EPISODE 9 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: STOP MAKING THIS MAILCHIMP MISTAKE

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools out there, and chances are, if you're a small or medium sized business you're currently using it. Recently, I've worked with a lot of clients who are making this one crucial mistake though. Are you one of them?

Hello. Holy moly. I was doing some research for this episode and came across some crazy stats around Mailchimp. You've heard of it, right? One of the most popular email direct marketing tools available for small business? So there are currently 11 million Mailchimp customers. Each day there are 1 billion, that's right, billion with a B, emails sent from Mailchimp. That's a crazy amount of emails being sent. Mailchimp has added some awesome tools and functionality over the last 18 months, which have really taken it from being a super entry level option to this really robust tool when used correctly. The issue is I'm yet to work with a client using it properly. So we usually start by having a cleanup of their database and categorizing things as they should be. Email marketing is still a super powerful tool, but it needs to be done correctly to see a great return on investment. Today I'm going to walk you through the common issues I see when jumping into our client accounts in MailChimp.

Now I know this is going to be a bit techie and maybe a bit dry, but just take note of what I'm saying and go and check out your own lists and things to make sure that yours is set up correctly. So some of the big issues that I do see, first of all is that people are using audiences when they should be using groups. In Mailchimp, you store your subscriber in something called an audience. Quick note here, audiences did used to be called lists, and I'm going to use these two terms interchangeably. What I see most of our clients do is set up every bunch of similar people into a different audience or list. The trouble with that is that you'll often have people in multiple lists or audiences, so duplicates in the same account, right? I'm just going to say audiences from now on to avoid any confusion.

Mailchimp charges you based on how many contacts you have. If you have the same people across multiple audiences then you'll be charged a higher amount because they count that as a new contact. If you're on the free plan, this means you'll hit a paid plan a lot faster. I hope this is making sense. So, for a lot of businesses, they might create a new freebie or offer every month, right? Or have an event or have a list of people that have purchased from them. What they'll do is create a new audience for each of these situations or a new audience for every single event they run, even if the same people are coming to them. When in actual fact, I might've downloaded all of your freebies or been to all four of your events. So now I'm appearing as a contact multiple times. This makes it super hard to track how engaged I am because Mailchimp actually views me as a new person each time.

So you can be using MailChimp as a bit of a CRM system to track your audience and see what action they're taking. So when is it a good idea to actually use multiple audiences or lists? Well, when you have people that are completely separate and mutually exclusive, remember that terminology back in high school? So there's no crossover between them at all. This is hard to see without an examples. So maybe if I bring you back to, if you're running a list for consumers and one for your clients. So if you never plan on sending an email to both groups, then this is a good indication that you should have separate audiences or lists. But if you have any crossover at all between your audiences, you should consider merging them into one audience otherwise you risk sending the same email to somebody twice and ain't nobody got time for that. It's a surefire way to fast track yourself to an unsubscribe and we all have people do it. You get the same email twice, one after the other, right?

Having multiple audiences also makes it really bloody difficult to have effective segmentation and marketing automation. Let me give you a quick example. If you have two audiences or lists that are separate, one is for a cheese lover and one is for a chocolate lover, sometimes you'll have people that love both. I definitely fall into that category. You can't then send the one email to everyone because they're in a separate audience. However, if instead you had them in the same audience with a click of a button, you can send it to everyone or just the people that are tagged as a chocolate lover or a cheese lover.

So I've just mentioned the word tag and this is something really, really important. So one contact can have multiple tags. So me, I would have the tag cheese lover and the tag chocolate lover applied to my profile. Another important point to raise around having someone across multiple audiences is that if they click unsubscribe, they will only be un-subbed from that one list. If you send out an email to the other audience they are part of, they will still get the emails and you'll likely cop some form of abuse or be flagged as spam, which will in turn affect your ability to land in other people's inboxes. Not ideal.

Okay, so I've told you all about what you shouldn't be doing. How about we dive into what you should be doing instead. This might simplify it a little for you. So number one, make sure you are using groups to segment your database. Remember the cheese lovers and chocolate lovers I mentioned earlier? That scenario would have been much easier with one audience and two groups. Subscribers could have belonged to both groups, which would have made it easy to send an email to someone who loves both cheese and chocolate. I know this sounds a little confusing, but don't be overwhelmed. Start by looking at your existing subscribers and grouping them best you can. You may need to export all of your existing audiences and merge them into one and then bring in that grouping process.

So I've created a little free cheat sheet for you that breaks down all the terms I'm going over as well as some suggested account structures. Head to kissmarketing.com/free if you want to download this, I promise it will make this so much more simple for you. Okay, so if you're diving into the back end of Mailchimp right now you're probably thinking, we've got audiences, groups, segments, and tags. What is what? Where people often come up stuck after combining these audiences is the difference between groups and segments. The easiest way to think about groups in MailChimp is to think of them like categories. Whereas for a segment, this is really just a filter, so here are some examples of the different information you might use to segment your audience. What they bought, if you integrate your eCommerce store with your MailChimp account, what page they signed up on, if you collect their information, what date they signed up on, what campaigns they've opened or clicked on, what they filled in for a survey or poll, and so, so much more.

Personally, I use groups a whole lot more than segments though. Let me give you an example with groups. So you'll have a group category, say chocolate lovers. Well within this you'll have the different group names, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, et cetera. A specific subscriber might be interested in white chocolate and milk chocolate so they could be part of the chocolate lovers group category and belong to both the white and milk group name. Now I know all this is a little overwhelming with so many terms and options for your list, but I've put together that freebie I mentioned before and it's going to help outline these terms and structures.

Remember, every business is different though. So if you understand the principles and capabilities of MailChimp, you'll be able to tailor this to your business. So, in a nutshell, the biggest mistake that I see businesses making is that they have a lot of different audiences or lists with the same people across multiple audiences. This means that you pay more and you can't segment your group and lists as well. Thanks for listening, until next time. See ya.