's creating us a welcome email. So this is what it has created for us. Right now, it's just a one step sequence. Someone signs up as in we put them into our audience, and then they are going to receive this email. Let's go ahead and click Edit email in Bilter. And right now, since we don't care that much about the content of it, but more about the theory of which step provides what, we're just going to go ahead and leave this email as is. So let's go ahead and click Close. And right now, we can see this customer journey. Right now, Contact signs up to brand subscribers, and then they are going to be sent this welcome email. Now I want this to follow up with another email. So to do that, I'm first going to put in a time delay. So I can add this time delay, and I will set it for one day. So they're going to join, receive this welcome email. Hopefully, they'll see it, and they'll like it, and then we can go ahead and follow up with another email. In this email, just so we can see the kind of gist of it, what I'm going to go ahead and do is set in a subject line. So we understand what each step of the process is supposed to mean. If we think our first email is like a welcome to the community email, this email can be a here's what to expect. And then we can go ahead and click Save. Then we can click Close. Right now, we have a welcome email. We have a one day delay, and then we have another email that is essentially saying, Here's what you can expect in this community. Now we are going to put in one more time delay right here. We are also going to have it set at one day, and now it's time to add in our first SMS message. Now we can go ahead and edit the content of this one because this is going to be something super simple. Now, here I can put something that essentially creates a little bit of urgency and gets them to check their email, the email that we just sent one day ago. So let me type something up, and then I'll come back to you. So now I have this text message typed up. I said, Hey, first name, check your email. We just sent you something special. This text message can create some urgency and have them check their email, and it can be accompanied by another email that I sent with some kind of little gift or something like that. Let's go ahead and click Save and Continue, and I'll click Save here. And then what I can do, instead of adding any delay because I told them to check their email, what I want to do is have an email that is sent immediately after that text is sent to them. This email subject can be something special for you. The subject would be something special for you. And within this email, I'll give them some little gift, something that would be relevant to the community. I can go ahead and click Save, and we can close this. Now we can do is add in a IL statement. So because I gave them a special offer in there, this I L statement can be essentially saying, Did they click the link with the special offer? If not, I'll send them one email. If they did, I'll send them another. So we can go ahead and scroll all the way down here and we can click here with a Link click. So the conditional statement is going to be this Link yes, I can then send a follow up, either an email, SMS or both, and then I'll essentially thank them for whatever, or I'll just be sending them another follow up message. So checking in on if they liked it or whatever it would be that is something that will be relevant to the thing that I gave them. If they didn't click it, what I can do is send in an SMS to them. So I'll go ahead and drag that, put that here. Let's go ahead and edit the content, and I can say something like this. So this would be the message that I can send. I would say first name, still thinking it over. Your offer is about to expire. So let's go ahead and click Save and continue. And then I can send another follow up email. I'll put in a time delay. Let's say this time delay will be just for one day. And then the email will be the last thing of this sequence, and it'll essentially just have a subject line that will say last chance to claim your author. So I can go ahead and click Save close. So now we have created a completely integrated customer journey with SMS and email within this. So let's go ahead and zoom out of this. And we can take a look. As you can see, that took not long at all, but it looks like something that is super complicated. Now, I think we did a pretty good job with this, and I think that this exact kind of automation could be something that you could use within your business. This is something that will span across a couple of different niches and industries. This one is just a good kind of broad customer journey that you can go ahead and do. All right, so we can just do one last scroll through of this. So again, they will sign up to this. That will start this automation. We'll send them a welcome email to our community. There'll be a one day delay, and then we'll send an email that is essentially saying what they can expect within this community. And then there's going to be another one day delay, and then we follow up with a text message that is essentially saying that we sent them some special offer then without a delay, immediately after this text message, we send them that special offer, and then the special offer is going to be in a link form within this email. So then we send this Ise condition. So if they did click it, then we could send them a thank you or a follow up email or text message, and if they didn't, then we can follow up with a text message. This text message says still thinking it over. You offers about to expire, and we wait one day, and then we send an email that is essentially saying that it is their last chance to claim this offer. There you have it. This is how we can integrate SMS and email in one customer journey. 14. Use Mailchimp AI Tools to Improve Your Email Content: Preface this lesson by saying that this might be one of the most valuable features within Mailchimp. Now, don't get me wrong. Our templates and automation are amazing. They're spectacular. They save us so much time compared to what email marketing was just a few years ago. But now, one thing that's changed not only email marketing, but the world in general is AI. And luckily for us, with Mailchimp, they have an AI integration within the software. So this not only helps us craft better and more compelling subject lines and body text, but it also saves us so much time. So let me just go ahead and show you the extent to which we can actually use Mil Champ's AI feature. So let's go ahead and enter in our email, and I'm going to go ahead and select regular, and our email name here is going to be AI. So let's click begin. Now, I'm actually going to go ahead and use a template that we created earlier within this course. That was an example Mailchimp promo email. Now, I went ahead and created all of this myself. But let's try to use Mailchimp's AI feature to maybe spiff it up a little bit. Okay, so how do we even access this? Well, first, it has to be on something that is a text based element. That means it has to be a heading or a paragraph that we could go ahead and use the AI feature. On Mailchimp, their AI is this little thing right here. So we can go ahead and click it right with AI. And as you can see, right now, it highlighted this, and it's telling me that I'm able to do a few things here. So I can shorten it. I can change the tone right here. And if I wanted to, what I could do is go ahead and create something completely new. So as you saw right there, I'll just do that again for you. I can click right with AI, and then I can click Custom and I can type in the prompt right here. So let's go ahead and type in a prompt. Okay, so I went ahead and typed in this prompt, and I said, create a header to a promotional email that is marketing my new Mailchimp course. So let's go ahead and click Generate and see what happens. Okay, so now we have three different options here. So discover the power of email marketing with our new Mail chip master class, enroll in our new Mail chip master class today, and transform your email marketing skills with our latest Mailchimp master class. So let's go ahead and click Shorten right now. So we can get some new variations that are going to be maybe a little shorter than those previous. You can see right now, it created three new variations for me, but if I still want to use one of the prior ones, then you could go ahead and click this button right here to see those first ones that I created. Now, what if I want to go ahead and change the tone to these? So I can change it to be, let's say, a little bit less markety and more authentic. As you can see, it created these three variations, but these ones are all way too long to have in the header of this email. So I'll again click Short end. Okay, so now we have these three short end variations. Go ahead and change this tone again. Let's go ahead and put a witty one to see what it comes up with. Ready to master your email marketing, join our Mail chip master class and add some bizarre to your campaigns because who doesn't want to be an email wizard? Sign up and sprinkle some magic on your campaigns. And we have this last one, as well, and I think these are all quite funny ones. But one thing that I do like about these is that they are two separate statements, and I can use them separately in different places within my email. Right now, what if I wanted to have this one right here, I just wanted to have this first statement right here. Ready to master email marketing? Well, I could then it all is going to autofill right here within my header. And now what I can do is just go ahead and delete this and I can just have this right here. Now, also, if I want to, I can go ahead and click this, change the alignment and make that centered, and I can do the same thing right here with this image. So I can go over here into styles, and then I can click Center line. Now this is like this. If I were to have something like this where it doesn't necessarily say the course name specifically, what I would want to have is a paragraph below that's going to describe it a little bit more. Now, of course, I'll probably have something about Mailchimp in the subject line of this email. So this also kind of gives me some leeway or some excuse to not put Mailchimp right here in the title. I went ahead and added a body text write here. So now, just as we did before, let's go ahead and click write with AI, and then I can tell the AI what to write. And as we saw before an earlier lesson, we see that we have some suggestions here, but I'm going to go ahead and type in a prompt myself. Okay, so I just wrote this little prompt right here. I said, create promotional email body text for a new Mailchimp course. Students will learn how to craft compelling emails, create marketing automations, and integrate AI along their journey. So I can go ahead and click Generate and let's see what it creates for us. So as we can see, we have three options right here, just as we had before. And because I told you it was body text, it created them to be a little bit longer. Now, of course, the AI and Mailchimp isn't necessarily going to give you the best kind of copy in its first but because we have so many options here about being able to change the tone, and, you know, we have our own smarts to be able to go ahead and edit what it gives us, it just makes the process a lot easier because although it's not going to be perfect, we can always go ahead and click Apply right here, and we can do our little edits to make it perfect. So from this point, what I can do is grab this text, and I can make it a little bit bigger right here. So I think this is a great size. Another thing that I want to show you is how we can go ahead and edit existing text. So right here, I have these two courses of mine that I put in, and I also put these little blurbs about them. I have my Pints marketing course, and I also have my newsletter marketing course. Now, let's go ahead and click right here in this little blurb that I put about my newsletter marketing course, and I can click right with AI here. Can do a bunch of things right here. So I can just allow it to get creative and do what it wants. I can fix some spelling and grammar. I can lengthen it, so make it a little bit longer. I can shorten it. And, of course, as before, I can also change the tone. And lastly, I can go ahead and click Custom here, and I can tell it to do something very specific with the text that I have. Now to kind of just play around with this, let's go ahead and click Get Creative and see what it comes up with. As we can see, we have three different variations here, as we always do. And I think this get creative function is something that's kind of fun because oftentimes you'll type something, and, you know, you're not very sure if there's some other way that you could put it that you might like a little better. And this is just one way that we can go ahead and check that super quickly. So I can go ahead and apply this second one. Now it's time to check out how we can use these AIs to boost our subject lines as well. So let's go ahead and click Save and Exit. Alright, so we are now back here and we're able to create a subject line for our email. So let's go ahead and click right here. Now, typically, what we're able to do is just type in our subject line right here and it'll give us some kind of pointers right here. We're also able to add some preview text. But what I want to do in this lesson is show you how we can use AI to create both of these for us. So let's go ahead and click Get Started. Then I can create a little prompt. All right so the prompt that I put right here, I said that my email is about a promotional email for a new mail champ course. Now, one thing that I also recommend that you select is what the purpose of your email is about. Now, this is all kind of just giving this AI the most information possible to create the best thing it can for us. Now, this is something that is just a kind of overall AI principle that you want to give it the most information possible so it can execute your task to the best of its I can select announce here or I could do sell products. Now, I'll just do sell products, and then I can click Generate. So there you go. I popped up super quickly, and we have four different variations right here. So as we can see, this big text here is going to be our subject line, and then the small text is going to be preview. Now, if you don't like the ones that it gave right here, what you can do is come to these three dots, and then you could click try again. And then, as you can see, it's going to generate some more you still don't like any of these and you thought that one from the original batch was the best, then you can go ahead. Click this back arrow just as we could earlier. So let's go ahead and select this one right here. So, personally, if I were to use this, I'd probably get rid of this enroll now just to make it a little less markety. And what I would also do is I would add in a merge tag right here. So as we can see right here, this is essentially what the final email would look like. I entered in that merge tag of their first name, so their first name would populate when they receive it. So let's say that Sara received this email, I would say, Sarah, transform your marketing with Mailchimp. And then the preview text under would say discover the secrets to effective email campaigns. One thing that's great about these AI features, especially here within the subject lines, is that when you create your account and you select the industry that you're working in, it is going to tailor the subject lines that it gives you to your industry. So because I said that I was in marketing, it gave me marketing suggestions within the things that they created for us. Just another thing that can kind of help you appreciate and honestly maybe amaze you about the tech and kind of the intelligence that goes into this. Here's how we can use AI within Mailchimp to the maximum ability to not only save us time but create us great copy. 15. Design Emails That Match Your Brand Perfectly: Now it is time to work within the creative assistant within Mailchimp. Now, this one is super fun because, first off, what it's able to do is scrape a website of ours, and it's able to pull in all the information that is going to be relevant in creating a consistent brand image across all of our marketing efforts. Now, I know I just sounded like an ad right there, but this is pretty cool functionality that it has within us right here. Let me go ahead and click right here. I'm going to reset the brand, and I'm going to go ahead and just put in Mailchimp's so we get to see what it does for us. So I'm going to click Delete and Reset brand, and I'm going to click and Import my brand. As you can see right now, it's going to compile the logo, the colors on the website, the fonts and images. So while it does this, let's go ahead and take a look at Milchimp's website. Right now, this is what melchimp.com looks like. So it has this image right here. You can see that there is a consistent font. There's this consistent yellow color right here. So now let's go back into the creative assistant. So as you can see right now, it just loaded up with these email designs for us to go ahead and use. So now let's go ahead and check out this brand as you can see, they pulled all of this from the website. So I pulled in the logo right here. I pulled in the colors. I pulled in the kind of button design, and it pulled in the secondary font. It wasn't able to get this primary font right here because I think this is one that is specific to Mailchimp, that they created this specifically for their brand. But it was able to get in all of this, and it looks pretty good and accurate. Other things that we can do with this brand kit is that we could go ahead and come here into this design. And then if it's giving us designs that aren't necessarily matching our brand, and we can come over here and we can click tweak our brands personality. And then what we're able to do is, first off, choose a kind of style that most accurately defines our brand. So let's go ahead and do minimalist right now. What it does is it auto fills these selections right here. Now, as you can see, if I click different ones, it's essentially defining these styles on the same metrics. So no matter what you choose, it kind of gives you a kind of default layout for it, but you could go ahead and choose anything that you want right here yourself to make it a little bit more kind of accurate to your specific brand. You do these, you can go ahead and save your changes. And you can come over here. And the next thing I want to show you is the different sizes that we can work with right here. As you can see, there are a lot to work with. So it doesn't only give us kind of designs that we can use within our email, but it also gives us website designs. Let's go ahead and click this one. This would be something on our landing page. So the first thing that people see when they go on our website. You can see, we have these hero images. And if we don't like this kind of animated look to this, if we want it to just be a stagnant thing, then we can go ahead and turn off this anime, and it looks just like this. We can even look at more kind of things that we can go ahead and put within our email. Let's say we want to have something that's square. We can size it down to make it a little bit smaller of a thing within our email. And the same thing before we can turn off this animate. Once we have these designs and we see one that we like, for the most part, we can do is click Edit Design. And within this, we kind of operate kind of like it's Canva. All of these buttons that are going to be here are going to also link to our website. As you can see, there are a lot of ways that we can go ahead and edit these. We can even choose different images if we want to. Let's go ahead and close this. We can change this CTA button right here. We can alter the position of it. We can move it over in little segments. We can change the title on it, so the text on the button, and we can even change the button style right here. Now, let's go ahead and back out of this. We can save and exit. Once we created one that we like, like this one, we can go ahead and click Select style, and we can go ahead and save it to our design library. Let's just go ahead and type in anything here? Basic Photo. We click Save. And now it is here within our design library to use either in our emails or even in the website that we will be creating later in this course. Now, what if you don't have a website, and you're just working on email, and your brand is something that you don't have kind of based in the domain. Well, let's go over to Brand kit, and I'll show you how we can work with. First, let me go ahead and get rid of all of these, and then we're going to come back and we can act as if we don't have a website. So now I went ahead and got rid of everything that I could. Right now, if you have nothing, it's going to be super simple for you to go ahead and add stuff. So we can go ahead and click right here and click Add logo, and then you can go ahead and upload your logo right here. Don't have one, you could simply create one in Canva or even other logo creators. Alright, so I went ahead and uploaded this logo right here. So now it's going to ask us two questions about our logo. It's saying, Can this logo be applied on white or light backgrounds? I'm going to say yes. And can this logo be applied on dark backgrounds? I'm going to keep this off as no. So I'll make save changes. And now we can go back. I could adjust the fonts, but I think these ones are going to be fine for us. And now I'm going to add in some colors. Let's say I want to have a darker gray, be a primary color, and then the secondary color, I could just set it as black. Now it's asking me another question. Can this be used as a background color? And I'll say. Again, it's asking me here, can this logo be applied on a background of your color? And I'm going to say, no. So let's go ahead and it out and save changes. Now, lastly, we have our button styles. So these are going to be our CTAs. For the most part, if you don't have a website that this is going to link to, then your buttons aren't going to matter that much. Bart, I'm going to go ahead and still design this just to show you how we can do it. So first, we have our shape. We can go rounded or we can go a full on pill. I'm going to go ahead and keep this square. Now we can have either an outline of a text or we can have this filled box. Alternatively, we can also add in different colors. So a different one for the background button, and then a different color for the text. Then we can adjust the font, and then it's going to ask us a few questions here. I'm going to go ahead and keep these selections as they are. So we can click XNw and we can click Save Changes. So now I can go ahead and come back here and I'll click Create new design. And right here, we're going to just answer some questions. Let's say that I want to sell products. I'm next. And then we can keep this heading the same. You can change this to be whatever you want, or you can just skip it. I'm going to click Next. And then I just went ahead and removed that picture. And another thing that we could do is also suggest smart photos. So these are going to be other photos that kind of gives us as a little template to use, but for the most part, I would just remove them. Here, you want to make sure that you have at least one image so that it can actually generate some designs for us. So I'm going to just go ahead and choose a thumbnail of mine. So let's go ahead and use this Pinterest marketing thumbnail, and then I'm going to click Generate Designs. We can see, it created these little designs for us. But we can see that the text is not working on this background because it's a white text on a white background. So let's go ahead and edit this design, and we can go ahead and go to the text color right here and set it as black, so we can see this. This wouldn't really work for Pinterest marketing image because it's turned emails and SMS into revenue. So this would be something that's more akin to, like, a mail chimp marketing message. This will be fun for us. I can go ahead and now click Back and save and exit. So just as we did before, if we want to use this, we can go ahead and click Select Sile and then we can save to our design library. And I'll just say Pinterest and save. Now to finish off this lesson, let's see how we can actually put one of these designs within an email that we're sending out. So I'm going to go ahead and go back to our email templates, and I'm going to use the one that we used most recently. And now what I can do is find a space. Let's say this one right here. I'm going to go ahead and delete this block completely, and I'm going to go ahead and drag in our creative assistant. So now once we have the creative assistant dragged in, what I can do is come over here and I can have it generate some content for me. So I can either select the image right here or I can go click more right here, and then it takes me to the designs that it already had created. So I can go ahead and just use this one. I can click it right here, a left click, and then I can click Insert. As you can see, and now put this directly into our email. So this functionality can be something that can really beef up your emails because not only are they going to be very visually engaging, but they're also going to be relevant and they have functionality to them because they can click this, and then they will be redirected to whatever source you want. In my case, it would be directed to my Pinterest marketing course. Now there is one last thing that I do want to show you before we go ahead and end this lesson. And that's going to be how our templates that Mailchimp creates us are going to be influenced by the brand details that we put in. So let's go ahead and click Done here, and let's exit, and I'll come back to you. Now we are here in our create section of Mailchimp. So what we can do is come here into email. We can come down into template, and then we can click Get Started. Now, if we go ahead and scroll down, we can see that we have some templates that are inspired by our brand design. Let's go ahead and simply click this one right here, important notification. As we can see, it has our fonts, our logo, and our button style. If we were to have some more colors in our brand kit, then they would probably also show up here as well. So this just goes to show that importing our brand kit within Mailchimp can help us create more consistent and less time consuming designs within Mailchimp. 16. Use AI to Improve Your Email Targeting: Now it's time to get into the nitty gritty about what's actually going to be educating a lot of the decisions you're going to be making in your marketing efforts. Things that are going to be educating your decisions are your analytics behind all of your campaigns. As we can see right here, we have an entire section within Mailchimp that is dedicated to these analytics under our marketing dashboard. This lesson is essentially going to be going over this and the things that we want to pay attention to and the things that we can go ahead and shift around to our liking. Now, the first thing that we see is that we have these options right here. So we can filter between a specific date range, and this date range is going to max out at one year ago from the day that you were checking this. Now the next thing that I want to bring your attention to is this little button right here, and this is exclude Apple MPP for more accurate open data. Now, I will always have this button selected. And this is essentially because Apple has this MPP. It's mail privacy protection. And this essentially means that whenever you send emails to people that have this Apple MPP enabled, then the analytics that we're going to be getting on those aren't going to be very accurate because the ones that we send to people with this enabled, Apple essentially opens the emails themselves because what essentially happens is that when Apple downloads them to the server, Mailchimp is going to detect this as being an open email, even though the recipient didn't necessarily open it. It was just something that happened in this process that Apple has. So in order to exclude these variables that we are unsure of, you should always have this checked off so you can have the most kind of accurate data. Now, next, we see this monitor performance section. So this is essentially going to be a quick little rundown of some key attributes. So as we can see, we have four here. We have total Sands, open rate, click rate, and unsubscribed rate. So if we want to, we can go ahead and click this Edit button, and we are able to change the metrics that this shows us. So for now, I'm going to go ahead and keep it all the same. It's divided into two sections. We have the engagement section here and we have the delivery section right here. So each one has about six different kind of metrics that we can look at. So let's go ahead and click Save. Now below each of these, we get to see the specific platform that they are referring to. So right here under Total Sens, it's going to have one total number, but then it's going to have a breakdown of how many of these were on email, as you can see with this icon, and how many of them was through SMS. Now, open rate is only going to be tracked on email, but you can see that these other three, click rate, unsubscribed rate, and Total Sens are tracked on both email and SMS. Now let's go ahead and look at this next section, which is performance overtime. So we can essentially choose the metric that we get to see a line graph of. So if I want to see my click rate over time, then I can have that here. I can do clicks per Unique opens, and I can have open rate. So with open rate, right here, I have it selected. Most of these metrics, we would want to see an upward trending graph in. So this is just something that you want to keep in mind. Your open rate should hopefully be pretty high. So we can also filter these between days, weeks and months right here. So as you can see in this conversion section, it's going to be mainly measured by click rate right here. Again, the click rate is going to be the percentage of people that click through a link in the message that we sent them. And then below right here, we get to see the kind of breakdown of this. So we get to see the total amount of messages that we deliver. Let's say, these are emails. So we have the total amount of emails, and then we get to see how many of these emails that we sent were actually opened. And the drop off is going to be the difference between these two. Then the same exact thing happens here with from opened to click through, and we get to see the drop off again is going to be the same as the difference between here. If we look at the conversions over time, this hopefully is going again to be a graph that is going to be upwards. And if it's not, then that indicates that there is going to be some kind of inefficiency within your marketing. That is going to be something where you should be looking in more closely as to what exactly is the problem. Now, here, this is exactly where AB tests are going to be your best friend. E tests are really just going to help us get these upward trending graphs until we have them all next out. Now, as you can see here, we can also break this down into email, SMS. We can go ahead and have it all, and then we can see that they are going to be separated by different colors here. And just as before, we can break it down into days, weeks and months. Lastly, in this section, we have delivery. So this is essentially going to be the amount of emails that were actually delivered. Right now, we have the metric set at abuse report rate. So this is going to be tracking the amount of people that reported our emails for abuse or spam or whatever. This one hopefully will maintain being at 0%. But as you can see, there's a couple other metrics that are relevant to delivery. So, for example, we have bounce rate. Bouncers are essentially the emails that didn't get to their desired location. They didn't get to the person's inbox. So instead of delivering, they bounced. Next metric we have here is delivery rate. So this is just going to be the percentage of emails that actually made it to an inbox. Lastly, we have our unsubscribe rate. So this is going to be the percentage of your audience who has unsubscribed from your emails. And of course, just as before, we can break this down between email and SMS. Now, the next section of this analytics is going to be audios. Now, in our audience, we get to see a full breakdown here. So first, you want to select the audience that you're going to be talking about. As I told you earlier in this course, we want to have one single audience to compile everyone, and this is partly a reason for that. So we get to have all the analytics in one place. So here, it's nice that we can see just a little bit more of a breakdown here. Now, because all of these subscribers, for the most part, I added in longer than a month ago, we don't get to see any kind of a change here. We see recently that I added in somebody right here, but we can't see anything past that. But of course, we are always able to change the date range right here as well. Lastly, what we have in this lesson is going to be the report section in our analytics. So reports are essentially breakdowns of our overall marketing efforts. So what we're able to do is instead of being here in analytics and we see it between a specific date range, we can come to reports and we can see analytics that are specific to the exact campaigns or exact emails that we sent. As you can see here, we can change the status. We can change it to be ongoing. We can change it to be completed. We can change them to be emails, SMS, automations, ads, social post service, all of it. For example, if I go ahead and look at this survey down here, I can click View Report. And here I get to see all the stats associated with it. So I get to see the open rate, I get to see the click rate and unsubscribe rate from it. So as we scroll down, we can see a little bit more information about this specific survey. So I can change the metrics here. I can change clicks per unique opens. And one thing that I next want to show you is right here under our predicted demographics. So predicted demographics is a very cool and unique tool within Milch. So what predicted demographics essentially tells us is, who are we reaching out to? So sometimes we're not going to have this information because oftentimes we're only going to be getting our leads emails. But through these predicted demographics and all the data that male chimps on their end, they're essentially able to predict what our audience looks like. Not only do they give us the genders, female male, but they also give us age ranges. Now, this is huge because knowing exactly who's consuming our content is going to educate us so much in the kind of language and the kind of way that we are approaching our marketing because at the end of the day, marketing is all about the people that we are speaking to. So as we scroll down, we can also see a little bit more information about also the places that people open these from. Now, if you continue to consistently run campaigns on Mailchimp, then this predicted demographics is going to be something that shows up in your audience dashboard. So now that we are here in our dashboard, what we can do is scroll down and we get to see this predicted demographics. Now, this is only going to show up if you have a standard plan. So an essentials or free plan will not show up here. And what's really cool about this is that we are able to target these specific ranges with marketing campaigns. So I can go ahead and target right here my 62% male demographic. Let's go ahead and target this, and then we can click Create an email. So now from this point, what I could do is create this basic layout, and then I can create an email that is going to be sent out only to this what it thinks is my predicted male segment of my audience. So before, as I told you, knowing exactly who we're targeting and who we're speaking to is something that can really be invaluable in our marketing efforts. Because if we're able to speak directly to the needs of the individuals that we're reaching out to, then converting them and making them our customers, our clients, whatever is going to be a much easier task. So that is it for this lesson. We went over predicted demographics and the analytics that we want to look at and creating and helping us inform our marketing strategies and marketing efforts. 17. Get an Overview of What We’ll Build: Okay, let's talk about one of the most underrated features in Mailchimp, one that turns it from an email tool into an actual marketing machine. I'm talking about building your own landing page or even a basic site directly inside Mailchimp. Now, when people think of Mailchimp, they usually just think about email campaigns, right? Write a message, hit send, and check your open rates. That's it. But Mailchimp has been expanding a lot in the last few years, and now it lets you do something incredibly powerful. Creating a full website that connects directly into your automations and your audience. Oh, what does that actually mean for you? It means that you don't need a separate platform like Squarespace, WordPress or Webflow, just to collect leads. You don't have to worry about integrations or copying form code or syncing up your lists. You can just build a page, embed a lead magnet using forms, and then start collecting sign ups. All of this is inside the same tool that you're using to email those sign ups. Now, here's where it gets even better. Because it's all under one roof, Mailchip knows exactly what each lead is doing. So if they signed up from your site or a campaign, the specific form they used, what and how many pages they visited, what lead magnets that they grabbed, and how they later interacted with your emails or abandoned your funnels. That's insane visibility, and that kind of data means smarter segmentation, better personalization, and higher conversion rates across the board. So in this section, we're going to explore exactly how we can use Mailchimp to build that kind of setup, one that doesn't just look pretty, but actually works to grow your list and feed your funnel. Here's how we'll break it down. First, I'll share some lessons on my best selling landing page design course. I'll talk about design principles and break down some top performing landing pages. Then I'll walk you through the different types of lead magnets so you can create the perfect one for your site. And then I'll walk you through building a landing page directly on Mailchimp and integrating it with your campaigns. And let me leave you with this before we dive in. The biggest mistake that most people make with email marketing is thinking that it starts with the emails. But email marketing starts with List building, and List building starts with landing pages that convert. If you skip this part or just throw up a quick join my newsletter button and hope for the best, then you're going to be missing the foundation. But if you get this right, then you'll have a steady, scalable stream of new leads flowing directly into your ecosystem. And every email that you send after that becomes ten times more powerful. Yeah, we're not just building a page. We're building a system for attention, trust, and growth, and we're doing it all inside of Melchin. So let's get into it. 18. Learn What Makes a Great Lead Magnet: You've gone around the Internet for long enough, then you've probably heard of, consumed, or even interacted with a lead magnet in some capacity. And we've talked about this in past lessons. But in this lesson, we're going to talk about what a lead magnet is and how and when we can use them in our landing page. So a lead magnet is basically a free product that you get in exchange for your contact information where the lead magnet is going to be received. So say you're signing up for a free you'd give your email and you'd receive that book in your email. It makes sense, because a lead, as we know, is someone that meets your ICP. And lede magnet attracts these leads or potential customers. And there are a few layers as to why you'd want to have Elite Magnet The main one is natural. You build an email list and you get contacts for people that you can then reach out in the future with updates, offers or anything else that you're trying to sell. Basically, by giving value for free and upfront, we're able to build an audience that we can then market to in the future. And another level to lid magnet is that it builds trust and compliance with your prospects. As we've spoken about before, the first layer of a funnel might be free content, something that you provide over YouTube, for example. Perhaps you do tutorials of some sort. It would be quite a big jump from consuming your free content to then purchasing your high ticket offer. So a lead magnet can act as a bridge as a layer to the funnel that gets you one step closer to that sale. And that's, of course, because instead of giving you money, they're giving you something as simple as the contact information. Finally, and perhaps the most important part of the lead magnet is the notion of reciprocity. This is something that most Uber successful online businesses are doing. And it's the concept of giving a lot of value, information or knowledge upfront without asking for anything in return. And this does so much for your brand. First, it shows your prospects the value that interacting with your brand has. If this is free stuff and it's so valuable, imagine how valuable the paid stuff will. Second, it's also a great chance to establish your expertise. Here is basically where you flex your knowledge and show that you know what you're talking about. Your prospects will see that they're in good hands and there'll be a higher likelihood of them purchasing your product. And lastly, if your lead magnet is actually good and valuable, then it can create so much goodwill with your prospects. If you position it in a way where your prospects get immediate value or results, then they're going to want to pay it back or say thank you in some kind of way. And that can come in the form of purchases or reviews, testimonials or anything else of the sort. Basically, this can all just build a lot of positive momentum for your br. Now, there are a bunch of different lead magnets, and finding the right one for your business is going to be important. So let's cover a few of the types of lead magnets so you can make the right choice. One of the OG lead magnets is a guide or an eBook of some sort. This is actually one that I use as part of my funnel, where I provide a 16 page outline that basically guides you on how you can build your own Utomi brand. This sort of lead magnet works great if you're teaching something that's actionable. Like a method or a program. And I've also consumed guides as lead magnets in the real estate as well as fitness spaces, for example. Remember, the idea with a guide, as well as with most lead magnets is to provide as much value as possible. So don't necessarily hesitate to give away super valuable secrets that your audience might find useful. Of course, it's fine to keep some stuff behind wraps, although you don't have to. What's crucial here is really just giving away as much value as possible. You need to give too much or too little away, then I'd for sure lean towards giving away too much. At the end of the day, your upsells will have a different form of value for your audience. So if you're selling coaching, then you can help them with implementing those concepts that are in the guide. Or you can give them specific tailored advice that they couldn't get with just the guide. Basically, with every level of your offer, your audience is looking for a new different kind of value. And for the lead magnet, in this case, it's content and knowledge. So don't hold back. Great case study of this is Alex Hermosi's brand. Hermosi has built a brand that generates over $200 million a year, and everything you see on him online is him giving away some kind of value or knowledge completely for free. He's basically just a huge machine of goodwill and credibility. So businesses pay him for his help and scaling, and he then shares all the knowledge that he gets from helping these businesses scale and puts that online. Other businesses see that he has this tremendous amount of expertise that he has a bunch of clients and that he's also consistent with the results he gets. Means that some businesses are going to apply the knowledge that they get from his free content, but also a lot of businesses are going to look to hire him for his expertise that he's shown off. This means that some businesses will apply his lessons that he teaches and his free content. But many, many others will seek to hire his services as they're so familiar with his expertise. This is all to say that if you're building a guide, don't be afraid to spill all the knowledge that you have on the matter. Of course, it should be in a concise and seamless way, but we'll talk about that in upcoming lesson. Other form of lead magnet, which is probably the most effective in most scenarios is some form of video training. It can either be a short video course, a webinar, or even a single video that solves a problem for your audience. Remember, we already went through this entire process of finding our offer and our audience's pain points. So we already know the problems that they want us to solve for. So the process of deciding on what your lead magnet should be should consist of deciding how to solve your audience's problem in the right medium. A classic way I've used many times for course launches is a three video video course. Basically, your audience signs up for a free course. And for the next week or so, you send out three videos which are part of a longer course. By the end of this, they should have gotten enough value and be confident enough in your skills that they want to buy that full course. And another OG lead magnet is a webinar. Back in the day, people would fake webinars with all sorts of tactics to make it look like they were live and not pre recorded. I don't recommend. Actual live webinars are still a pretty interesting strategy. But I'd reserve that for the more advanced marketers and those of you who already have a pretty big audience. I've also seen one off videos work. If they're specific in solving a problem. Case studies can be a good example. If you're teasing a specific case study in a video that is going to be interesting for your audience, then you could have a full breakdown of that case study on your landing page. Finally, another lead magnet that I've seen people have a lot of success with are questionnaires, tests, quizzes, stuff of that sort. These ones can work really well in certain niches. For instance, anything medically related where you can get a diagnosis after answering a few questions can be really valuable. I know Michael Bruce, whose brand is sleep doctor, has a test that you can fill out to find out your chronosyte. Once you fill out the test, you give your email and you get your results there. These can also be a really good way to rate your skills at some activity. Let's say you sell some kind of copywriting course. You could have a test that has some copywriting exercises that would rate them on a scale of one to ten. This one's pretty effective because first, it makes you seem like the teacher or expert who's rating their ability. And second, if their rating is lower than they expected, then it might give them that extra push to buy your course. I've also seen these types of lead magnets used for matchmaking purposes. Something that's really good about this is that you only ask for their contact information after they already completed the survey test or questionnaire. Because after filling out all that information, it's pretty unlikely that they won't share their contact information with you so they can see their results. Anyway, this was a crash course on lead magnets, so you can pick the one that's right for your business. And future lessons we'll go over each type of lead magnet specifically and show you how to create it. 19. Create a Video-Based Lead Magnet: Previous lesson, we touched on what a lead magnet is. Now in the following lessons, I'm going to take you through the different types of lead magnets, so you can choose one that's specific to your business and your needs. So in this video, we're going to cover how to build a video training lead magnet. Remember, this is a type of lead magnet that works best if you're selling a longer course or coaching of some sort. This training is a great chance to build credibility in your audience's mind and give them a sense of the vast value that you have to offer if they work with you. The template I'm going to go off of to teach you here is the PLF method. PLF stands for product launch formula, and it was developed by Jeff Walker. The idea is simple. Before launching a product, we're going to want to tease it and tease it and tease it until people can't wait to buy it. Since Walker, people have taken this idea to the extreme. As we were discussing in the previous lesson, people are now building personal brands around this notion of providing value for free in a way that when they finally release a paid product, people trust it enough to buy it. So how does this apply to your offer specifically? Well, here's what you're going to do. Ideally, we're going to want to record these lessons from scratch. But if you have some from an old course, we could potentially reuse those. What you should do is take three concepts from your course, coaching, or method, or whatever your offer is. Then you're going to build a lesson around a story. Now, this is important. Let me tell you why. I used to do sales on stage. I'd go up, do my entire spill about a product, then ask people to buy it at the end. I was good. I was really good. So much so that other companies hired me to do this for them. But one day, I had to sell a product that I wasn't confident about. And it was dog food. Five years earlier, my dog Pockets, my best friend, passed away because of eating hyper processed dog food, which was just terrible for him. But this company's very mission was to make the healthiest dog food possible. So they took me to their factories, and they showed me all of their research all to convince me that this dog food was, in fact, healthy. And they did convince me. In fact, that if Pockets had eaten this food, then he wouldn't have passed away. So I stepped on stage the next week and I told my story about pockets. And I'd never sold so many products. Now, everything I just told you is a lie. You're probably super hooked. The moral of the story is that humans like stories. Stories hook, stories sell, and stories are exactly what you need at this stage of the relationship with your audience. Stories are a chance to connect with your audience, to show a genuine side of view. Please don't lie for comedic effect, like I just did. And it attaches an emotional aspect to what they're learning. This is the exact reason why testimonials and success stories are so strong. So take three concepts that you teach and remember a time in your life where those concepts came particularly in handy. Then just build three lessons around those. Now we're going to give these lessons away for free, spread out over a week. But before you do that, you might want to include Jeff Walker's first step to PLF, and that is sending out a survey to your audience to know exactly what it is that they want to be learning. Even if you don't end up teaching exactly what they voted for, it'll feel like they have a say in what you're putting out. This might not necessarily apply to the lead magnet, though. Now, there's two schools of thought about when to send out that first lesson. You can either send it right as they subscribe or the next day. The thinking here being that you're building up anticipation. Personally, I don't think that works anymore nowadays, so I just send it out right away. Alright. So the first lesson should be about ten to 15 minutes long, and it should be giving out as much value as possible. It should solve a subproblem of the problem that your full product or service solves. Something that gives them a quick aha moment. Ideally, something that's actionable. The first video, you don't necessarily want to tease the full product or course too much, but you can definitely start to mention it. Two days after should be your second video. Your second video should be the same idea. Pick another concept and tell another story. This time, you can afford to make a little longer video here because the people that are going to be watching your second video are likely to be more engaged. Now on this video, you want to start seriously mentioning the fact that your new course or mentoring program is going to be opening up at the end of the week. Again, the idea here is to be teasing and teasing and teasing to build up anticipation. Ideally, you should have people emailing you about when the course or coaching is coming out so they can start to buy it. All right. Once that's done, it's time for the last one. In my experience, it's good to give a lot of value in as little time as possible. Best case scenario is you make a five minute lesson where you spend two to 3 minutes teaching and the rest just talking about your course or mentorship. You're going to want to list all the benefits of your product and clarify exactly how it's going to solve your audience's problem. You're going to want to finish with a pretty clear CTA, a call to action unless you want to wait a couple more days to release it to build up anticipation. This one is also a valid option. After completing these lessons, you've now done two important things. First, you've provided your audience with real value and you've laid the groundwork to sell your product or service. And second, you've shown your knowledge and you've connected with your audience and showed them that you're not just there to take their money, but you actually genuinely want to help them. Key here is not just in giving information, but creating a relationship and trust. The more you give them something actionable and helpful upfront, the more likely it is that they're going to invest in your full offer later. So to wrap up, building a video training as your lead magnet is an excellent strategy to showcase your expertise and prime your audience for your bigger offer. By following the steps of the PLF method and using stories to create an emotional connection and giving real value across your three lessons, you set yourself up for a successful launch. So keep the content engaging, solve problems, and end with a really strong call to action. I'll see you in the next lessons where we'll talk about other lead magnets. 20. Offer an Ebook as a Lead Magnet: In this lesson, we're going to get into the first type of lead magnet that we are going to cover. And that is an eBook lead magnet. So, as we've talked about before, eBooks are most useful when you want to give value upfront. So whether you want to give your prospects a guide or a walk through on how to solve a specific problem or pain point of your target audience, this is really going to be most useful to do that. And this doesn't have to be a difficult process at all. It can really be super simple for you to do in an evening. In fact, let me show you how easy it can be. So let's hop into Canva right now, and I'll show you this process. All right. So now we are on Canva, and the first step that you're going to want to do is to just search up here in the content and just type in EBook. So I actually just added multiple pages to my search because if you put EBook and Canva, then you'll often just get the covers of the EBoks. So here we have a bunch of different templates that we can go and look into. And on Canva, what you can do is just hover over them and they'll give you some preview about how it looks. So you're going to want to keep this in mind in building and choosing your own because we don't want to have anything that is too heavy on any specific kind of content. For example, you don't want to have an eBook that is filled with just pictures because then it's going to be kind of difficult to communicate any kind of value to your prospects. On the other hand, you don't want it to be all text, because if it's all text and it's not very engaging, then your prospects probably aren't going to go the entire way through the eBook. And therefore, they're not going to get that much value from it. So, as you can see, there's a bunch of different templates that we have here, and a lot of them look pretty good. They're all very visually appealing. And that's also something that I quite like about Canva. It's the fact that a lot of their stuff, a lot of their templates are actually quite useful. So I'd say what I just mentioned is going to be a prime thing in picking a template. You're really not going to want to have it be heavily based on one form or the other, in terms of having images or text. You want to have a good balance of both. So I'd say to look through a bunch of these and see what kind of template or for fits exactly what it is that you're going to be selling or communicating to your prospects. I actually have an eBook already that I think is quite great in communicating and implementing a lot of these principles that I've been telling you, not only in this course, but also in previous lessons. Alright, so now we're here in this example eBook. And as you can see in the bottom here, it's 16 pages. Remember, the key to these eBooks is going to be communicating as much value as you can to your prospects. And although that's the case, we still don't want to do something that's going to be going overboard. Don't want to have an eBook that is, say, 100 pages because then it's not going to be something that's going to be very digestible for your prospects to go and look over and get a lot of value pretty quickly. So as you can see, this one is 16 pages, and I think something around this length is going to be the ideal length for you to give your prospects. But now actually starting with the content itself, and the first thing we see is the title page. And here, there's not too much to mention and point out, but there are a couple key things here. So the first thing is that the cover to your eBook should contain both some visual kind of stimulation and text. So obviously you should have your title, whatever it is that you are giving to your audience. This is an online course automation walk through. As you can see at the top, business walk through online course automation. And below it, we have a picture that accompanies it. So in terms of the formatting of all of this, if you choose a good template, you shouldn't have to think that much about it. It should all fit in quite well. Okay, so now moving on to the next page, and this one is a welcome page. So with this part, you're going to want to do a couple key things. And, of course, this is all going to be depending on how you're giving this eBook out. But in this case, I know with this person that was giving out this E, they were giving it to people that didn't really know who he was. So in this case, what he decided to do because his prospects didn't really know him or his brand, he decided to say a little bit about himself and why they should trust him. He gave social proof. You see that done in a few ways on this first page. First, you see that he had built multiple five figure online course brands. And a lot of this is talking about that, talking about that and his prior success and why they should trust him. Accompanied by that, he also has a visual representation social proof. So not only is this building further trust between him and his prospects, but it's also getting them excited as to what he's going to be giving them. Because the purpose of this lead magnet is not solely just getting their email from giving this to them, but it's also for building a relationship and continuing that relationship. So we want to make sure that we get them excited in this beginning, so they actually consume the entire thing hopefully take action to get their own results. So when we circle back to them, whether that be through email communication or any other sort, they'll have a positive experience with us and be more likely to then go to that next stage, whatever it may be, either enrolling in our low ticket offer or maybe some premium high ticket program. So let's move on to the next page. This one, yet again, there's not too much to mention here, but it's going to be an essential aspect of your eBook. That's simply a table of contents. Although the table of contents itself is going to be something that's obvious that we're going to be adding to our eBook, it's also a helpful device that we can use in structuring our information and the things that we are going to be sharing because we want this all to flow and make sense from one page to the next. We never want to lose our potential customers along the way. So just thinking about that table of contents even before you create the eBook is probably going to be a helpful strategy for you and just making this easy for you. Alright, so we've covered this now on to the next page. Which is going to be the Chapter one cover. Yet again, another key thing here, like we talked about in the welcome page, is just getting our prospects excited about what we are going to be giving them. And that's exactly what he does here. He talks about basically why his model is going to be very easy and very great opportunity for his prospects to bounce on. Then following that, he has some action steps. So what is it that they're going to be doing in this part of the process? Super simple and clear. What they're going to be doing is going to be picking a profitable and scalable niche. Also, they're going to find a profitable course topic within their niche. So we're only in page four of the 16 page eBook. And he's telling me here I'm going to be able to pick a profitable and scalable niche and find a course topic within this niche that I could then build myself. So if this for me who just got the EBok I would be quite excited to see what he has to say next. So let us do that and continue. So now we're here still in Chapter one. And we have already something that is quite valuable right in front of us. He's communicating here that in this site, um, they have this thing called Utomi Marketplace Insights. And there we're able to see what course topics are going to be profitable for us. And he also tells us how we can interpret these tools into getting the best results. Right here in the bottom, we see what we want the demand and supply to be. Want it to be a high or low or high average. And then we see the percentile, we want over 85th conversion rate less than 5%. And we can see screenshots of this right here where we get to see all of this. Where this in the bottom here is the conversion rate. This is the conversion rate. This is the percentile. And here we can see the student demand. So just on page five, we already have this value that's being given to us, and it's super straightforward and super digestible. Here with the visual representation and these quick little bullet points, we're able to get so much value and understanding of what it is that this means. And I'm not going to go through all of the lessons of this eBook because that might take a while, but I just want you to know the principles that you should really be taking and creating your own. So now we're on this next page, page six, and it's talking about picking your niche. So here you can see that it is a little bit more text heavy, but that also makes a little bit more sense because it's not something that you could just take from that Utomi marketplace insights like he showed above. And this is something where it seems like the person is going to have to make a more accurate decision themselves. So he's doing that, and then he's also below that, he's showing us ideal niche examples. So he's supplementing their knowledge with actionable examples that they could look into themselves. So, we're going to move on from here. And this one is quite crazy. It's 100 course topics researched by him with optimal statistics and the niches as he previously mentioned. So what he did here is he took these example niches. And broke them all up and created an entire table of a bunch of course topics under these niches. Yet again, giving so much value. This makes it super clear that this is something that he actually put time and effort into. So when his prospects see this, it communicates two things. Number one, it communicates his expertise and being able to compile all this. And number two, it communicates his dedication to this. And that dedication can go both ways. It could be a dedication to this thing that he is talking about in this business model, but it also is a dedication to giving value to his people. So far, this page is the least visually engaging out of all of them, but that is completely fine because it makes up with it by giving so much value. So let's move on and see the next page. And that's in a bed Chapter two, creating courses. And here you see the same things that I've been reiterating, and it's staying visually engaging. He has an image here. He has a nice looking page and some text that isn't going to be too overbearing. So next page we're going to be moving into. This one, he talks about finding instructors. Yet, again, the same things apply. He has an image and he has text that's clear what this is about, but it's not too text heavy where people are just going to kind of look over and just see that it's like a word salad and not read it. Okay, now moving on to the next page. And this one is going to be a kind of step by step demonstration. And this is a great tool that he used here because he's breaking down this kind of complex business model and something that's super simple and digestible for his prospects. Not only is he just telling them what to do, but he's also adding some visual representation of what it is they're doing. So here he's talking about finding instructors and he's talking about using the platform upwork. So in this page, what he included was screenshots of upwork and what they can do on it and what they should select on it to then find these instructors for the courses that they're going to be making. And in step two of this, he shows example descriptions that they can put for their job postings. He's really just grabbing their hand and taking them through this entire process. This is probably something that took him quite a while to figure out, and he's just handing this out completely for free. Now moving on to the next page, and that's going to be pitching instructors. And this one, yet again, you can see, it's a quite text heavy page. And that is okay, because this one he's really just talking about sales in general. So that's going to be such a huge kind of umbrella topic, and there's so much to talk about in that. But he's trying to keep it as su sync as possible, and I think he did a quite effective job how to do this and communicating this to his prospects in order for them to get these instructors to teach the courses. So now we're moving on to the final chapter in this E book, which is driving sales. And I don't want to be redundant. You know what I've said before about the formatting of all this. So as we can see, these look good. They have visual representations. They have text, and they have a bunch of value. So now on to the final page of all of this, that's page 16. It's his conclusion page. And this conclusion page is where you're going to want to include a call to action to your prospects because in almost anything that you're going to be communicating or giving value to in an eBook, it all requires action to some extent. And you want these prospects to get value from you. So you want to tell them to take action and tell them the best way is to do that. Hopefully, you've outlined. I mean, that is what your eBook is all about, how they can probably take action and whatever it is that you're communicating to them. So here on this conclusion page, you can really either number one, just tell them take action or number two, tell them that first place to start. But let me just read you what he said so you can get a good idea of this. He says, Now you have all the knowledge you need to go and take action, and that's all that's left. Taking action. Think about it. If a course makes you on average $200, which is a conservative estimate, you're 50 courses away from making ten K a month. So this is him again, just getting them excited to take action, making it clear and making it super easy for them to go ahead and do it. He then says, You could get there uploading one course a week for a year. And that's without calculating this model is completely exponential. So this is just another way of reframing why they should take action right now and the fact that it's just super easy and not something that is going to be difficult or time consuming for them. Then he finishes it out with saying, Get started, I publishing your first course today, and you'll think yourself very soon. I guarantee it. I really wish you all the best and I hope to hear all about your successes. I think this was a pretty great and effective eBook. You can take the lessons from this and go ahead and make your own. Yet again, you can do this in Canva in just one evening. Alright. That's enough of this. Now on to the next one. 21. Use Quizzes to Capture More Leads: At this point, you already understand the value of a lead magnet, and we already know that lead magnets can take multiple different forms. So in this lesson, I want to take you through a specific kind of lead magnet that I personally find as being quite interesting and a fun one that you can choose and add to your own landing page. And you've probably experienced this yourself. So many of us have taken these buzz feed quizzes to get to know a little bit more about ourselves. And do these quizzes actually tell us anything? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But the point is, regardless of that outcome, all of us want to take them. So I want to show you an AI software that can help you create one of these quizzes personalized for your landing page. And a particular reason as to why this can be quite an attractive option is that it takes mere minutes to set up and create. So let me walk you through this software and show you exactly how you can do it yourself. Step number one, you're going to want to go to a software that can allow you to do this. And in this lesson, I'm going to be showing you lead quizzes.com. So first step when you're here is you're going to click Try it free. So now that we're at this page, what you're going to want to do is input all your information and your website URL. So what this software does is it goes and looks at your website, all the information and sees what it's about to then help create that tailored quiz specifically for you. So now that we're here, you're going to want to click Generate now with the AI Content Builder. Yet, again, we're going to input our website URL. And then enter a short description about what it is that you do and what your page is all about. Alright, so I have all the information we need right here. So I put in the link of the website that we built earlier in this course, and that's founders focus. And I continued under that persona of that website that we built in saying that I am a business coach specializing in helping small to medium sized business owners streamline their operations and increase their profitability. So this is exactly what I do to give the quiz information about me and my offer. So then I wanted to go into what I want the quiz to entail. So I said, I want to create an interactive quiz that assesses a business owner's current operational effectiveness and their potential for growth. The quiz should include questions about business planning, financial management, team leadership, and innovation. These are things that I work with that I specialize in helping business owners improve upon. Furthermore, each question should help identify the strengths and weaknesses in their current business model. Then I'm going into what I want this quiz to eventually lead into. And I say that the goal is to assess where they need the most assistance and to get on a 30 minute free consultation call with me. The quiz should be engaging, visually appealing, and easy to complete, encouraging participants to leave their contact information for a follow up consultation. Alright, so now let's click Generate quiz and see what we get back with. Alright, so now the first prompt it gives us is to select a title for our quiz. So let's go ahead and do that. Okay, so out of these ones that it gave me, I'm going to choose streamline and succeed, measure your business' efficiency. So now we're going to go ahead and generate questions. And now it's provided us with a bunch of questions. And one thing that I really do like about the software is that you're always able to generate more. So, if you don't like what it gives you at first, you're always able to get more and find those questions that you believe are going to be extremely appealing to your target audience. Since I'm not actually going to be using this quiz, I'm not going to go ahead and go way too much into analyzing what questions are best, but I will show you about how they look like. So you have here this first one, for example, how often do you review your business plan to align it with your current goals and market conditions? So if I just click this drop down, we get to see what kind of questions it gives or what kind of responses it gives. You're able to select either once a year, every quarter when there's a significant change in the market or I don't have a formal business plan. And just like with these questions, right here, as you're able to see, you can edit them to change them. Maybe you don't like the wording or you want to use some kind of specific language in the questions, and you're able to do that same thing with these potential responses. And as you can see, with each question, it's something different. So this next one, what's your approach to financial management in your business? You can click this drop down and here are a bunch of responses that it gives us. I have a dedicated financial team that manages it. I use software to manage finances myself. I consult with a financial advisor periodically. You get to see that these are all pretty good questions given the prompt that I gave it. And the responses are also on that same level. They're very specific and it makes that person that's taking the quiz on your landing page feel as if that, you know, you created this yourself, and it's very specific, and it feels like you're about to give them some really valuable information, or really valuable feedback. So I'm just going to go ahead and select these top five, and then we're going to move on. Now we're going to go to Select type. So in this software, it gives us two different options to select our content type. The first one is outcome logic. For this outcome logic, what the quiz is basically going to do is look at their answers, and it's going to associate an outcome with. So for our example, this outcome would be that they need help in their business, or they have a lot to improve on. Therefore, they should hop on a 30 minute consultation call with me, and we can talk about improving and what they can do better in their business. And the second type of logic here is scoring logic. So basically, this would be assigning a score to every kind of answer that they and at the end of the result at the end of the quiz, it's going to give them this score. So let's say that they were about 50% across the board, that none of their answers were exceptional and none of their answers were that they really needed help or they were at rock bottom. So they got a 50% back on this quiz. And that is going to be associated with, okay, like, this is your result. So I think that you should hop on a 30 minute call with me and we can discuss how we can improve this. So what I'm going to do is select outcome logic, and that outcome is basically going to no matter who takes the test and what answers that they put, I'm going to have it recommend that they get on a 30 minute consultation call. So, we're going to go to quiz Biz. Alright. So now we're actually at this page where we're able to edit our quiz completely. For example, lets us alter the start screen for the quiz. So what we can do is drag this cover page and put it right here at the start screen. And what we're able to do is then add a title, add a description, and then add a button label right here. So, for example, with the title, we can just have it set as what our quiz name is. I'm just going to type in measure your business proficiency. And then I'm going to add a short description just kind of grabbing their attention. So what I just typed in here is, see where you're at and running your business. Will you get a perfect or is there room for improvement? So this is basically just short text that gets them a little excited in taking this quiz because they want to know, do they have things to improve on, or are they going to be perfect as everyone wants to be? And then the button, I just click Start now. So this is super basic, super simple. We're also able to add an image or video to the start screen. I'm not going to do that, but that can be an option for you to make it look a little bit more visually appealing. So I'm going to click Save. So next, I want to show you how we can build this results screen. So I'm going to go here and drag Results Builder and put it there. So, if I actually were to do this with this business, you want to have the right language because you don't want to turn everyone off and getting these results. So you want to phrase it in a way that can make them more excited and a little bit more willing to take the words and your consideration into account. So instead of saying you suck, schedule a call with me now, I'm going to frame it a little bit nicer than that. And don't get me wrong. There is space for provocative language when marketing. But in these results of this quiz, I'm going to choose not to use those. So I have my results title typed out right here. And what I said is that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. Now, since this is just an example, I'm not going to go ahead and create this entire description because these descriptions should be a little bit more tailored to whatever it is that their responses were just so that they can feel like that this was actually something that you put a lot of thought into and something that really demonstrates your expertise in this field. So when you're building your own quiz, you could have a title that is akin to mine in saying that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better because this is a blanket statement. But when going into the description, make it a little bit more specific because this result title basically sets us up to do whatever it is that next bigger action is. In my case, it's going to be scheduling a call with me. So this is going to be good because I'm not going to be going on them a little too hard, but I am identifying that there is room for improvement, and therefore, I'm implying that I'm going to be the one to be providing that expertise and that guidance to help them improve. So let me actually show you how you can tie an answer to a specific result. So, this result description is, I'm going to say test one, save. Can create results, and you can also add a different result here on this result screen. So I'm going to name this one test two and save. That's two and save. And we can go right here into the mapping on each content, and we can say what each answer associates with. So with once a year, if they say that they only go over their current goals once a year, we can say that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. And as you can see, you can put all of them to just one result if you want. Or you can switch it up. You can go to that result screen, create another one and associate these answers with different results. And basically, what it does is it's going to be counting up their responses. And if they have a certain amount of responses that is the majority for one result, that is the result that they're going to be taken to. And there's so much to this. As I showed you, you can have all these different results, but then you can also do logic branching. And this is going to be a lesson that I can really dedicate an entire video to. So if this is something that you're interested, you can look into it. But if I went over this, this lesson would be way too long. So other things that we can also add to this result screen are our calendar calendar. And if you don't know what calendly is, it's basically an appointment booking software. So if this were me, what I would be doing, if I just had this one result that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better, I would then add this calendly widget associated with that result. And basically, what that would do is it gives people, our visitors, the people taking these quiz, an option to then schedule a call with me after, like I said I wanted to do in the beginning. Also, you have another option here in the URL redirect. So if you want to send them to a specific part of your website, for example, you can also do that. The next part of this that I want to show you is a quick thing, but it's going to be something that you're going to want to spend a little bit of time on, and that's going to be the design. So like I said, this starting screen doesn't look very sexy. It's not the nicest looking thing. So if I were to actually go ahead and be using this lead magnet, I would spiff it up a little bit, make it look a little bit more visually appealing for my visitors. So you have a lot of options to change it up. You can change the font. You can change the colors. You can even upload an image like I showed earlier and then play with the opacity of this image. And then also you have themes here. So you could basically select a theme from one of theirs, and that alone makes it look ten times better. So say we're going to stick with this one that I chose this theme. It's a quick way to make it look good without putting in too much effort and time. Then we can go to Configure, basically make the title of it, make the description, and add all these other things if we want to do or not. And then from this point, we're going to want to go over to share. So depending on how you want to provide this lead magnet to your landing page visitors, you have a lot of options. So if you want to just have it in your landing page, you could use an inline Embed Code. So basically, with whatever website building software that you use, you can just go to the HTML code element, put that on your page, and then paste in this inline embed code. And this quiz will pop up right there on your landing page for them to take. But if you're doing this in some way where you're getting their email and then sending them this quiz, then you could also just get a URL right here. The content URL, it's going to lead directly to this quiz for them to take. So once you get all that you just click Publish, and now it's all published. So it's going to be ready for anyone to use. So let me just quickly show you how this would look. I just copied this link, open this. I'm going to paste it here, and here we go. Here's our quiz. I'm going to click Start now. And as you can see, it looks pretty nice. Once a year, submit, submit, submit, submit. Now, finally, I'm going to submit that last one. You're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. And yet again, if I added this calendar inline widget, basically, what I would be able to do on this page, it would show my title. You're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. A description. Hopefully, it's going to be specific to this quiz. And then below it, it will show the calendar Leap, basically, the website scheduler. So, ideally, in that description that is going to be tailored to their response, it's going to also have a call to action to schedule that meeting with me, that 30 minute consultation call, which they can see is the clear next step in helping them improve their business. So there you have it. You saw for yourself. That was super easy and something that can be done super quickly in just an evening. Maybe you don't want to use this as your sole lead magnet. But as you saw, this was super easy to do, and it probably will have some kind of value for you and your business to use, even if you want to just use it in some email marketing. So there you have it. That's how you make your quiz in under an hour. Go ahead, try it for yourself and increase your conversion. 22. How to Build a Site With Mailchimp: Alright, so it is finally time to actually go ahead and create our own website within Mailchimp. Okay, so to do so, what we're going to do is come over here to the website tab, and then we're going to scroll to this part where it says, create a website with MailChimp, and then we'll click Set Up your site. Now we're going to have to go ahead and create our sit name, and this is going to be part of our URL here. So if you're not going to be buying your own domain, so your own website, and you're gonna be having the free one that Mailchimp provides, then essentially what this is going to be is your sit enamemilchimsites.com. So I'm just going to go ahead and put in digital skills. Academy. Okay, so right now we have our site name here, Digital Skills Academy. And as you can see, the URL is also right here. So let's go ahead and click Edit My site to go right into this. Now we are at our managed site page. So this essentially is going to be the page that shows us all of the pages within our website. So right now we only have one page right here, and this is our homepage. Now, if you look over here to the left, then we have a couple of options right here. We have our managed pages. So this is going to enlarge the pages that we have, and it gives us the option to go ahead and add some pages here. So it gives us a few different presets that are based on the brand kit that we already created. So I'm going to go ahead and click Cancel here. And what we're going to be working with is going to be one homepage. So we're gonna have one landing page, and we're not going to go ahead and add any pages here. But as you can see, if you want to go ahead and do so, it's super simple. But right now because I want our landing page to act as a funnel, I don't want people to be distracted by any other pages that is going to take them away from the desired action that I want them to take when they go ahead and access my website. To do this, we're only going to stick with this one homepage. So now I'm going to go ahead and go back, and now we can look at our styles. So as you can see right here, this theme is derived from the brand kit that we created. But if we go ahead and click it, we can see a couple different variations. Just now for example's sake, I'm going to go ahead and stick with this one. But we could also go ahead and choose any one of these if you like a little more, but I'm going to stick with this top one. And, of course, we also have the ability to edit it right here. Then we can also come over here to colors, and we can change some things up right here. Well, for now, I think I'll choose this little color scheme right here with the purple buttons, just to add some a little bit of color to our page. Now I'm going to go all the way back, and we're going to go ahead and actually enter this page. So we can go ahead and start creating this and actually form it into a proper funnel. Now, before we go ahead and start changing anything up, what I want to show you is the different functionality that we have within this website builder. First, we are able to go to any section, and as you can see, the sections are going to be highlighted whenever you put your mouse over them. You can see that this one is a small section right here, and then this one is going to be a little bit bigger. So what we can do is click Edit section, and then we are going to be given a couple different options here. So we're able to change the layout. So as you can see, it gives us a few different options here. I think I like this layout a little bit better. So I'm going to select that one, and then we're also able to change the background image. This is going to be something that I'm going to do, but we're going to be coming back to this. Now I can go ahead and collapse this, and we can look at how we can edit other sections as well. As we can see, this is the header right here. So we're going to have a different kind of options in editing this. I can set it at a fixed position. What that means is that it will only ever stay right here at the top. And if I unselect that, then if I drag down, then it's also going to come down as well. For this, I'm actually going to turn off this fixed position, so we'll have it pop up when we're actually on the site. There's a bunch of little options depending on which section you're going to be editing, and you go ahead and look at them yourself. They're not very complicated at all. Now the last thing that we can also do with this is change the order of our sections with these arrow buttons. So if I wanted to go ahead and put this one at the front, then I could do that with that arrow. If I want to drop it down below this section, then I can use the other arrow. And then we can also delete pages or delete sections with this trash can icon. In terms of actually adding different sections, the way that we're able to do that is, as you can see, between each section, have these plus buttons, and if we hover over them, they expand into add section. And then we have all of these different sections that we could go ahead and add. So let's look at this subscribe one. I can go ahead and select that. And as you can see, put in this little subscribe form. If I want to take the subscribe section and put it all the way at the bottom of our page, instead of clicking these arrows, which might take a little bit of time, what I can do is come over here to the sections, and as you can see, the subscribe section is right here. What I can do is grab it right here on the left, and then I can drag it all the way down, and let's put it right above our footer. Now if I scroll down, we can see right here, we have the subscribe section. Let's go ahead and delete this one. So now this is right before our footer, and it's essentially the last part of our page. So now it's time to actually start putting the structure into something more that is akin to a funnel. And we have that kind of already starting right here. This is gonna be the first thing that people are going to see. Right here, we're going to have some kind of hero image. And then here is going to be kind of our value proposition to our customers. Now, for this next part, I would typically have something here like a testimony. So something that's going to be helping our social proof and getting people to trust us as a brand. Following this section, we can go into a little bit more detail about what it is that we do as a business. And then maybe right here, we'll have some kind of about section. And then we can go ahead and go straight into our call to action. For now, I'm going to get rid of this section right here. Let's go ahead and actually start creating this. So, right here, we're going to have our hero image. So I'm going to go ahead and put in an image that kind of reflects what I'm selling. And then here we're going to put in our USP, so our unique selling proposition. So for this section, I now change it up. I put in a hero image. So these people looks like they're all in the same business and they're on their computer. So I said right here for our USB, I said, learn exactly how to market your business without the agency price tag. And I put in a little bit of blurb right here. Now, what I want to do next is I want to change this button to then lead to the bottom of the page where we're going to have our ultimate call to action. Right now it says subscribe, but I'm going to change this to be some kind of lead magnet. Let's say, in our case, I'm going to have it be a free lesson or maybe a free course. Okay, but now to actually link this, what we can do is come here, click the button. I'm going to click Link two. And then instead of being external URL, I'm going to have it select as section. And then I'm going to choose this bottom section right now and click Save so it should lead into this section right here. Next, we have this right here. And here, as I said before, what I want to make this is a testimonial of some sort. So here I'm just going to make up some kind of example testimonial, and then I'll come back to you. Now we are back here with our example testimonial. I said it right here. Before Digital Skills Academy, marketing felt overwhelming. I was wasting money on ads and agencies without understanding what was working. Now I finally feel in control. And then we have some information about her right here. So this is always going to be good practice for your testimonials to add in as much information about the individual as possible because at the end of the day, what this is supposed to achieve for us is some kind of social proof. So giving some more information, some more credibility to the person that is giving this testimonial is always going to be something that is going to benefit us because as we see here, this person is the owner of their own business. Earlier, my screen recording file corrupted and actually creating the rest of this site. But as you can see, everything here is mainly following the same kind of format that was originally there. The only thing that I changed was actually going through and changing the pictures and the copy. There wasn't necessarily any kind of software thing that you missed out on. Right now, what I want to do is go over the kind of important things that I did in creating this site. As we said before, we start right here with our hero shot and our USP. What I did right here is I changed the text here on the button to say access our free course because this button is going to lead down to the bottom of our page where we have our call to action, which is a free marketing basics course. Now, I'm going to go a little bit more information about this section right here, which is the actual form. But for now, let's actually go back to the next section that followed this testimonial. So this section here is our features and be here I essentially just wrote a little bit about digital skills Academy, and in it, I balanced a kind of feature oriented text and benefit oriented text. One kind of sentence that encapsulates this, I'd say, is this one right here. So if we look at this, it says, each course is packed with real world examples and practical assignments. So you're not just learning, you're building marketing assets for your business as you go. As we can see, this is kind of broken into two parts here. If we look right here, we get to see the features. So we get to see the actual specifics of what the courses entail, which is real world examples and practical assignments. Then we see this part of the sentence, which says, You're building marketing assets for your business as you go. See, this is the benefits. So we see the features right here, but we also see how they translate into specific benefits for the individuals that aren't going to be consuming our products. Of course, this one also has a CTA button to then link down to our CTA section. Let's go ahead and scroll down. And next we have this about section. This one I just put in a little bit information here. I said, meet Adam Taylor, your guide to marketing success. I put in my picture right here. And then I put in a little bit more about myself. And yet again, the purpose of this section is just to have some social. In talking about yourself or your team, essentially, what you want to add is information that is going to be relevant to your business, which is going to make your audience feel like you are someone that they should listen to that you're an expert in your industry. And yet, again, this also has a CTA button. And all of these CTA buttons then lead down to our form right here. Before getting into this form, what I want to do first is look at these buttons again. Each one of these buttons leads down to this. So how are we able to do that? Well, I showed you before, but I'm just going to show you again. If we click these buttons, we can click this link button right here, and then we can link it to a section. Originally, it's going to be linked to an external URL, but we want to link it to a section and we want to link it to our subscribe section. So we can do that on every single one of our buttons. Now, if you can see this one also says access our free course, but this is already in the section that we are linking all the other buttons to. This one, actually, if we click on it, we see that it doesn't have a link button. That's because this kind of block here is a form block. So that means that once they put in all the required information and they click this, their information is directly going to go into our mail champ audience. Let's take another look at this form because this is honestly the only kind of software specific thing that we went over that I kind of have to go over again with you. First, before I did any edits to this, it was only an email address field. So let's go ahead and click this and see how we can add other fields. So if I select it, we see that the sign up form pops up right here, and if we scroll down, we get to see that these are a few basic ones that we already have in our male champ merge fields. So for any given one, what you're able to do is select these buttons right here, select these toggles to have it included in your form or not. So right now, if I take it back to how it was in the beginning, then we can see that only the email address is here. But if I toggle this one on, we see first name is there, but we don't see an Asterix. So an asterisk is obviously going to be the required fields. So we can have required fields and we can have optional fields. So what I want to do is enable both first name and SMS phone number, but I only want to make first name require. Obviously, it's going to be ideal for us to get the most information on our leads as possible, but we have to balance kind of friction with this information that we desire. Because if we add too much friction, so if we ask too much of our leads, then it's going to be at least relatively likely that they just are going to click off. They're not going to want to give all that information. It's too much of a hassle or whatever their reasoning may be, but they're just going to click. We want to do is only require the things that we absolutely need. And this is obviously going to be depending on the kind of sequences that you run maybe a phone number is going to be something that you absolutely do need. In my case, I'm going to say that that isn't the case. And what I will need for sure, though, is going to be their first name and obviously their email address. Now, if we want to go ahead and edit any one of these fields and we want to add some more, what we can do is come up here to our audience field settings. Now we are taken back to this page, our audience fields and merge tags that we've seen a couple times during this course. What we're able to do here just as a kind of quick refresher is if you want to add in a different field that you want to collect in those forms, and what you can do is click Create a new field. You can label it to be whatever you want, and then we want to select the kind of data that it is. So if it's a phone number, we have phone number, we have website, address, birthday, date, just numbers or text. So you can go ahead and add that in, and it's pretty straightforward there. And if there's any existing ones that you want to go ahead and edit, then you can do so super easily. Like, for example, this field label was named name instead of first name, and I wanted to change it to be first name. So right here within my form, it was going to be clearer as to what they should be providing me. So what I was able to do is come over here and click Edit. And before, as I said, it was just name. Instead, I changed it to be first name, and then all you have to do is go ahead and click Save, and then it will save, and it will also update here if it's one that you had existing. Now this is basically our site relatively complete. So let's go ahead and go over here into this preview view so we can take another look at it. So one thing that I would always make sure that you go ahead and do is check your buttons and make sure that they always lead to the correct part of your page. And as we can see, my buttons seem to be working fine. Now, if this was going to be something that I was actually going to be putting out myself in relation to my business, then I'd probably spiff it up a little bit when it comes to the design and maybe even upgrade the copy as but for what we are doing this as an example page, it's pretty good because at the end of the day, what it has is all of the basic foundational pieces that we want to have in our landing page. We have our hero image with our USP all in our headline. We have our buttons right here, our CTA buttons that are going to be in essentially every section that we have here. We have social proof right here in the form of a testimonial. Then we have our features and benefits section. Again, we have our About section that is just more social proof for us. And then we have our final CTA, which is going to be collecting all of our leads information and then putting them into our marketing pipeline. So from this page, what we can do is click Exit preview, and then we can click Done and publish. So right here, we can see that we have our own URL, so I can go ahead and click this. And now we are brought to the site that our leads will be seeing. And again, you should just check your buttons and make sure that all of them work. And as you can see, all of mine are working swimmingly. And the next lesson, what I'm going to show you is how we can integrate forms within our websites. Alright. So there you have it. This is how we can quickly and easily build our own website within Milch. 23. Use Blogs & SEO to Bring in Visitors: This section, we're going to talk about how to actually grow your email list. Now, there are many, many, many ways to do this, but I'll talk about the three most effective ones that I've used consistently to generate leads for myself and my clients. In this lesson, we're going to talk about a text based medium that's often overlooked. Blogs. And yeah, I know. The word blog sounds like it's 2012 and we're all wearing skinny jeans, and we're all writing on Blog Spot. But just hear me out. Blogging when done right is still one of the most effective organic, evergreen and scalable ways to grow your email list. Not a trend. It's a system. So let's dive into what makes it work and how you can use it alongside Mailchimp to collect leads, segment them, and start automated journeys that build real relationships. First, here is why blog posts still work today, especially to grow an email list. We haven't talked much about this in the course because I wanted to get straight into the Mailchimp nitty gritty. However, if you've watched any of my other stuff, then you know that I emphasize over and over the importance of knowing your niche and your ICP, your ideal customer profile. That person, your ICP is probably out there Googling the exact problem that you solve right now. And guess what? If you write about that problem on your blog and if you do it strategically, your post shows up on Google. They'll find it, they'll click it and they can read. And now you have their attention. The beauty of a blog is that you're capturing intent based traffic. So people actively looking for the solution that you offer. And all you have to do is put the solution where they're looking. When we talk about blogs in this course, we're not talking about a personal diary. We're talking about a search optimized resource hub, one that brings in readers, converts them into leads, and drops them right into your mail champ ecosystem. So let's talk about how we can find gaps in the market to create content where we have a competitive advantage. You'll notice in this section that we don't guess what content to create. Instead, we look for untapped opportunity where there's an asymmetry of demand and supply. That's where SEO comes in, search engine optimization. Don't worry. That doesn't mean stuffing your articles with keywords or becoming a Google Sourcer. It just means knowing what people are already searching for. To do this, we're going to use SEMRush, and this is basically like having Google's cheatsheet. The next lesson, we'll walk through SEMRush in detail, but here's a basic strategy. You'll start with a broad topic from your niche. For example, productivity, Gut health, sales funnels, whatever your domain is. Then we're going to use SEM Rush's keyword magic tool to find these. Keywords people are searching for how many people search for them and how hard it is to rank for that topic. Now, of course, we want to look for that sweet spot, and that's going to be high volume, low to medium difficulty, and something that is closely tied to your niche and expertise. These are the infamous gaps in the market. You're not just writing for fun, you're writing to meet existing demand and then turning that demand into email sign ups. What should you post? This is going to be the same principle as YouTube, which we'll talk about in a second. Search based topics. These are specific problems with specific answers. So, for example, if your business is about helping remote workers avoid Burnou, then don't just post five tips for working remote. That's generic. Instead, you should post how to avoid Burnou as a remote software developer or remote work routines for introverts. And lastly, you could post why remote workers feel isolated and how to fix it. By the way, if you have a newsletter or you're consistently writing emails that solve specific problems for your ICP, then these articles don't have to be completely new or different. You can just repurpose your newsletter issues as blog posts. Just tweak the title in a few keywords and optimize it using the tips that we'll cover in this section. Now, how do you optimize your blog post without being inert so first, we have our title tag. So this is going to be the headline, which is front and center, and it contains your main keyword. So, for example, this can be 15 minute home workouts for busy professionals. And now we have our meta description, and this is the short summary that shows up on Google. Here, you could say something like quick and effective workouts for busy professionals. No gym required. Next we have our URL. And here we just want to keep it clean. And yes, the URL does contribute to SEO. So an example can just be www dosite.com slash 15 minute Workouts. Now for the first hundred words, you want to mention your keyword naturally because Google weighs this heavily. Now your headings. You want to use H one for the title, so this is going to be your biggest one and H two and H three to structure your points. This one really just helps with readability and. Now for all text, this is the text that you add to any image that you use that describes what's happening within this image, and you should include any keywords if relevant. Next, we have internal links. So these are links to other blog posts or pages on your site. So for example, if you like this, then you might also like our work from home routine guide. And you want to make sure that these links are always open, and these are always working and they're not broken links because broken links are bad for our SEO. Lastly, we have our CTA, which is our call to action. So this is going to be at the end, and it's going to be telling people to sign up. So for example, we can say, want more tips like this. Get new articles straight to your inbox, join our free newsletter. And now time to talk about integrating this with Mailchimp. This is where everything clicks together. Your blog isn't just a content engine. It's a lead generation machine, and Mailchimp is what powers the backend. Here's how we can connect the two. You want to embed a Mailchimp sign up form at the end of every blog post. And you can, of course, make your blog directly on Mailchimp, like we covered in previous lessons. You want to make sure that you're adding inline forms throughout your article for natural CTA moments that tease elite magnet. So, for example, want our full morning routine guide, enter your email below, and we'll send it over. And next, you can use exit Intent pop ups with Elite magnet. You're able to set your blogs homepage to act like a landing page, minimal distractions, one clear offer, and a mail champ powered form. And finally, you want to make your value proposition pop. For example, you could say, my promise. I only send the most valuable insights I've learned running a seven figure business. No spam, no fluff. See, that's compelling. That's what gets people to sign up. As we've talked about in detail, lead magnets are essential to get people to sign up to your email list. Blogs plus lead magnets equals your best List Growth compo. Imagine someone just read an in depth article about managing stress as a freelancer. Now you offer them a free toolkit. Download our seven day freelancer stress detox plan. They click, they sign up. They're now in your Mailchimp list, tagged, segmented, and dropped into a welcome journey. That's what we're building. Of course, after the previous module, you now have more knowledge than you'll ever need about lead magnets, and you can create the perfect one for your business and integrate it within your blog. So to wrap up, here's the big takeaway. You don't need to be a blogger to use blogs. You just need to be strategic. Make sure you're writing to fill gaps in your niche. And use SEO to find those gaps. Well, then optimize your posts to rank, then convert readers into subscribers with smart CTAs, clear design, and lead magnets. All of this powered by Mailchimp. This is one of the most evergreen ways to grow your email list. Your best posts will keep working for you months, even years after you write them. Next up, we're going to dive into SEMRush. I'll show you exactly how to find those high potential keywords and build out a content strategy that grows your list on autopilot. Let's keep going. 24. Send Consistent Newsletters with Mailchimp: This lesson, we are going to be going over how you can create a newsletter within Mailchimp. Now, this is actually a super simple process for us, and Mailchimp helps us along the way because it gives us templates to create our newsletter. So not only can Mailchimp help us send out these newsletters, but they also assist us in creating a brand image. Let's go ahead and get right into this and we can come over here into the Create tap. Then from here, we are going to click this dropdown and then come here into template, and then we'll click get started to choose one of the templates that they have for us. You could go ahead and scroll down and look at all of these templates that they have to offer us. But one thing that I would just do is come up here into the filtering, so we could go ahead and filter it to the newsletter specific templates. So as we can scroll down here, we see that there are a handful of these newsletters for us to work with. Personally, I think I can go ahead and start out with this one right here. Now, if you want, we could always click review so we don't have to immediately enter in the email editor. If you preview it and you like what you see, then you can go ahead and continue into the builder. From here, it's going to be super straightforward and actually editing the text that we have here. And if we believe that this newsletter is something shorter than what we want ours to be, then we can always come over here in our content blocks, and we can go ahead and add some more text or add some more images or whatever it is that we please. So let's go ahead and add in a second section right here. Here we have allergy season. Let's go ahead and duplicate this, and then let's move it down below this divider line. And we can also add in another one of these to mark that it's the second section. So let's just go along with the theme of this newsletter. It's a newsletter, it seems about pet owners. We talk about allergy season here, and now we can make this second section best Best pet toys. But this could be a section where you're going to be recommending your best pet toys, and you'll have affiliate links associated with each one that you recommend. So now we can also go ahead and add in a paragraph right below this. And then let's go ahead and write this with AI. We can tell the AI what's right here. I'll say So the prompt that I created for this was create a section of the top three Best pet toys with a description for each we can go ahead and click Generate and see what it creates for us. So we can go ahead and click Show More on each of these. We have these three suggestions for us. Of course, we can come over here and we can change the tone. We can either do things like lengthen them. We can shorten them. We can just have them try again or we can kind of give Malhimp AI a little bit of creative freedom So I think we can go ahead and apply this first. Because it's kind of a little shorter description, what I would probably want to do is create a three section area here. So I'll have a little description for each one of the toys, and then I'll have them accompanied with some picture. So let me show you how we can go ahead and do that. First, what we're going to do is come back here. We're going to come to layouts, and then I'm going to grab this three layout right here because we have three toys. And now what I'll do is add in image blocks to each of these and some text blocks. Go ahead and come back here to our content blocks. We can grab images, place one image in each of these. And now that all the images are here, we can also go ahead and put in paragraphs below each one of these. Now what I can do is take this interactive treat dispenser, keeps pets entertained for hours. So I can go ahead and copy that and put that right here. Now for this next one, we can do the same thing. Go ahead and copy this and paste it in here. And if I want to go ahead and center this, I can come here to alignment and center align. And then, lastly, we are going to do the same thing with this third toy right here. Copy, and we can paste it in here and again, let us center now we can just go ahead and get rid of this block. And if we want to add a little bit more space between this section and the header right here, I can select this and I can come down here and I can increase the padding right here on the bottom. So let's say I make it 25. And now all that's left would be to actually go ahead and put in the images right here. For example sake, I'm going to go ahead and show us how we can actually input this image here, and you can kind of visualize how the rest is going to look. So we can go ahead and click Add Image right here. And once we're here, we can go ahead and upload the images that we want to put in. There you have it right there. I just uploaded a little treat dispenser. And again, if we want to add a little bit more space between these, then we can come over here into style, and we can increase the bottom padding, just as we did before with this header. We have this last section right here, which is upcoming events. Now, if we want to add a little bit more separation between the two, one thing that I always love to use is this divider right here. So we can go ahead and put that one in. Since this one doesn't look like the rest of these, what we're able to do is we could edit it. Within right here, we could change the style of it, but something that would be a little bit easier would be just grab this divider right here, we can duplicate it, and then we can go ahead and drag it down. So now it's much more kind of consistent. So let's say this is our finished newsletter. From this point, now what we have to do is go ahead and send it to our audience. First thing that we probably would want to do is save this template. Because if this is going to be the kind of structure that we are going to follow with all of our future newsletters, then of course, we want to save this template so we don't have to do all the work in the future. Of course, we do want to keep a consistent style in our newsletter because branding is associate. Be able to save this template automatically be done as we exit. But first, what we can do before that happens is we can come over here and title our template. So let's just go ahead and say weekly newsletter. We can go ahead and save it. So this will always be accessible to us. So now that we have our newsletter, we've saved it as a template, the next step is going to be sending it out to our audience. To do that, we are going to have to come up here and click Save and exit. So, right here, we can see that it is saved as a template for us to use whenever we we already constructed this email, this is the one that we want to send out. We can go ahead and come here, click this drop down and click Create Email. So the first step of this is, of course, going to be actually selecting the people that we are going to send. So once you upload your audience into Mailchimp, then you can go ahead and select it right here. And then we're going to make sure that this information is all correct. Our email is here and our name. And then we're going to go ahead and construct the subject line for this specific email. I can just put it as the title of this newsletter, weekend Bork Down. And I can also have AI help us here with the preview text. So I can click Get Started. And for our email purpose, we can say that it's just about educating and informing. I can tell AI that I said it was a weekly newsletter to dog owners. So I can now click Generate and see what it creates for us. And we can just go ahead and go with this top version right here. Now I can click Save. Now for another key functionality and why Mailchimp is great from newsletters. And that's because we can schedule these out. So let's go ahead and click this Sent. We have a couple different options here. So first, what we want to do is select the date that our newsletter subscribers expect our newsletter to come. So let's say because this is a weekend bortdwn, we can send it out on a Saturday. Then we have three options here about how it can be delivered on this specific delivery day. So for this first one, it essentially uses its own AI to send out these emails when Mailchim believes that each recipient is most likely to open them. Now, for this next one, you can send it at a specific time according to your time zone. And then, lastly, we have time warp, which instead of just sending it at a specific time, according to your time zone, it can be any time zone. So for example, if you want to send it in the middle of the day, let's say, 12:00 P.M. Then it will be sent at 12:00 P.M. Of each individual person's time zone. Say you were to send this at a specific time, let's say you live on the East Coast of the United States and you send it at 12:00 P.M. Then the person on the West Coast of the United States that is within your audience is going to receive it in their time zone, which is going to be a couple hours earlier than that. Now, if you send it with T warp and you live on the East Coast of the United States and you send it at 12:00 P.M. Then the email is not going to send to them until that person on the West Coasts time zone reaches 12:00 P.M. What's great about this is that you can go ahead and create a bunch of your newsletters at once and then send them out for weeks or even months to come. So once you have your selection, then you can go ahead and click Save. And from that point, you can just go ahead and click Schedule. You can confirm your scheduling email. And then that is it. That's how you create a newsletter within Milhap. 25. Newsletter Breakdown: Mozi Money Minute: So in these next two lessons, we're going to be going over two newsletters that I think are phenomenal. And the reason this is is because each one of these knows exactly who their specific target audience is. And because of this, they create a newsletter that speaks exactly to their target audiences needs, and therefore, it's perfect. Now, in this lesson, we're going to be going over Alex Hermosi's Mozi Money Minute. Now, if you don't already know, Alex Hermosi built his personal brand around business. He speaks about business, and he's built his entire brand around giving so much value away for free. His newsletter, Mosi Mine is an extension of this. He's constantly giving away so much value about business that is valuable to rising entrepreneurs and small business owners. But it doesn't just stop there because his expertise goes way further than just small business owners. And this is illustrated by the first newsletter we're going to be looking at from his. And the subject line to this one is what business are you really in? So if we're looking at his newsletter, right away, what we see is it's super simplistic. So right here from top to bottom, we see that each line is only about a sentence, and then it's a break. So it's super easy on the eyes and it's super digestible. One of the reasons or the entire reason why it's called Msy Money Minute is because as we can see here, as promised, money in under a minute. These newsletters are super digestible and they're supposed to be made to be read in under a minute because his target audience is busy business owners that don't have time to go through something that has so much content. So they're going to be getting in so many emails in their inboxes. So this newsletter should just be something that they're looking forward to that is going to be quick value to them. So let's look at the format of his newsletter. So his newsletters always start with words that he likes. Well, first line is always words I like, and it's going to be some little excerpt that is kind of going to give you an idea about what this newsletter is about. What he says here is what got you 0-1000000 isn't what's going to get you 10-30 million. Then he states a problem that many people and his target audience face. They're entrepreneurs, and he says, Entrepreneurs get comfortable solving problems that they know how to solve. Then they wonder why they plateau. And then directly following this problem statement, he gives the solution. He gives why this is the case. He says, You're probably in a completely different business than you think. And then he's going to go ahead and explain this. Again, let me show you this is already in just a few sentence in his newsletter. So he identifies some big problem that many people in his niche face, and he's already getting into solving this within 5 seconds. So he gives a personal excerpt to you. He says, When I got into gyms, I thought I was in the fitness business, but I wasn't was in the marketing and sales business. And then he gives another example. When I got into supplements, I thought I was in the product business, but I wasn't was in the brand media and distribution business. And lastly, when I got into software, I thought I was in the marketing and sales business, but I wasn't. I was in the product business. So as you can see, there's a few things that he does here. First, he relates to his audience with three different things that he personally experienced. And then, secondly, by relating to his audience with these three separate experiences, it also asserts his expertise because he's saying that he was in the gym market, he was in the supplement market, and he was in the software market. And if this is something that his audience is receiving, then they know that he was successful and is currently successful all three of these fields. So this is further just kind of exemplifying his expertise. So he talks about his experience, and then he's going to zoom out into real world. Yet, again, this is a format that he follows in almost all of his newsletters. So he says, every industry has a big hairy problem. This is the thing that determines success. Then he gives an example for someone else that he knows. And he says that a gym owner friend started a cleaning business thinking it was like gyms, which is marketing and sales. And then it turns out cleaning is a recruiting and training business. And then once he flipped this mindset, he went from 40 k to 150 k in monthly revenue within so now after giving all of these examples, he's now going to give some actionable advice to his audience as to how they can fix this problem. So in this, he gives three potential solutions to his audience. Ask successful people in your industry, what's the hardest part of your business? Then look at the big companies in your space. What are they exceptional at? Then identify your constraint. So what's keeping you from doubling your revenue? Says, The moment that you identify what business you're really in, then everything changes. So then he just ends it off by saying, You stop wasting time on distractions, what I call the woman in the red dress, and you focus on breaking through the concrete wall in front of you. And then as he finishes all his newsletters, he says, as promised, money in under a minute. And then after giving this value, he then proceeds into his call to action. So he says, If you want to help identifying the real business you're in, so first, he talked about what this ailment was within this niche. So sometimes entrepreneurs don't understand the business that they're actually in. Then he gave this value, his personal experience with this, and then some actionable steps that his audience can take. So now after all of this, his call to action is going to be back in relation to what this newsletter was talking about. So he says that if you want to help identify the real business you're in, we just open spots for our next scaling workshop in Vegas. Now, this is his offer in his newsletters, this scaling workshop. So, the call to action right here is to just book a call. And it's super simple. As I said before, what I really love about this is how straightforward this Msy minute newsletter is. It's super simple. It's as promised, money under a minute. You can read this super quickly, and it's super digestible, and there's so much value packed in to such a small newsletter. Now we're going to look at one more of his newsletters to kind of solidify what he's going. This one is titled The competitor callback. So as we can see, it starts with the way he started the previous one and as he starts all of his with words he likes. So this one says, curiosity is stronger than desire when it comes to getting someone's attention. So again, what this does is kind of summarize what it is that he's going to be talking about in this newsletter. But secondly, what it does is kind of piques his reader's curiosity as to what it is to come, no pun intended in terms of this. So usually these opening statements, whether they'd be adages, phrases or whatever, they have some kind of mystery interpretation to them to where you're like, hm, what does he mean when he says this? Then he goes ahead and gets right into the content, and he says, I'm about to share the single most effective voicemail script I've ever found. And it's only 17 words long. After thousands of voicemails left over 15 years, nothing else comes close to its callback rate. I getting into the content, he's already said two sentences, and it's very straightforward as to what we can expect in this newsletter, and following this, we get right into the meat of it and he says, Here's the exact script. So we're not bustling around any weeds here and we're getting right to the chase. So, he gives this script, which is, in fact, only 17 words long. He gives a little example to kind of help his readers kind of imagine how it is going to be in action. And then he says, That's it. No explanation, no urgency, no value prop. So notice his language here. So he knows exactly who his readers are, and therefore, his language is tailored to that. He's not overly formal and he's casual. He knows exactly who he's talking to, so he doesn't have to put too much effort in making things fancy. He knows that he can get right to the point. Then he follows this and says why it works. He gives four reasons as to why his readers should understand the strengths that come from this voicemail. Then lastly, he follows this with some key pointers as to how they can actually implement this themselves. He makes sure to give some tips as to how they should actually go about using this so they know exactly how it is that they can get the most out of it. He says, name their direct competitor, keep your tone casual and matter of fact, and don't add anything else to the message and then be ready with your actual pitch when they call back. Then he finishes it all off under as promised, money under a minute. So although it was a different newsletter topic, he still prefaced this one and saying, If you want to help identifying the real business you're in, we just open spots for our next scaling workshop in Vegas. And then if we go back, we see him offer a different value preposition and saying, What more field tested sales tactics. We just open our spots for a next scaling workshop in Vegas. So although he's prefacing his ultimate call to action in different ways, at the end of the day, it all ends into the same thing in his scaling workshop. This just goes to show how much value that is going to be within his scaling workshop to his viewers. They see that every newsletter topic being something different, all is going to lead into this scaling workshop where he says to them that this is what I'm going to be covering. So although every single time they get so much value from these different topics, they know that in this scaling workshop, they're going to get all of this in just one or two days from him. Then lastly, we have this little PS message from him, and he says, You sales teams face when they realize 17 words just got more callbacks than their two minute voicemail scripts. Let's go ahead and click on this, and we have a little hosme. It says, You're not the only one cursed with knowledge. So as you can see, Al Chamozi isn't too serious in his newsletters. He's able to kind of poke fun and he's able to have some fun in writing this. And also, he doesn't have to be too formal. He's casual in his writing, and he knows who he's speaking to. So this influences a lot of the decisions that he makes within these newsletters. Are the things that I want you to take away from this. It's the fact that you don't have to have some kind of essay of a newsletter every single time to actually deliver value to your readers. And there's something to say about the format here, because as you can see, there's nothing here that's going to be too pretty where you're looking at it, like, Wow. He did a great job in making this look nice. But what you can't say is that it's hard to read, although it doesn't have any flashy kind of images or any kind of, like, dynamic stuff within it, it still is super easy to look at and super easy to kind of go from topic to topic and not lose where you're at and still get all the information from. Lastly, as I said before, it's important to truly understand your target audience because it's going to influence exactly the style in the way you're writing to them. Because here, if he were to write super formal and all of these newsletters, then they probably wouldn't connect and they wouldn't ultimately lead into his call to action converting very well. He knows who his target audience is and he writes to them knowing that. All right. Well, that's it for this lesson, and the next one, we're going to be going over a different newsletter and a different niche, international int. 26. Newsletter Breakdown: International Intrigue: Alright, so in the last lesson, we went over Alex Homose's Mosey Money minute. Now in this lesson, we're going to be looking at a completely different newsletter, and this one is going to be International intrigue. So International intrigue is a newsletter about global affairs. Their goal is to make complex international news accessible for a broad audience. So just from this description, we can kind of get an idea about what their target audience is. It's going to be a range of people that go from not very informed to probably quite informed about international affairs and kind of world politics. So it's these people that want to learn about what's going on in the world that don't want to spend too much time kind of sifting through all the news articles out there. Because International Intrigue is designed to be read in about 5 minutes. So let's go ahead and get right into it and I can show you what it's about. So here we go. Here is the beginning of the newsletter, and this one was subjected credit scores. So the first thing that we see is that they have a little bit of a breakdown right here in the beginning. They say, in today's edition, and they give one, two, and three. Give China's new social credit rules. The next section is going to be the Intrigue Jobs Board, and then lastly, they end with Art of the Day. What they usually do is in their first two sections, they're going to talk about this world politics. Then lastly, they're always going to have something of the day. It can be art of the day, it can be words of the day, they even have TV so, typically, international Intrigue is always going to start off with a message from one of their co founders that summarizes what this newsletter is going to be about. And all of their co founders are former diplomats. So this kind of gives you an idea of their expertise and experience in this. So here we have one of their co founders, John Fowler, giving a personal excerpt about the subject that they're going to be talking about. So he says, during my time in China, two issues consumed my work hours more than any others, the South China Sea and the social credit system. He follows this by giving a personal excerpt that you can see isn't going to be very formal or serious. And then as we continue, we see a kind of similar thing. He says, China's social credit system is a confusing beast. So as you can see, not the most formal. So then they go on to talk about this social credit system. And then we can go ahead and move down into the headline section. So this one is going to be more of kind of broad things that are happening in the world today. And in each one of these headline sections, they also have these hyperlinks that you can go ahead and click them and read more about what it is that they are talking about in each one of these headlines. So then they're going to move into what this newsletter is about in their top story and the focus of it. And they're going to go in depth into what it is this is. So in this section, they're talking about China's new social credit rules. So you can go ahead and read into this, and it's very succinct and very straightforward and easy for their readers to kind of comprehend. The language here isn't going to be too high level, and it's going to be something that could be understood by a broad audience. Again, this is, like I said before and who their target audience is. It is going to be a broad audience that is going to be interested in this world politics. So we can also look at the format of this. As you can see, each one of these paragraphs is no longer than two sentences. Each one of them is broken up, so they're very easy on the eyes and easy to read and digestible. So we can go ahead and scroll through this and we see bullet points, we see numbers, and it's all fractioned up, very easy to get down, and it's not going to be something that you're going to look at and be kind of overwhelmed and just not wanting to read at all. So after this, we have intrigues take. So they're going to give you here in this section about what's happening, and they try to keep it as unbiased as possible, and they're just trying to give you the facts. And then intrigues take, here, they're kind of trying to explain it to their audience, so they can kind of take these facts and process them into kind of a cohesive story that they can understand. Then as we scroll down, we have their meanwhile elsewhere section. So this is going to be something that's going to be in all of their newsletters, and it's just little kind of things that they have about news across the globe. So they'll have a little image here, and they'll have numbers associated with different parts of the world, different specific parts. And then below it, they're going to go ahead and give some kind of updates about what's happening. And just things that are going to be interesting to their readers. And as before, as we saw in the top headlines, we also have hyperlinks that are going to take us to the specific kind of articles to learn more. Now, next, we're going to go ahead and go into this is usually their promotion section. So here, they're not promoting any sponsors, but instead, they're talking about their own event. So they said Intrigue is hosting an event in DC Friday, April 11. So you can go ahead and register now. This is their call to action. And then below here, we have Intrigue Jobs Board, so this is just positions that they're offering within their company. And then lastly, we have their Art of the day. So as you can see, this is something that is kind of very light hearted and a short section. So as you can see, it's just not too much going on here. They're not going too deep into this because as I said, they're going to have always something of the day, and it's kind of just a nice little fun fact for their audience. And if you notice, what they do across this newsletter is called the Readers Intriguers. So this is a nice little thing about just building a community around their readers. And then, lastly, we have a daily poll. So as you can tell by the this is something that they do every single day to kind of engage their readers and give them something to kind of play along with. So right here, it says, Do you ever wish your country implemented a version of China's social credit system? And then you can give an answer here, and then in the next day, you'll then see, as you see here, yesterday's poll results. Then below the poll results, they'll also give excerpts from their readers that decided to write in along with their answers. Now let's go ahead and look at another newsletter from International Intrigue just so we can solidify the vibe and angle that international intrigue is going for. Now we're in this one and this one was subjected, all that glitters. And as we can see here, they have a partnership here. So this one's in partnership with foreign affairs, and as you click on it, it'll take you to their page. Again, we're going to start in the same way as before. In today's edition, it's going to give you the three sections. So three golden tales. Number two is diplomats on the move, and lastly, their day. TV of the day in this edition. So again, they're starting this one by calling their readers intriguers. So this is a nice touch that they add because everyone loves to be a part of something. They love being part of communities. This is something that is just inherent within humans. So kind of giving a name to their community is something that I think definitely helps them out. So in reading this, they're going to be talking about gold in this edition of International Tree. So we can go ahead and move down into the headlines. So same as it was before, we're going to have a couple of different headlines about things that are just going on in the world, and they're not necessarily going to be in relation to what this kind of overall theme of today's topic is going to be. So we're going to go ahead and move on. And here, because they're going to be working with this foreign affairs newsletter, they have this kind of promotion going on where I bet in foreign affairs, also are going to be promoting international intrigue. So this is kind of them just cross promoting and they're both going to be benefiting from this. So this is something that we also talk about in this course. If you can find someone that works in an adjacent niche to you, this is something that can be a great kind of strategy for you both because you're both going to be benefiting from each other's audiences. So as we move on from this, we're going to get into the top story, which is about. So they usually have some kind of image that is going to kind of depict what it is they're going to be discussing about. And then you can go ahead and scroll. And same thing as before, we can notice that this is all in a very digestible kind of format where there's never too much text in one little block. It's always going to be separated. We have little bullet points, and the language here isn't going to be very difficult or hard to understand. So let's go ahead and keep going down. And yet again, as we saw before, all of these facts that they just listed is then going to be followed by intrigues Take. So going to be their kind of interpretation of what they think their readers should do with all of this information and what it kind of means for the future. And yet again, we have this same section, which is meanwhile elsewhere, where they're going to pick five different places around the world, and they're going to give some kind of updates about their news and their government and the politics that are going on. And then as we move on from this, we have from our sponsors. So before in the last section in the last edition that I showed you, here in this section, they had something about a event that they were running. Now, here, instead of that, they're having word from their sponsors. So this is something that they are getting paid to put into their newsletter. As you can see, it's something that is a very small section. It's not taking up too much of this space, and it's very straightforward to the point and what it is that they're promoting about what it is that the sponsor is going to be offering their readers. And then it's followed by a little bit of extra intrigue, so extra information that they choose to include for their readers. And then we have TV of the day. As you can see, these little day things are usually just little random tidbits. Here, it's talking about a Russian language tutor once told us that to level up, you've got to turn on Russian radio or television in the background as you go about your day. But how we hear you ask? We were delighted to learn that recently about an online service called TV Garden, which somehow streams channels from all over the world on a single website. You just pick a country and you go down your preferred rabbit hole. So again, these are little tidbits that are going to be interesting and kind of fun for their readers that they know that they're going to enjoy. And then as before, we have our daily polls, which are going to be great for engaging their audience because who doesn't love answering a poll and sharing their own opinion about something. Just as before, we see yesterday's poll in which do you think there's a real chance that Trump will bomb Iran? We can see that the intrigue readers were quite split about this. We see from International Intrigue, which was different than Alex homose's Msy Minute, there's a few things to notice here and this one is much longer, but just like Mozi minute, it retains the same aspects of readability. Everything is kind of broken up in a way that when you're looking at it, it's not overwhelming. But here with International Intrigue and all this extra information that we don't see in Mosey Minute, we can see that there are a few ways that we want to kind of break up and organize our newsletter if it's going to be something that is going to be offering a lot of information. So we see here that they break it up into three separate parts, so their readers know what they're getting into and kind of how much is left as to when this is going to end. I think the thing that they do that is great is when they present facts, they do just that. They have a section where they just lay out the facts without any kind of opinion associated with then they have a separate part here and intrigues take, where they evaluate these and they tell their readers how they should look at this and what's serious, what isn't, what's concerning, or what's just fog. Another thing in international intrigue is that they use colors and they use images quite well. So they always have this little image here. They have emojis that are kind of plastered in to give it a little bit more life. Their headlines are always a specific blue, and the sections are all just kind of broken up in a nice easily digestible way. So there you have it. Here were two newsletters that you should use to influence how you're going to be creating yours. 27. Use Semrush to Improve Your SEO: Now it's time to discuss how we can get our newsletters and blogs to be seen organically through search engines. Now, the process that makes our content discoverable is called SEO. Now, we went over this in the course. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and one of the key ways that we can do this is going to be with our keywords and the types of articles that we are going to be writing. Now, SEMRush is probably the best software out there that has everything that we need to do when it comes to optimizing for SEO in our newsletters. And now we are in the software. So as you can see, right here at the top, it's smrush.com. Now, if I'm being frank, I could honestly probably create an entire course that is solely dedicated to SMR. We have so many tools here that do a whole lot of different things. Now, one thing that I definitely recommend to you when you're coming into SEMRush is having a blog or a newsletter website that's already created. Now, so much of the benefit that we get from using SEMRush is going to be coming from actually going ahead and putting in our own domain here, our own website. Because what it does is it analyzes it with everything that has to do with SEO. As you can see right here, these are all going to be relevant kind of subjects that are going to kind of help us in improving our own website SEO ranking. So SEO is a huge umbrella. There is so much to cover here in terms of optimizing for SEO. So what I want to do in this lesson is kind of give you a quick overview that covers the most important parts for you. Now, starting with this analysis, the first thing of SEMRush that you should definitely go ahead and do if you have a website or if you don't have a website is go ahead and go over to the keyword research section. So let's go ahead and go into the keyword overview. So as you can see we don't have to actually put in our domain to search in for any keywords. We can right here below, put in our website if we want, and then it'll tell us kind of how our keywords that we're entering are going to relate to our website in terms of difficulty and stats like this. Now, these keywords are the top of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, because keywords kind of lay the foundation. It's the easiest thing for you to go ahead and implement that can also have the biggest impact on your ranking. So let's go ahead and put in AI as a keyword. So as we can see with AI, we have a very high search volume. This is 1 million within the US alone, but the keyword difficulty is 100%. So this is the hardest kind of keyword that we could potentially rank for. So what we want to use SEMRush for is to kind of take this broad keyword of AI and give us some ideas, as you can see here, for some more specific things that aren't going to be as difficult to go ahead and enter. So let's go ahead and look at keyword variations here. We're going to view all of these keywords. So now we're here in this view of looking of all these keywords that are related to AI, and we see a bunch of different metrics here that I'm now going to explain. First, we have intent. Now, on SEMRush, there is four different intent categories. Now, as we can see here, these four are listed right here. There's informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. So transactional is basically going to be those searches that people are going to be putting in with the intent of buying. Now, commercial is going to be the kind of a step before transactional, where they want to kind of go ahead and learn about the things or services that they hope to buy, maybe at a future date, but that exact search that they're putting in, which is a commercial search intent is not going to be something that will lead directly to a purchase as transactional now, navigational is essentially going to be a search that helps an individual get to a website. So this can be Subaru website, for example. And lastly, we have informational, which is just going to be how individuals are going to get more information on a topic. So this can be just a very broad question of what's a good place to eat. So this can be a very broad search, something like what's a good car. Now that we have these intents down, let's go ahead and come back here. And next we're going to look at volume. So volume is essentially as we see here, it's the average number of monthly searches for a keyword over the past year. So looking at this top keyword right here, character AI, we see that there's been an average of about 3,350,000 times that character AI has been searched every single month within the past year. Next, we have KD, which stands for keyword difficulty. So this one is pretty straightforward. The higher the number, the harder it is for you to rank highly within this specific topic. So right now, looking at volume and KD keyword difficulty, what we want to look for is something that has a very high volume, but also a low keyword difficulty. So it's not going to be as difficult for us to rank highly for these. So looking at this, we have this volume now put from highest to lowest. So this is a good way for you to have this structured because as I said before, we want to find things that have very high search volume. Then what I would do is probably just go ahead and look through this keyword difficulty and scroll down and find ones that look viable that we could possibly create content on that can then boost us in that specific topic. I can go ahead and scroll down here and I can see different keyword difficulties with their respective volume. Now what I can also do is come up here and select this filter, which is low hanging fruit, and these ones are usually just trending opportunities that are probably going to be good for you to go ahead and get in because they're not going to be too difficult to go ahead and capitalize on. Now, in the realm of AI, what tends to have pretty good keyword difficulty with respective high volume is usually specific AI generators. So as we can see here, we have a few. We have MUA. We have novel AI, brainy, we have runway down here, and these ones are all going to be specific softwares. So if I had a newsletter that was specifically going to be dedicated to AI and tech in general, what I could do is create newsletter topics on each one of these AI softwares and then have them on my blog and create more in depth articles on them. And this will likely have me ranked very high when people search these things. So once you have these decided and you've gotten some insight from here, next, what I would recommend you to do is come up here to the competitive research tab and then come here into Keyword Gap. Now, the way that we use keyword Gap is going to be putting in our website versus our competitors website. And we can go ahead and add up to four of our competitors, and we can see where they are ranking on specific keywords where we aren't. So those are going to be some spaces that we need to go ahead and fill, hence the name of the section, Keyword G. So once you do this and you have a good set of keywords that you want to go ahead and create some content on, the next tool that I want to show you is going to be down here, we're going to go over into content marketing, and then we're going to go with SEO writing Assistant. So we can go ahead and select Analyze my text. Then once you have your keywords and you've decided that you're going to be making an article around a specific set of keywords, you can then put in that article 0R newsletter or blog post into here, and then it's going to tell you how well you rank for SEO. I'm going to go ahead and put Runway AI. Then I can just go ahead and click Get recommendations. On this point, I can go ahead and type in a few kind of sentences that are going to be summarizing what I'm going to be speaking about, and then I can go ahead and click Compose. And then SEMRush is going to kind of expand it into something that is going to be very SEO optimized. Now, the next thing to discuss when it comes to SEO is going to be backlinks. So backlinks is obviously as it sounds, it's going to be on the back end of our website. Binks and SEO work in two separate ways. First, you're going to have backlinks that are going to be on your website that are going to be linking to websites outside of your website. So this, for example, can be you talking about some product and you have an affiliate link attached to a word as a hyperlink. And then people can select it, and then they're going to be taken off of your page. So here, in this context, what we want to make sure of and what we want to make sure that is okay, so our SEO is not going to be harmed by this is that we want to make sure all of the links that we have within our website are not broken and they in fact work. So if we have any broken links within our website, then this is going to harm our SEO ranking. The search engines know this. They know if we have broken or correct links within our website. Now, another way to increase your ranking based on these back links is for you to go ahead and link reputable sources. So say that you have a newsletter that is talking about politics. You want to make sure that when you're going to be discussing things, if you can link to some reputable news organization in context of whatever it is that you are discussing to maybe give some more information about a specific part of your newsletter, then you should go ahead and do that because this will give you a little bit more credibility when these SEO engines are going to be scraping your website. On the other side of a coin of a back link is going to be when other websites are going to be linking to your website. So again, in these cases, we want to make sure that all of those links that are going to be linking to your website are going to be correct and not broken links. Depending on when people are referencing your website or newsletter or blog, these are going to be a little bit harder to kind of track and kind of maintain because sometimes you don't have control over the people that are going to be talking about your website. But if you can control this, then you want to make sure that these are all going to be good links and nothing is going to be broken. Now, do this, to check this here, we have a couple ways to do this. Here in Link Building, we have Blink analytics. So of course, here, what you're going to have to do is go ahead and put in your own website. Let's go ahead and check this world wildlife.org, and we can go ahead and see what it is that is here. So the backlinks from May 2024 to April 2025 here. We can see that across time, they have decreased significantly. Now, I can't say the exact reason for this as to why this happened, but one thing that I can say is that looking here at their authority score, you can see that although they've had this decrease, it doesn't seem to have impacted their authority score, so kind of how they rank in terms of their backlinks in SEO. So their authority score has remained consistent. So the decrease in backlinks hasn't been a problem. So this goes to show that the more back links that you have on your website doesn't necessarily mean the higher you're going to rank in SEO. So if this is something that you're concerned about, I wouldn't be too stressed out about for me, I would just recommend that all the links that you have that are going to be in your control to make sure that all of them are going to be not broken and they're all going to be functional. So now, lastly, what I want to show you and bring your attention to is to go ahead and put your domain within this domain overview. Right now, we see that it's stuck with this world wildlife.org, and we get to see so much information here. Now, typically, if your website isn't going to be as large as this one, it's immediately going to give you some tips that you can go ahead and implement to increase your SEO score. And these ones are always going to be good things for you to actually keep in mind and take action on because oftentimes they are going to be simple little tweaks that you can make to your website that are going to pay off in big dividends. Now, speaking of paying off in these dividends, we can also see the effects of all of our changes right here within SEMRush. So right here with worldwildlife.org, we can look at this organic traffic in comparison to this paid traffic. So it doesn't matter if you're only going to be working with paid traffic or if you're only going to be working with organic traffic. What we can see regardless is the number of traffic that is going to be given to our website. So how many people are going to be visiting our website at any given date and time. So over time, as you make these small tweaks and adjustments, you can come back and you can look at this traffic data and you can see what's working and what's not and what's working, you can double down on and what isn't can just forget. Now, like I told you in the beginning of this lesson, SEMRush has so much stuff that we can go over and we can analyze. Now, what I did in this lesson was give you a quick overview. That is going to be able to get you started with the most important things that are going to give you, honestly, the most improvements to your page. Alright, so that's it for SEMRush. Now, this might be something that is going to be a few steps ahead of where you're currently at, but I don't want this to be something that you forget about because SEO is going to be a pivotal part in your newsletter or your blog or whatever content that you are going to be posting. Do not ignore SEO because it can really pay you dividends and it can give you crazy gains. 28. Leverage YouTube for Audience Growth: Until this point, we've talked about funneling people to our email list through blogs, which is a text based medium. This is because there's the least amount of friction because you know that people who are reading a blog have at least some level of affinity with consuming content in the form of text. Now I want to talk about a different kind of platform, video. But before we get into it, let me make a quick distinction. We're not going to talk about short form video. So Tik Tok, Reels or YouTube shorts. We're going to be skipping those for now. Here's why. Short form content can generate leads. And yes, you can technically send people a lead magnet, get them into your funnel, and then start a mail champ automation. But the friction is real. Short form content is fast, impulsive and entertainment roofing. The nature of the medium doesn't lend itself well to nurturing, educating, and building relationships, which is what newsletters are all about. Just think about it. If you're someone that consumes short form content, then think about how many of the people that you regularly follow or see on your feed, you actually remember their names. On short form, we tend to remember people associated with the thing that they do rather than them as an individual. And more often than not, if you're getting someone's attention on short form, then it's easier to close them on platform. So that's either by selling them directly, DMing them, or pushing them some low commitment offer. For newsletter or email list growth, short form is a channel. There are better uses for that attention. Now here's where it gets interesting. I'm not saying video is off the table because long form video and specifically YouTube is a whole different game. YouTube isn't just a content platform. It's a connection platform. YouTube lets you build real relationships with your audience at scale. Spend ten, 20, even 30 minutes watching you talk about one topic. They see your face, hear your voice, pick up on your sense of humor, and form what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. That is a one way emotional connection with someone that they don't know personally. And this is a big deal because in marketing, relationships sell. People don't just buy products. They buy from people that they trust, people that they like, and people that they're connected to. And YouTube gives you that opportunity, even if you only have 300 subscribers. That's the concept behind 1,000 true fans it's this idea that you don't need millions of followers to build successful business. You just need a small group of people who are genuinely into what it is that you do. And YouTube is where you find those people. How do you use YouTube to actually grow your mail chimp list? Let's get into the tactical part. How can we actually leverage YouTube to drive email sign ups and not just views? Well, step one is going to be nail your niche. Yes, I get. The same rules to follow when picking a niche for your business apply here. Don't chase views. Don't try to go viral, and don't dilute your message, just to appeal to more people. YouTube in this context, isn't about entertainment. It's about connection. That means that you can and should go deep. Make videos that are a niche within a niche within a niche. That's how you attract the right audience. The people who will actually sign up for your list, engage with your content, and buy from you later on. Of course, this means having done the research to confirm that you have a genuine problem that you'll be solving. Now, that's a conversation for another time, but you can use Google Trends, conduct interviews with past clients or people who meet your ICP, et cetera. Now step number two, which is going to be what videos that you should make. And here's a hint you want to use data. Here, we're not just randomly brainstorming ideas. Just like we used SEMRush to find blog post gaps, we're going to be using VDIQ to find video topic gaps. VitiQ shows you a plethora of things, and among that is volume versus competition. So you can find the topics that people are actively looking for that don't have too many videos covering them. Here you're working in search based traffic, not YouTube's recommendation algorithm. So what does this mean for your content? Well, it means evergreen topics, specific hats, and problem solving videos. And we'll go deep into VitiQ in the next lesson, but just know that the goal here is to find high demand, low competition ideas with a VDIQ score over 60. That score tells you that people are searching for this and you have a good shot at ranking. Now on to step three, which is titles and thumbnails that pull. Now that you got your topics, your titles should basically be the search term itself. Now, the magic happens if you're able to combine the keyword or keywords with a really provocative title that is suited well for YouTube. Example, if your keywords are Utomi instructor earnings and how much could you earn on Utomi, then you could combine it into one with this title. Utomi instructor earnings reveal. How much can you earn on YouTube? Now, as for thumbnails, here's the rule. Your face plus emotion, plus bold text. Again, there's 1 million things that we can talk about here, but just make sure that your background isn't too bright. That's because we want us and the text to stand out and be a little bit separate from that background. Should try to keep the text to be four words or less and to be as provocative as possible. For example, a thumbnail that worked really well for one of my clients had, like, the Yelp review icon, and the review just said chess but better. And another similar thing that worked really well for them was a picture of a top chess player with the quote that said the chess problem. So you should really just look at what's working in your niche and try to borrow from them. A great tool to use here is View Stats, because we can find high performing thumbnails around your keywords. You'll be able to see what's clickable, and then you can replicate that energy. And another great tool that we can find directly within YouTube is AB testing thumbnails. This is something that you should definitely be doing in almost all of your videos because you can just let the data speak for itself. Now for step four, how often to post and how to launch right. If you're starting from scratch, then don't just post one video and pray. Instead, you should be batching your content. So you should record eight to ten videos before your launch. Then you should start posting daily or every other day for the first two weeks. This trains the algorithm on what your channel is about, and it helps YouTube find the right audience for your content fast. After that, you want to post consistently. Even once a week is fine, but just show up because each video becomes a long term asset that drives recurring search traffic. And if it's connected to a lead magnet, then that means recurring leads into your mail chip twist. Now for step five, which is going to be converting YouTube viewers into email subscribers. Here is the core of this lesson, turning views into sign ups. The simplest, most effective way offer a lead magnet that solves the exact problem that the video talks about. So if it's a video on how to use Mailchimp for ecommerce, then your lead magnet should be free five step automation guide for online stores. If the video is how to build a sales funnel, then your lead magnet should be plug and play funnel templates that you can copy. You can pitch it like this. Hey, if you found this helpful, I'd put together a free guide that goes deeper and gives you templates to get started, the links in the description. That's it. No hype, just value. Do not just say subscribe to my newsletter. That's not a real offer. Everyone says that, and no one cares. People will exchange their emails for solutions, not for updates. We'll dive into Lead magnet creation in the next module, but just know that this is the key to making YouTube work for News Auto growth. And now before we close off this lesson, I just want to give one more final nugget, and that is just get to the point. Should treat your videos the same way that we treat emails. Get to the value fast. Don't spend 60 seconds introducing yourself. Don't say, Hey, guys, welcome to my channel. People do not care. You should hit them with a hook that is maximum 8 seconds long. Tell them what they'll learn and why it matters. Then you should deliver right away. The faster you get to the good stuff, the more trust that you build, and the more likely they are to click that link in your description. So here is the final recap. YouTube isn't for going viral. It's for creating connection. You don't need a massive audience. You just need the right one. Use search based videos, a clear lead magnet, and Mailchimp aster engine behind the scenes. And you'll turn traffic into subscribers on Autopilot. And the next lesson, we'll get hands on with VDIQ to help you find those video ideas.