TOOLKITS
E-Newsletter
How to create a great E-Newsletter using Mailchimp
Created by Transport for All and Inclusion London, with the support of London Councils
Introduction E-newsletters are essential if you want to ensure that your beneficiaries, stakeholders and funders have visibility of your organisation and its activities. They can help you to promote your campaigns and events and increase traffic to your website and social media platforms. Mailchimp is one of the major email marketing service providers which could help you to create e-newsletters. It is simple and free. That is why the Power Up project has been promoting Mailchimp. There are other Email marketing service providers which work in a similar way :
Why should you use Mailchimp? • Free: you can send for free, up to 12,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. • Personalise your emails: you can easily personalise all your emails with the name of your recipients. • Great support: Mailchimp offers hundreds of articles to support you in the different steps for creating your email. They also offer online chat support. • Impact: it’s easy to evaluate the impact of your E-Newsletter with their analytic tools.
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MailChimp is based on three basic tasks of email marketing which we will introduce in this toolkit: manage subscriber lists, build email campaigns, and review campaign reports.
Create a contact list It’s easy to create an account on Mailchimp, you just have to follow the process on www.mailchimp.com. Don’t forget to validate your email address when you receive a verification email from Mailchimp (look into your junk box if you don’t receive it). On Mailchimp, the first step is to create a contact list of people you want to email. Please note that Mailchimp use the word “Subscribers” to describe these contacts. It’s easy to create a list. First go to ‘List’ and then click on ‘Create List’. When you create a list on MailChimp, you’re prompted to input default information like who your emails come from and how your subscribers got onto your list. Don’t forget to give your list a name which you and your colleagues will easily identify in the future. After you’ve set up your list, you can add subscribers in three ways: • Type in subscriber contact information. • Upload from a spreadsheet. • Import from your CRM (customer relationship management) database. We’ll learn more about the 2 first ways. To add a subscriber contact information, just go into the list you have just created. Click on ‘Add Subscribers’ and then ‘Add a Subscriber’. Enter the information such as email address, first name, last name. After that you absolutely need to tick the box ‘This person gave me permission to be added to my list’: this is a way for Mailchimp to protect themselves, if someone complains.
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Validate by clicking ‘subscribe’: Your contact is now on your list. Upload a spreadsheet: The great thing with Mailchimp is that, if you’ve got a large amount of contacts on a spreadsheet, you can easily import it into your ‘Subscribers’ list. To upload a spreadsheet, click on ‘Add Subscribers’ and then ‘Import Subscribers’. There are then a few options. If you have got an Excel document, select ‘Copy/Paste from Excel’. Open your Excel spreadsheet and copy the content you wish to import. Paste this content into the box labbeled ‘Email address... First Name... Last Name...’ and click ‘Import List’. On this new page, you need to tell Mailchimp what’s inside each column. For each column, click ‘Make a selection’, select the nature of your column (email address, first name, or other options) and click ‘save’. When everything is done click ‘Complete Import’. Please note that you cannot import the same email address twice on Mailchimp. This is very practical: this means that if you merge two different lists onto a single Mailchimp Subscriber list, you don’t have to worry about the fact that someone will receive your email twice. But you can add the same email address into 2 different Subscribers lists. Segments: Mailchimp recommends that you maintain a single list. But you can easily segment your list, by adding extra information, interest groups and other data as needed. This helps keep your list clean, and your billing rate low, since monthly rates are based on your total subscriber count. Duplicate subscribers across multiple lists count toward your total subscribers.
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Create your E-Newsletter The next step is to create the email itself. Please note that on Mailchimp, emails are called ‘campaigns’. Even if it may take you a bit longer than sending an email via Outlook, it is pretty easy to create a ‘campaign’ on Mailchimp. The best thing is that you can easily produce some professional-looking emails, without knowing anything about HTML. To create an email go to the ‘Campaigns’ page and click on ‘Create Campaign’ and then select ‘Regular Ol’ Campaign’. On the Recipients step, select the list you would like to send your email to. Then proceed to the next step, by clicking on ‘Next’ (bottom right-hand corner). On the Setup step, add the ‘Name of your campaign’ (internal use), ‘Email subject’, ‘From name’, and ‘From email address’. Use the options below to select tracking, connect social media options, and set advanced options. When it is done click on ‘Next’. You will then arrive at the ‘Template’ section. The good thing with Mailchimp is the fact that you can select ready to use templates (‘predesigned Themes’): this is very practical when you have no skills for creating a nice layout. But if you have a graphic designer in your organisation who could create a nice banner for you, we would advise you to select the ‘Basic’ option: choose the layout you want by clicking on ‘Select’.
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The design section is the part where you can add content. You can include text, links and pictures but also features to encourage readers to share your content or join you on social media. You just have to drag and drop blocks of content you want onto your ‘campaign’ template. To edit a block, simply click on it and some options will appear. The text editor looks more or less like on a Word document.
Once you are satisfied with your design, click ‘Next’ (bottom-right corner) to continue. It’s time to review the settings. You can use the ‘Preview and Test’ drop-down menu at the top of the page to ‘Open Popup Preview’ or ‘Send a Test Email’. When you’re happy with everything, click on ‘Send’: Your email is now on its way to your contacts. Please note that you also have a ‘schedule’ option if you want to send your email later (it’s practical if you are off on that day).
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Evaluate the success of your E-Newsletter You’ve clicked ‘Send’, but it’s not over yet! Evaluation of your Email’s impact is a key part of the communications process that is often overlooked. However this important step could help your organisation to increase the impact of your communications on your beneficiaries, stakeholders and funders.
How many people opened your E-Newsletter? What articles were they most interested in? These are some questions that are impossible to answer when using Outlook. But you can do it on Mailchimp: you can even know who clicked on the different links and how many times. To see the report about an email you sent, go to ‘Campaigns’ and then click on ‘View Report’ (to the right of the email concerned). MailChimp’s open- and click-tracking tells you how many people looked at your message, which links they clicked, and even their geolocation. You can download, share or print specific reports.
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Please note that the average opening rate of a E-Newsletter is around 25-30%. So don’t be disappointed if it is so low. There are many reasons why your recipients didn’t open it: • Maybe your email went into their Junk box, • Maybe they were too busy on that day and received too many emails to deal with, • Maybe they were not interested or didn’t remember having subscribed to your E-Newsletter.
For more information • about Mailchimp, visit: http://kb.mailchimp.com/ • on how to create a list: http://kb.mailchimp.com/lists/growth/ create-a-new-list • on how to create an email: http://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/ ways-to-build/create-a-campaign-with-campaign-builder • on how to check the report about your campaign: http:// kb.mailchimp.com/reports/statistics-in-campaign-reports
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