MailChimp Confidence Class - Beginner Essentials

1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Stuart waters and I'm the founder of brand wrote marketing and hunting cause I'm also a MailChimp Pro partner. Which means that basically means teaching this for quite a long time now and helping entrepreneurs and small businesses with that email marketing. If you don't know, MailChimp is the biggest and most popular email marketing tool in the world. Yeah, it's not always that easy when you haven't used it before, same as anything. What I put together is a small intro course into how to use Mailchimp and go from nothing and being a starter to then sending a first campaign within an hour of training that runs through everything from setting up the account, adding your contacts, audiences, designing and creating a beautiful looking email template which matches your brand. And then the important bit, sending the e-mail which engages with your audience and hopefully even generate some sales. I wanted to put this course together because I understand or hard it is when you're trying to work out a platform and you try and make money off it, but you go around in circles and you're wasting precious time with that time could be spent doing the effector things new business which makes them money and things you enjoy. So I wanted to make sure you could just follow my step-by-step instructions and make things as easy as possible. With this course, I've made it really bite size was small videos where you can read, digest exactly what is happening. You can just follow along with me. I'll walk you through the process, hold your hand and even explain why you are doing the best you do. The end of it, you will have a great template and campaign which you can send out. And then you can use again in future. Hope. Hopefully I'll see you inside a really hot you find the course useful. And if there's anything you need, just give me a shout. Have a great day. 2. Setting Up MailChimp Account: So what better place to start than creating your own Mailchimp account? And I do understand a lot of you will have accountant's already. And this is what applies to you. But if you don't and you would like a walk through of it, then please join me in this orients to do. First of all, go to www.mailchimp.com. And you will see the page that we have here. In the top right. You will see the button sign up. We can click on that. This is standard for any kind of platform that you sign up for. You add your e-mail, username and a password. I will use. One of my e-mail addresses. The username, you can call it either the same as your email address. You can set up as sensitive your company. I'm going to call mine Brand tutorial. Then password. Just make sure that it has the necessary characters like it says. Then you can choose whether you'd like to receive e-mails from MailChimp or you can click sign up. On this occasion, I'm gonna click Sign-Up. Once you've filled in the details and you'll happy everything's correct. They will actually send you an email just to confirm that it is you and your e-mail that you received will look just like this one. Just like it says, click the Activate Account. Let us get this show on the road. So we click, I'm not a robot. Just to prove that you want some spammer. This is where it will ask you what kind of account you would like the moment when, while setting up. But always, always, always choose the free option. Because why you get everything set up, There's no point in paying for anything. And also, you start sending automated emails and multi-step, multiple steps, then there's not really much needed anyway. The differences are between them is essentially you get a few more audiences. If you go to Essentials or standard, you can send AB testing and essentials, for example, but in free, you can just about do everything you need and note them also charge you based on how many contacts you have as well. So you had the first two thousand completely free, and then after that, you pay to the next segment. So for example, between 2 thousand to 2500. At the moment, you probably have a small list or you might have a list at all and you wanted to grow this. All we're going to want to do it in a moment is click on free. We can easily upgrade plans later on, which I'll show you how to do, because we will need someone to get started into the automation. We click Continue. This is where we set up the information for your account. This is self-explanatory. You fill out all this information, websites, phone number, and then continue. You can add your address. So this is just for Mailchimp can contact you if there are problems with you sending emails to people who didn't want the mix that dries just to a protocol. Once you're happy with that information as well, click Continue. Then it does ask if you've got a list of contacts already. As I mentioned, you might have a list already from a previous Mailchimp account or another email marketing platform. If so, you can, I would recommend adding them in this software, but only if they are quite recent, if there are about four years old and you haven't contacted them for years, then I would definitely get it validated first. What I do are added validation tool link into this module for you. Just so you can make sure that is all up to date because Mailchimp can be quite fussy if you've got data which is not relevant anymore, if you get loads of balances, then they'll start walking your account. You don't want to start getting those people complaining and on describing straightaway. So it's best to play it safe. The moment I'm going to say no. At the moment it's probably best to say no anyway because it makes the setup bit quicker. And then we can actually learn how to add new contacts and audiences in afterwards. Then this is more for them than it is for you. What do you offer or planning to offer services? Or you can just skip it. It doesn't matter too much. This is tell us where you've set up your shot. If you've got a WooCommerce or a Shopify store or any kind of online store. You can actually connect your store to MailChimp. And then all the stats or the payments you receive will then link with your Mailchimp account. Then that way you can really, really great if the track is really great for tracking how much revenue you receive your campaigns, then we can see which part is there clicking. It's really good to break down. The moment as we setup. Tell us where you've set up your shop. We can say ONE, our website or e-commerce store. Then you're ready to go. So click Continue. There, we have it. You have your own Mailchimp account. And we can now start adding our audiences, templates, campaigns, automation, and stopped helping you generate some business and hopefully in some money. 3. Template Overview: Now a template, this is where Mailchimp starts to get a little bit more fun. It's less figures and data and processes are more about being creative and making your brand really stand out. So you want your e-mails to do your brand justice and you want it to be consistent with what your website shows. So I'm going to run through how to start and create your own template. And we'll look at how to make it look like your brand and make sure it looks great on mobile and desktop. So it's really important, but they're awesome tools which will make this quite easy. To get into the template section. This time we're gonna go to campaigns on the left-hand side menu, which is the megaphone speaker option. Click on this. And then the yellow sub bar. It is the second one down. This email templates, we'll click on this as well. At the moment because this is a brand new demo account without any template saved, which is good. As if your accounts knew you weren't either. Scrape a new template, we simply go and create template in the top right corner. Mailchimp does provide us with a number of pre-made layouts already. It's not really a ready-made template, but it creates the blocks which you can build and base your template from. It has suggested layouts based on products, based on announcements, the logs, education follow-ups. And it also provides different basic layouts as well already. It's purely just the text blocks, an image box there at the moment. And it has layout save you want everything in one column. If you want something too, if you want in three even, or a mixture of all of them. Also. If you click on themes, they have some pretty good, pretty good pre-made templates there for you as well. These are only available once you have a paid plan. But to be honest, they're not actually that great. And I do find that they can look a bit funny on certain browsers. And the flexibility isn't that amazing? I think you're either better off creating your own or using one of the ready-made designs that I've added into the template is module under resources. But I will show you how to edit one of them and upload this to your account later. 4. Text Blocks: To create a template from scratch, we want to go back into templates just to run through that bit again with you. We click on campaigns are the left-hand menu, which is the speaker phone icon. Click on that. Then the yellow menu, we click on email templates. We want to go to Create template in the top right. From scratch is best start off with the basics. The most basic of all of them is the one column. This is fine because we can add in two column elements easily anyway. The only thing we can't add in is three column elements to the basic design. So if you really do want free columns, then you will have to go and select the three column templates below. But three colon templates often look quite squished because within e-mail marketing, we don't get much space. It's not like in if you're creating a PDF or you're creating a PDF, we have quite a nice big canvas to work with. An e-mail marketing. We only get 600 pixels width to play with. Height-wise, it can make it as long as you want. But the width does make design slightly limited. When you've got three columns. 200 pixels for each section is quite small. It's completely up to you and it's worth having a play with. Got two variations for each layout. So for example, we've got one column and we've got one column for width. Full width means that you don't have any kind of gray border around an email and let you normally would. And I personally don't think it looks quite a smart. I'm going to go choose one column. Again, it's all down to preference. And you can play around with this as much as you like to get your kind of get what works best for you. On this occasion when I click one column. And it brings up very, very basic layout. This is basically a blank canvas. You can see what elements are already in the template by hovering your mouse over the actual template. So when it has a border around it, it means that is a different section or block. We click on this text box here. On the right. It brings up text where we can edit it. If you go in here and you change it to I'm learning about templates. You'll see it comes up on the right-hand side, on the left-hand side straightaway also. Again with the title. Template is just like any other word document or any kind of platform used before. You can edit the text within. So very similar layouts, a word which is great. We can highlight the text. You can click on font to change the font. This is called quite a few fonts here. Unfortunately, we are quite limited with what fonts you can use in your marketing. Because so many people ask if they can have that custom form, they use the website. But email is quite an old fashioned kind of technology and it's crazy, but most platforms and web browsers don't actually accept any other fonts apart from the ones within MailChimp. But there's still enough where you can get it pretty close to your brand anyway. Long as it looks good and looks close, then it's fine, doesn't really matter. But we can change the font by clicking on various different fonts and you can see how it looks in the left-hand side. We can change the size just like on Word. We can also change the alignment. We can have it left at the moment. We have a central from the right-hand side. Let me get a justified. We can align left the moment. And we can change color, the text color, and click on this, the a with underlying and it has a drop-down. This will bring up different colors for us. We can choose a selection of colors here. Or you can even pick more colors. And you can type in the hex code of what I mean of your branding color or specific color that you like. We can also make the text bold, italic. Well underlined as well, simply by clicking on the three icons. As same as in word. Again, nice and easy. If we have quite a lot of different, if you want to have bullet points. We've got three lines here. They want to turn to bullet points. We can just highlight the three lines. We can click on the bullet list icon here. Again, if you want it numbers instead. Click on the 123. You'd say any single update happens on the left here, which is great. It's exactly what we're doing. If you realize you don't like the styling you've got within the text and you wanted to get back to how it was. You can highlight it all and click Clear styles. Or if you realize you made a mistake and if the light is on, you don't want to want to go back. You can do undo by clicking on the undo button on the right-hand side. If you want to change the line height, either spacing between the different lines in your template. You can simply click on style, click on line-height. And we can choose between normal slides, 1.5 or double-space. And you say if we click on double spacing, we go double-space between the lines. We have normal, they got really, really close. Southern we're going to have slight, slight looks good. We're gonna keep slide. And we can save. If you do decide that you want this in two columns instead of one. You might want, as you say, this is quiet. We've got quite a shorter sentences. So if we've got bullet points on the left, we might think it might be quite cool to have the same again on the right. So we simply go to settings. Then it lets us choose how many columns we want, one or two. You want to choose two columns on this occasion. We can choose the split if you want it, half and half, three-quarters. Either way. Half-and-half looks much neater to me. So we're gonna click on that. You will see another layer to this. You will see that there is a column one and column two option. Automatically it will have what you've just typed in a minute ago and your column one. Column two, it will have just the generic text. We want the same kind of thing in the right-hand column. We can copy this, paste it. And then we can change this to welcome pain. Then you can change the bullet points again too. But when you are editing, just watch out and make sure you are changing the right column. 5. Image Blocks: Images is what really brings your template or campaign to life. And this is super easy to add in. Again, if we want to go into our template, which we're currently making the right-hand side and our blocks, we will see what options we have here. So we have images, we have imaged group, we have image card, an image text. Again, it'd be want to drag any of these in, hover over and click on one of our choice. So I'll click an image. And I can drag this into the arena and choose where I want it to go. I'm going to have you on this occasion between these two blocks. At the moment it just has a standard gray block which shows you need to add something in. To add in our own images. We click on upload an image. This takes us to our files, which we already have in our account. If you've already got some images, you will see these here in your concept studio. If you want to upload some that went click Upload, upload. So we can go into our min, go into our folder of choice, and we can simply click, double-click and upload it. Once I've loaded, it will show in your template. A lot of the time when you upload an image, it will come up with this error message. Was say, this image is too big and might slow load times or get clipped. And people's inboxes aim for eight hundred, ten hundred, three hundred pixels width instead, let's fix it. As they mentioned, having really, really big photos and images is not going to do your e-mail campaigns any good. They're going to either get blocked by different e-mail browsers or they can end up in people's spam. If the email is just slow to load and open, then people are less likely to click on them. Some LCM suggests between 801,200. But if you remember me saying earlier, an email is only 600 pixels wide, I would always, always make sure my images are 600 pixels maximum. That way you've got the best chance your campaigns to be delivered. You can change this nice and easily by clicking. Let's fix it. And it will take you to a really cool editor that they have. We don't have to edit all this in Photoshop or something before we can upload it and do the cropping within. It has 1600 width. It corrects it to that, but I'm going to change it to 600. If you have the blue tick filled in, then your height will automatically change in relation. We changed the correct size in relation to the new width. Once you're happy that you've got 600 width, you can click save. Now you'll see the error message is gone. If you want to edit this further, we can click on edit. We can actually crop images as well. I might think, Hang on, I don't want all of this in here. I quite like it to be square. And then it creates a square automatically. And you can drag which part you want within the image. Or again, it has some other pre-made options for you. Or again, you can even do custom. This way. You may want to turn off the lock dimension tick. We can click on that and it's gone. Now, we can crop it manually exactly how we want. You can say you can just weren't part the phone in there. You might just want centers to the left. Once you are happy with your cropping, you can click Save. Do say that you don't want to have pixels above 600, but you don't want to start getting them under 600 really either, because then it weren't sure the whole width of the template and they look a bit funky. Once you're happy with that, you can click save. We can also add links to our images as well, which you can see by the Link button. Let's click on that. Again. We can choose you wanted to go to an email file again or just go to an e-mail or a web order skirts were a web address. We can go to this fence of brand remote. You want to remove the link, no problem. Just click on Link again. Click Remove link. You can also see here the image display size has kind of drag sensitive indicator. So we can drag this up and down and we will see change in size within our template. We have a style books for images too. We can add a border around it, just like we did with our text. Dash. Changed the pixels again. Pick a color. We can also choose if we want rounded corners on our image and our border. You see it looks like a game of snake with it moving around at the moment. And just like we did before, we can extend this style to other image blocks that we have. Then settings we can choose if we want to align central, left or right. It also gives an option for if you want to edge to edge, automatically, Mailchimp has images in and it gives a little bit of padding to the left and right and top and bottom. What you can do is you click edge to edge. You see it stretches out. And four main wide images. I think it looks really cool when you do that. You can also constrain the image dimensions with 50% for high res displays. But I wouldn't recommend that. Then you can save. If you want to replace the image, simply click on Replace. Once you're happy, click Save and Close on that box. You can also decide if you want to have image groups. So we select an image group. It's exactly the same again. But here you can see you got two images left and right. You can add up to five images per group. If we click on, Add another image, it creates this cool effect here. You can add another. Now we go to settings. It provides us with a few layout options. If you do have two images next to each other within an email, you do want to make sure they are the same size though, as if they're not. It can look a little bit uneven, a bit messy. So we upload pictures to this block and we want to have a square picture of a goat on the left. Then we have a landscape picture of a sheep on the right-hand side. You can see there's a big, ugly whitespace underneath where the sheep are. We want to make sure these two images are exactly the same height and width. So we can see that I mentioned the two images here underneath the names, 427 times 427 for the goat on the sheep, we have 640 times four to eight. We can see the goat is cropped to a square. We can do exactly the same for the sheep and they will match. We click on Edit. And we can choose one of the pre cropped options that motion has. We can go square, move it to where you happy, and click Save. And now they are even Heights. Say if you wanted them to be landscape, instead of cropping, just one of them to the square. You could go edit. You could choose on. You can click on 69, for example, crop, and do the same on the shape. It doesn't really matter what you choose, but just make sure that they're even and it looks so much better. 6. Logos: One of the part of images that I did forget, as I mentioned quickly, which is quite important. At the top of your campaign with a basic gate, we'll have a logo here. So credit default, blank logo. This is exactly the same as any image block is just called logo instead. So again, if you want to, you want to add your logo, you click on Replace. And you can click on this solo ago. Of course, that's all. And just like any other, you can re-size it. Next, fix it. You can type in 600 pixels wide and you can see it's automatically changed the height as well. And click Save. Save again. This image is very big on this occasion. I know I said he put it on when you use it too often. You could actually use constraint image dimensions by 50% on your settings part of the image. Click Settings. And it's still then high-definition. But 50% 7. Image Caption Blocks: Now a template, this is where Mailchimp starts to get a little bit more fun. It's less figures and data and processes and more about being creative and making your brand really stand out. So you want your e-mails to do your brand justice and you want it to be consistent with what your website shows. I'm going to run through how to start and create your own template. And we'll look at how to make it look like your brand and make sure it looks great on mobile and desktop. So it's really important, but there are some tools which will make this quite easy. To get into the template section. This time we're gonna go to campaigns on the left-hand side menu, which is the megaphone speaker option. Click on this. And then the yellow sub bar is the second one down. This email templates, we'll click on this as well. At the moment because this is a brand new demo account, we don't have any template saved, which is good. As if your accounts knew you weren't either. Create a new template, we simply go on Create template in the top right corner. Mailchimp does provide us with a number of pre-made layouts already. Not really a ready-made template, but it creates the blocks which you can build and base your template from. It has suggested layouts based on products, based on announcements, blogs, education follow-ups. And it also provides different basic layouts as well already. It's purely just the text blocks and image box there at the moment. And it has layouts if you want everything in one column, if you want someone to, if you want in three even, or a mixture of all of them. Also. If you click on themes, they have some pretty good, pretty good pre-made templates there for you as well. These are only available once you have a paid plan. But to be honest, they're not actually that great. And I do find that they can look a bit funny on certain browsers. And the flexibility isn't that amazing? I think you're either better off creating your own or using one of the ready-made designs that I've added into the templates module, the resources. But I will show you how to edit one of them and upload this to your account later. 8. Call to Action Blocks: The most important part to your templates by far are the call to action buttons that you add to your campaign. Without these, just provides a pretty picture or a blog for people to read. We've added some links with hyperlinks to some of the images we talked about and some of the text. But what really makes it stand out is the buttons. We drag in button on the blocks and the right-hand side. We can add it where we want within our template. It makes it quite simple. It lets you know what's actually want to add. So we can have, by now that sounds good. We can link it to a web address, which would be your landing page or a page with a blog that you've written. You could add our website, selling else distribute useful. It could be a download button. If someone's described to a sign up form and you've said Sign up or subscribe to receive your ten tips on becoming an expert email marketer. Then you're going to have to link them to a page or a PDF. If that is a PDF, we can change the text to download. Now. Instead of linking to a web address, we can add it to a file. If we uploaded a file, sample ten things your clients do. Just let you upload an image that appears in your content studio. What it does actually creates, creates an own unique URL for that document. Now you will see links to file, file URL. Now that is in your MailChimp Macau and it's hosted here. You can also send that link to your customers. For example, if I create a new tag, a new tab, and I paste this, you will see that the document comes up and they can scroll for and read it. Great way of sharing your PDFs of your clients. Because in a really pro, way, of course, you may actually want to add a contact button. And most of the time I'd recommend going through a contact form. If you want them to email you directly. You can do also, we say click to email. And we can do link to email address. We can say brown remote. And we can add the subjects that you want it to automatically have. We could add Mailchimp template, even a message body. Hi, I saw your offer. I am interested. Then you could leave space and this is what they would type in below. You can add an advanced options, but that's for another day. So you can save and close. That way we go to Preview again. It goes to the top right. Enter preview mode. See on desktop or mobile. You can see it on Inbox motive want to upgrade your account. It doesn't really matter because desktop mode or mobilize all you need. If you scroll down to our button, if we click on Click to email now opens up by email within Outlook or Chrome or wherever you have it sets up. It opens up the email. And the already has this TextView here. Always if you want to get out of preview mode, just click on the right hand side and click on the cross. Of course, you may not want it to be this color. Again, we can change the colors by adding your own hex codes or by dragging, dragging the color selector around. Make it as personalized as you like. We can change how rounded we have the corners. So you can have a square by having on less or you can drag it around and have really kind of really circular shape. Just like our images, we can add borders. And as you guessed it, you've got the pixels. You can change the colors. Kind of creepy looking button. But for now, you can change if you want it bold or not. Change what color do you want the text? You can change the size. The padding means how much space there is between the text and the the actual button. So if you increase it, for example, to 30, you'll see that space is increased massively. Save and Close. If you did have another button, save, you already start creating templates and you went to button down there as well. And you're like, hang on. This design is pretty, pretty beautiful. I want this at all my buttons. We can go to style and click on the text at the bottom applied to exist in button blocks. So we take that save. Now you other button is the same style. We go buttons. You can also align to censor or left or right. You can have it full width of the text. This is in the Settings area of your butter. Every block you do have has contents, style, and settings. If you never quite sure where each bit is, because sometimes even I forget, maybe you just click through them. You'll find it. Click and scroll. Lot of it is just trial and error and just have some fun with it. You see this template isn't looking the best, but you get the picture of how to build it and you will do much better job than this. I guarantee. 9. Social Media Accounts: If you see at the bottom of any of the templates that you start within MailChimp, it will automatically have a social follow box. This is what you'd expect. It adds the icons of various social media platforms and allows you to type in your own URL for Twitter or Facebook for websites. But there's a lot more there than just the three that they add. You click on, Add another service. You click on drop-down. You will see that there's LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, instagram, female Irvine, is that still exists. Rss for your blogs, you've got a huge choice of what you want to add. You can go crazy with this, but if you add more than five or six, it might look a bit messy. If we choose, Instagram will replace website with Snapchat. See the icons that really cool here on the left. We just need to make sure we add in our personal company domains these obviously if you leave them as they are now, It's just going to go into a generic Instagram page where there's no good for your company. We can change the style of bees just like we can with anything. You can add texts underneath and if you want, whichever I wouldn't add. You can add backgrounds, the actual container. The same way as you always can. You can add a border. We can change the size of a social media icons. We can have them really big, which I quite like that. We can eat them, have them downwards, which I don't like, but it's all preference. And we can choose if we want them icon only, text-only, both icon and text. I'm Professor than just icons much cleaner. Love them essentially left to right. Such. Then we can even choose if you'd like them black and white, if you'd like him. White and black, gray and black. It will depends on your branding and what do you think that was clean on this occasion? Once you're happy with that version, click, Save and Close is really that easy for people to follow you. Another kind of social media block that we have within MailChimp is the share blog. So the difference is this is to share your campaign that you're going to send. Every time you send a campaign, it actually creates its own domain. This domain can then be read on any kind of browser. It's not just within your email. If you do want that to happen. It automatically picks Facebook, twitter, and forward to a friend by email. And again, you can choose the platform that allows you to share this on. So it's not quite as many. You can add another service and that Google Pinterest LinkedIn. You can even change the text that you want to add under it. Check this out. For example. You can share it, as I said to the campaign URL or you can add a custom URL. If you want to share. For example, you might have a link within your call to action you won't be able to go to, you can say, I want to share this link. And so you can say I wanted people to go to brand remote description. Again, once you click, Save and Close. 10. Template Sections: Borders of images, buttons, text. It all keeps saying kind of design and layout. Once you started to get used to it, it becomes much more natural when you go to email, becomes much more natural when he got to editing our emails. We click red border and we choose the pixels again. We make it 20, for example, as a border to the top of the e-mail. We can have a border around the whole e-mail itself, which is cool. So we wanted this time we'll do dashed, will make it that red again. It just keep consistent and we can see it slightly narrower on the side, but we've only got it for one pixel. And as you remember, an email is 600 pixels. You can change that to ten. Shows us it looks horrible. Reported to make it to the whole, you know, it looks a bit crazy. I must admit. You can change the styles of font that's of different headers, adding one and into. Then automatically it will go to those styles. If you choose Resample, Georgia had a warm. When we go back into different blocks. If you highlight parts, and I didn't actually mention earlier, if you've gone styles, you can choose if you want a heading one, heading two. For all this kind of thing. Change the heading one and changes that Georgia style that we had before. But we're going to clear that up for now. Easy mistake to make is click on settings, but when you're actually on the block, but you will know quite quickly if you are because it would just have no options. We could save and close. Let me click back on style. And that's page. That's all you need to know if the page part, the most interesting part is the sections that Mailchimp has. When you're scrolling through our e-mail here, it looks like there's no no unique sections apart from the blocks that we have, the elements we built into the e-mail. But once we started to change the colors of different sections, you can see where they begin and where they end. So a lot of time I quite liked to have one section and white in the next section, background with the color of the branding I have. If we make the pre header color white, we can change header to read. Now already, you can see where then two sections are separated. The pre header is y and the ends here currently, header, the red and that's here. And it stops off before body. We can see body here change color. And we can make this one just make it a horrible color just so you can see the difference. Again. Don't make it look like this. It looks beautiful. Really want to make it white, is black. Let's make it white. But you can see what the difference is. Then fits her. We're going to change this background to red again. You can see here where the first section is. Those sections are defined. The elements itself can move from one section to another. So for example, if you have templates block here, but I really want that with the black, with the red background here. Not a problem. Just drag it up. And if you move it into that section, it will. They'll have that red background. Again. If you want the logo, you want it with the white in the pre header or whatever color you have in pretty header, you can move it there and it changes. You can actually add as much she liked within the body of any of the sections. So if you want to keep dragging and adding things with the red background, for example, keep moving in there. You know, we looked at the dividers to create space between sections. You can also do that directly within the styling to it. Now we know header has the red background, so we can define where this section ends. We have a padding top, which is nine, and the 0 padding bottom. If we change the pattern bottoms 18, we can see there's a big gap now between we make it bigger. Just to really show it. You see how much that changed. And with the sections, we can have borders again. So we could have a board AS a solid border. We can make it white. We can add the pixels to ten. We go up. Having a white is permanent. The best idea, because we've got white above it already. If we change that to black, maybe go. Now you can see where the board of CMS and where it starts. 11. Audience Overview: It's time to add in your own data. Your own data can be added in. If you want to add them manually, one-by-one basis. Or you can add in a group or a big list all at once. For an Excel CSV file. I'll show you the audience dashboards quickly before we start adding contexts. Say here we can see audience with a funny-looking Lego creature icons here. We can click on that. This takes us to our audience dashboard. So the top it tells you how many people you have in this audience, how many of them are subscribed? So they're not described. It probably means they unsubscribe from a previous campaign. We look for the dashboard. It tells all kind of cool stats for how many people have described recently where they've come from. So we can see here that 83% of these contacts that come from our e-commerce sink that we did earlier on for the Shopify, 17% are being added in manually or by me. It works out what kind of things like location and engagement rate of each of the people. So the more you build this up and the more campaigning to send out, the more data Mailchimp can give you. And it can give you some really cool smart stuff. In the dashboard, we can view all of the contacts by clicking on the top. Bright left view contexts. Here it shows us a list of everyone that we have in here. You can see the firstName, lastName address. This is all info that we linked in from our Shopify. But I'll show you how to add in extra columns because there might be some that are more unique to your business. Here we can see who's ascribed and who isn't. Then from here we can even click on individual people. Click on ourselves. In this case, in the activity field here on the left, it will show you exactly what they've clicked on Open and what products they bought. Anything is really, really cool. If you have an e-commerce site attached to it, it will show you how much revenue that actually spent. Eventually you are going to want to add your own contexts, this list as well. So I can show you exactly how to do that. As I mentioned, we could have it for subscribers, we can add it, we'll do it manually by typing them in one by one. Or we can import contacts. These are the two ways you add concepts in yourself as sign-up forms as well. But we'll go into that a bit later because there's quite a lot to it. For now. These are the two options that we manually add people in. We click on Add a subscriber. This gives us a form where, I mean, simply as you like, you can add in contacts through this. If I add one of my personal e-mail addresses in my address, birthday, then we can choose if you wanted to send him full HTML emails, which always click that or don't even click it. Then what you need to make sure is that you click on this person gave me permission to e-mail them. If you don't click on that, then motion for Adam, but it will have them as non prescribed. And if they're already in your audience that you might want to be adding someone and change some of the details. Then you want to make sure you click this button here. Then we click Subscribe. Not easy as that and deceive, it's actually worked. What you can do is where it says your audience has seven contacts. We can click on your contacts. We can see at the top that I've been added in with exact details that we used. Simple as that, it's adding people manually as all you gotta do. Nice and easy. 12. Preparing Contacts in Exel For Upload: Now manual adding is great if you've got maybe like one or two. But of course sometimes you have a list of hundreds or even thousands and in all gonna be sat there typing every single one-off or copy and paste in one-by-one. Lakhani Mailchimp has a really, really good import feature from Excel. What I would do before actually going into Mailchimp and doing this, I would go into Excel first and prepare your data. You might have exported this from the previous CRM, or you might be insensate or bought it. If you have bought it, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you do validate it. And again, I'll put a link in good validation. So I use once you have your data in a spreadsheet, PRO looks something like this. On the top and the columns it will be the headers like FirstName, LastName, phone numbers, addresses, etc, etc. So let's do that. I'll just make these bold on board around them just so we can see. And you might want to just double-click on the right-hand side of each of these columns just so you can see the full thing. The only column we really, really do definitely need is of course the MAC address. We're not going to get a far without that. But the rest of it can sell more information about the context that you actually do have. You might not need all of it in there, but I'd add in what you think could be necessarily down the line. For example, if you think you're going to have to send any of this information with an e-mail, then keep it in. Or you might want to keep in phone numbers. For example, if you're sending out a sales campaign and you want to see exactly who opened it. Then you can export that list. You can see all their phone numbers and you can get somebody on your team to call them. Hopefully your data will be a little bit more impressive than this. This is obviously just an example. But I've looked through, I'm happy and confident everything matches up. If you have if you see that your email addresses are all under first name, etc, then there's something wrong. You might want to muddle it all up and fix that. But I'm happy with this. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna click Save. But what you need to make sure is that you have it in the right format, because when you're an Excel, it normally saves it as a standard Excel file. But when importing data into Mailchimp, you're going to want to make sure this is actually CSV. This is really, really easy to do. We can do this within Excel itself. We're going to click File. Then we're gonna go to Save, As in the left-hand menu. We can see here the moment is saved as an Excel workbook XLSX, which is fine for looking through data but not for importing. What we do is click on the Write down arrow here. And we scroll down to the list where it says CSV comma delimited. So this is the one we want to use. I mean, there's other ones that do say CSV next to them and I think they are fine as well. But this is the most standard one. That's what we want to, this is the one we want to use. Let's save that. Replaced it. Now we can go back into our Mailchimp. 13. Uploading your Contacts: So again, we want to go into the audience dashboard, which I'm sure you remember this already. Just check out the funny icon on the left, the lego people. And when you click on that, then again it takes the audience dashboard. And this time, when we click on Manage audience, we want to go down to import subscribers. Instead. We click on Import, import contacts rather, click on Import concepts. And here it gives us the two options. We can upload a file using CSV, or we can copy and paste contexts from a spreadsheet. I mean, now we've, once you've gone to the effort of sorting it all out in Excel, is always recommend just saving as a CSV and important because that way there's no room for error is easy to copy and paste things in the wrong columns. For example. I've done before. Sometimes you think you've done Control a and got everything and you end up missing some important parts, sometimes the email. So if we upload the file that we'd have to worry about any of that, does it all for us. And then we click on browse to upload our contacts. We can see it here. Mc example data, which is the one that we've just made. Now, we want to double-click on this and continue to organize. This OS is what status you want to add this in as. We're gonna want to add this as described. The only way you would want to add in unsubscribed is if you're adding a list of contacts who have unsubscribed. So a previous e-mail marketing software. And you want to import them in so you have the data. But you want to make sure you don't send to them because you never want to start adding data in that that has been described before. It's just, it's just asking for the balance place to go crazy on. You. Just leave that. We just want to click Subscribe for this. You want to click on update an existing contacts. If you've already had these concepts in there, then continue to tag. Tags are there to help you match up your days or it better. There's so for example, if you have a contact list, which is all people who subscribed from a pop-up event you had in London, you might want to say, create a tag for it called London pop-up event. That way you can then send emails just to this lot of tags later on instead of sending to everyone. But we're looking at tags more later on. But the moment we're just gonna click Continue to match. This is the important part where we actually match up the columns that we had in our spreadsheet with our merge fields in Mailchimp, submerged fields are added when you want to add a bit of personalization two emails, one merge shows that you have, for example, a common one is FirstName. If we send that a lot of e-mails and add FirstName. This first contact here, it will say Stephen, you probably get emails like this all the time from huge corporations. And unfortunately, they're not writing these one-by-one. They are adding in. Merge fails and picking out your name like that. And we can do that later. The way that we get this correct is if we match up our Excel list properly. So as you can see here is a perfect example. This data is actually not matched up very well because we've got Mr. in author's name merged goats and misses, which would mean we're sending out a bulk email. It would say Hello, Mr. I mean, it was pretty bad. I think I'll be on describing quite quickly. Automatically. Mailchimp has a number of merge builds in there already. As you can see, firstName is matched up automatically. Lastname is matched up automatically. And importantly, email address is matched up perfectly. Here we skip across any blank ones. It skips out, don't worry about that. But then here, this orange, it means that there's a column or merge that doesn't exist in Mailchimp. Weirdly, Mailchimp doesn't actually have an automatic merge built for business or company name, which does seem crazy to me. That's what it's for, but we can resolve this very easily. This can be done for any topic of column, any type of column name that you want. You can click on here on the orange. Now it's asking us to match up company to one of the automatic, automatic merge fields within MailChimp. Here we can see every single mesh filled that melting automatically has. You can see that quite basic. It's mostly adress, birthdays, preferred email format. So there's nothing to do with business name. For example. There's no problem Are we got to do is click on create new field. We're going to call this business name. Select the datatype. That's just text. Confirmed. This. Now you can see here on the left, it's no longer orange is matched up and we're good to go. Phone number. You can see that has ultimate mathematically matched up already. If you've got any blank ones that city or state, then just click Next, we can ignore that. Then we get to another, another orange field which has dates are in. We can see here that it's an address. And the reason it hasn't matched it up is because Mailchimp has about four options of addresses that you can add. You want to click in here. It already has a suggestion for combined address. You may want this, it may not be right for you, so you can scroll through and then you can choose what you want to match this up with in Mailchimp. I'm happy with combine the address for this. We're going to click confirm. Again Here, Town orange. But we don't need it is empty. County EMT postcode. This is something we need to add again. What we can see here is there's no option for address. As you can see, the option for postcode is there, but it's grayed out. This is actually because I think about it is because I've used a combined address field for our previous address column. So if you do make a mistake like that, luckily we can go back a stage and we can do it again. So continuing to match, these are matched up already. Phone numbers matched up. Company want to go back in and add this. Because we've already added in the merged field now to this audience that will stay there forever now, we can look through and merge tag is here. Most hex six for business name. We can click on this and confirm it. This time we go back and address. We don't have combined address anymore. We're going to call this line to address. Again, if you didn't want it cool that you want to call something else. We can just click on Create and you failed. You can call it wherever you want. But in this case, in this situation, I'm gonna call it address line two. And we're gonna confirm. Keep going across, we click on the right arrow and go back to postcode, which is where you got stuck before. And this time, yeah. Luckily, we can see address at the bottom and it says zip postal because it's all American. Click on this one and confirm. I mean, if you really, really want it called postcode, if you're quite fussy, there's no problem with that. You can just click on Create new field called it postcode. Confirm. Then once you're happy, it would say seven columns being ported, six columns will not be imported. It's always worth just scrolling through with a left arrow and checking that everything you need has been added in. If you're not that bullet about having a phone number, for example, you don't have to match up. You can just click on, click on the tick and checks it off, and then that way it doesn't add it in. But this time we're going to add it in. I'm going to go absolutely crazy. And then we click finalize impulse. This is where you review your pull. Six concepts be updated or added to your brand, right? Audience. Import from file status ascribed, which is what we want unless as I mentioned, are adding in a list of people who have not wanted to hear from you. Then update existing contacts? Yes. Tagged none. Grape, complete import. Ready to go. Now because of that, it was very quick because I added six. Hopefully, you can tell us a bit more exciting. Updated 0 contacts and added six. If you have contacts already which had those information, it will then tell you how many of those that were and it will update the new fields. So for example, if you have them in before, they wouldn't have had business name because business emerged hadn't exist. But now you've added an Excel with that new column and merge field, and they will know how the business name. From here we can start a campaign of your contacts. We want to get to edit ourselves and August and a campaign just yet because there's more audience stuff that you want to look at. If you do want to send a campaign straightaway, then you can, you can skip the next ones. The next videos. Contacts as few concepts. Now our audience, this has got a bit bigger. And we can see here first name, last name addresses being added. 14. Sending a MailChimp Campaign: By now we have all of our contacts and imported our segments, Bell, our template silicon gray and matching our brand. And now we're gonna do what we came in to do that, send emails, to send a standard one-off campaign to your contacts. You just need to go to campaigns, which then the left-hand side menu with the speaker phone. You click on that. When we were amending, our templates would eclipse on templates in the left-hand bar. But this time if you scroll all the way to the right, you will see creates campaign in the top right-hand side of your screen. Let's click that. Then the first option is email, and this is what we need. Here. It provides you with some options if you'd like regular, want to automated, we want to do AB test and just to send a one on female, we're going to just click on Regular are explained about automated and AB testing later. There is also a plaintext oxygen, which is just simply to send an email campaign just without any of the fancy styling that mailchimp does have. First of all, we click in the box but under campaign name and we want to give it a title. It could be a newsletter or a could be end of January sale. We want to click Begin. And now it takes to the screen where we can choose who our emails go into, what the subject is gonna be, what our template is gonna look like. And who is sent from. First of all, we have to, that is who we are gonna send our e-mail to. Automatically. It will choose your main audience and it will select everyone from that list. If you've got a small contact base at the start, this is probably what you want to do, but you can also narrow it down. So if you built with some groups or segments or have tax, like we have done before. They didn't click on Edit recipients. You can either click on the audience and change your audience if you have more than one. In this account, I don't know how much. I didn't have much choice for this segment or tag. We click on the down arrow. At the moment you'll see it says, or subscribers in audience. But we want to break it down a bit more. And it provides you with some options and tags that you had before. You can see here we've got a segment which we created earlier on in the tutorials include sales campaign send. For example, if you click on that and click Save, you'll see the audience amount has changed slightly. And if you click on Edit recipients again, then we will scroll down and we want to say just people who are with the tag. Pop-up. Click Save. Again, it updates the contacts who match your new roles. And we can see here one recipient. We can click on them. We can see they've got the tag pop-up here. It shows us working, which is great. Also, Mailchimp has pre-built with segments based on their new subscribers. If they're active, the repeat customers, some rules based on age and recent orders, etc. There's a lot of different choices that you have. You can break it down as much as you want. Any of you decide you need a new segment or some new rules, creates it, then you can simply click on Group or new segment. You can create rules just like we did when we're creating our segments added on in the audience module. So we can say contact match any of the following conditions. You can do this based on dates, based on email marketing status, contact rating, based on merge fields such as first name, email address, and you want to really get specific, can add tags. E-commerce activity. We can say if they purchased orders is greater than one, for example, you could say It's added, is after. Then choose specific date or went to last campaign was sent. Or you can even paste in only the e-mails from the audience that you'd like to send. So if you've got an Excel CSV with these addresses ready and you don't want anyone else to get this campaign, then you can paste them into here. Once you're happy. I'm gonna say it was described as an audience at the moment. You will notice there's a personalized the two field. This tells us add merge tags, display your recipient's name to make it more personal and help avoid spam filters. So this is, as it says, instead of showing the e-mail address, you can have it showing their FirstName. If you have it with an e-mail instead, just to make it look a bit more personal, they say it helps with spamming. I'm never too sure, but very, very easy to do and there's no harm in doing it. You click on personalize the two field emerged tax election. If you remember, based on our lesson with audiences, it will basically just choose the header of the column that personalized data that we'd like to choose. We can click on FirstName, LastName, or customer. 15. Upgrading MailChimp Account: Now I know I had mentioned a few times, so it's best to keep your account and free for as long as possible. But there may come a time when you do have to start paying if you want to use some of the features, such as upgrading the amount of users that you have your account. Or if you want to add multi-step automations, you might want to do AB testing. When it does come to that, then there's no other choice you're going to have to upgrade. There are different pricing points within MailChimp and definitely kind of packages that you get. We should expect. We're going to have a look at these and see what grade or we need to do is as usual, we go into the bottom left where it has your name of the account. We want to click on accounts. Third one down. Then this time when we go into building, building is a third one across. You see here. Before that actually we can see what we have planned. We have got here it says we've got the fleet free plan or flee pan free plan. We have 30 contacts only and we get 2 thousand free. And also with the free plan, you get 10 thousand campaigns ends, which is a lot for a month, as you can see here. It resets on February the 11th. We're fine for the moment and you probably will be too, unless you have a lot of data already from your website or some other data that you've got from other customers or previous CRM. As I said before, we're going to go into building. We're going to go to monthly plans or credits. Here we're saying your current plan, the free plan, like we know it says before and it tells you how many contacts we get with this. It says not coming bell because it's free obviously. But if we want to change our plan, upgrades use some other features that I mentioned before, then we can do by clicking here. We see we've got free essentials, standard or premium. I mean, I've actually never used premium with anyone. I've worked with those 209 $9 amount of sounds a lot. You can actually compare the plans by clicking on the button. Competitive plant features. You can see it with free. Get the basics. You get a single automation, which is really cool. I think that you got for free. So you can send a welcome emails automated. You get all your campaigns templates. As you would. With essentials, you get sent a few extra e-mail templates, which I personally don't think that the best is that you get AB testing. And it says 247 support is not the best I must admit. And then standard, which I wouldn't recommend definitely go any higher than this unless you are a huge, huge company and loads of, loads of concepts. But you're gonna have to have a lot for this peaceful standard means you can add in your custom code is templates. You can send multi-step automations, which is basically off. For example, if you had a welcome email to maintain it. Because then send an email three days later, another five days later. And keep on going like that, which I do recommend eventually to start building out your campaigns like that. Because that means you're doing less man-hours. That means less human hours and more going on in the background for you. For example, we want to click on standard because I want to start sending some multistep automation. And I want to show you how to add users, etc. Then with that, it says 4099 months in dollars. Then it has a slider below it. This depends on how many contacts you have. If you slide it across, you will see the number here. Increase. Some companies do have lots and lots of data was they buy it or whether they've accumulated over a long time. And what you want to do is you want to be quite accurate with this. If you like, for example, if you have 5 thousand contacts and you've saved when he got 2 thousand, you end up paying a fortune in additional fees a month. It's cheaper just to be accurate with it. It says here, if you exceed either of those limits, you will incur additional charges of nine pounds, $9.99 a month for additional 300 contacts. And I've seen some companies make huge mistakes with this and they can spend a fortune more month when they all have to do is slide this correctly and be accurate with their definitions. And what I would recommend is if you're adding a huge amount more data in, go back to this and amend your plan because you want to make sure this is correct, which is important. And you say I've got contacts I pulled onto whereby hit unclick our grade. Estimated 14, $99. And then you add a new color, details, etcetera, etcetera. Then you click paint out. Here you can see my new plan where I've now got based on 500 contacts. So they get a bit cheeky with this. Once you are on a payment plan. Like a 6 thousand the most sense, but nobody got 30. I can't imagine that increasing too much over the next month. Now it takes us back to the billing page again. Monthly pans are credits. Now, you have done this correctly. This will now say what plan you are wrong, and it tells you exactly what you get with that. And it tells you how many contacts and sends you have left amongst. Again, if you already more context to this, please come back and change it. You don't want to start getting some horrible bills. 16. Welcome Email Automation: Sending bulk one-off campaigns is great. If you want to send an offer or newsletter. But if it's a welcome email, you're not going to want to send individual welcome emails every single time you notice someone has joined your account. But there is a way around this. We can actually set up some welcome automation. This means as soon as they sign up, there'll be a trigger, a Mailchimp which says, send this person this email straightaway. Anyway, let me show you how to create a welcome email. And then from that you'll get some better ideas for what you want to do for your welcome campaigns. So to get things started, we will go to the automation menu link. We look on the left-hand side. This one is the third one down with a squiggly line. Automations will click this. This is quite a new feature. These used to be part of normal campaigns, but they have made it a lot easier. But one thing you will need to do is upgrade your Mailchimp account to a paid account. I think the account that you will need. Just check what this one is. That we are on the standard plan. So just make sure you've got a standard plan. As you'll see here. This one's 13 pounds a month roughly. This is definitely worth getting just for the welcoming mouths alone because I save you so much admin time. And I've added another video into this course, just so you can see how to upgrade your account just in case you need to help with that. Once you have a greater to standard, you will now see in your automations, you'll see this screen. So beforehand you probably wouldn't see anything on my journey is you wouldn't see anything on Explore. And you wouldn't see this in the top right, which is what we're going to look at. Let's begin with. I will also add some customer journey stuff as well. Let's begin and click on go-to classic automations because we're gonna look at the classic welcome sequence to begin with. It'll come to this screen where it asks you to create an automation email. And you'll see it gives you some choices, which is quite cool to help you. Featured ones, email subscribers when they are tagged. This is great if you want to send different welcome emails to different categories or sectors of contacts. But the moment we're gonna do a generic welcome news described as email. So we will click the second one which says welcome new subscribers. Introduce yourself to people when they sign up for your audience. Click on this one. You see it gives you an option if you wanted to send a one-off email or if you want to send onboarding. This just means if you want to add more than one email to the sequence. And education series is basically exactly the same as on-boarding. It just means follow-up emails. But the classic automation, I would only really use that for single one-off e-mails. If you look into sand follow-up onboarding series messages, then strongly recommend using the customer journeys sequences because you get a lot more flexibility and more visual and easiest edit. We can call the campaign single welcome email, that's perfect. And then you just got to make sure you choose your audience where you'd like it to go to. We'll click Begin. Once that loads. This screen will look all too familiar. It will have your froms subject, your content, which you say I haven't picked anything yet. You're going to want to go into Edit design. You are going to want to select templates. We click on Template, go back to our Saved templates, and we're going to choose brand remote welcome template that I created earlier. Blue pizza. We might want to add a bit of personalization with our merged tax. If you remember, we can do that easily by clicking on the text box. And then off to the word hi or hello. Good morning. We click on merge tags or we can pick on. We can click on first-name, for example. Just make sure it's the same formatting like we talked about before. That's great. I'm happy we can click, Save and Continue. I'm happy if he was to receive this when they sign up to my forms. But you will notice one slight difference, which is at the top. It says sends two new subscribed contacts immediately after they joined brand remote. We can click on edit delay and recipients if we wish. You can change it. When they receive it. They don't have to receive it immediately. You could send an hour, six hours a day later. You get the choice. You can, if you click on this button, this means that when you import its context as well through your Excel importance that we looked at in module one. Then it will also send them a welcome email. Again, that's up to you. I'm going to choose not on this occasion. Save. Once you're ready, you simply click, Start sending in the top right. And just to make sure is sending click on campaigns. Look on your ongoing emails and you can see the stats and the notification letting know it is sending.