MailChimp Email Automation Management

Email is the lifeline for most brands as well as small business owners and an email marketer’s efficiency is directly measured based on the campaign performance. In the quest for finding maximum engagement (and in turn ROI as well), an email service provider (ESP) is the trusty sidekick for an email marketer.

Just like a sidekick to a superhero (yeah, you are a superhero), an ESP manages all the trivial activities such as scheduling an email campaign for later times, providing you with all the different reports, fetching data from your CRM for better list segmentations, etc., while you are engrossed in fighting dormancy, cart abandonments, and finding new prospects to onboard. Mailchimp is the preferred ESP for most email marketers as it is blessed with a huge list of features that make the life of an email marketer much easier by:

• Building your audience with display ads
• Developing flawless yet free Mailchimp email templates
• Setting up and sending email campaigns on time
• Building high-converting landing pages
• Creating and setting up social media posts across different social media channels

One of the premier features that has become mandatory, when it comes to choosing an ESP, is the ability to set up intelligent email automation workflows. Mailchimp automation has been nailing this even before its move from being a DIY email marketing tool to a full-fledged email marketing automation tool in 2018. So, let’s dive deep into the realm of email automation and gain guidance on how to improve your email campaigns using Mailchimp Email Automation.

What is Email Automation? Why Do You Need Mailchimp Automation?

The term "Automation” comes from “Automata" which was derived from the Greek word "αὐτόματα" which means "self-acting". Automation helps you set up workflows for most commonly used tasks for them to be automatically executed, when a specific trigger is activated. In case of email automation, the email campaigns are set up in a way that specific emails are automatically sent to the user when the user completes an action that is specified as a trigger. With the boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT, different combinations of the trigger conditions can be used for setting up complex email campaigns.

Email Automation is a boon for email marketers as repetitive email campaigns such as welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, anniversary emails can be automatically sent to the right person at the right time without any human intervention. Email automation is also great for sending email newsletters to your prospects during the lead nurturing stage.

Sending the right communication without human intervention is only one of the reasons that email marketers consider setting up automated email campaigns as an important part of their marketing strategy. Some of the other reasons why you should adopt email automation, especially Mailchimp automation as soon as possible are:

Relevance to Customers’ needs

As per the triggers mentioned in the automation workflow, a specific email is only sent when the user does (or doesn’t) perform a specific action. Assuming that your email copy is relevant to the trigger condition, your automation can be helpful in generating relevance to the communication you have with an individual subscriber.

Better Engagement

In case of behavioral emails such as order placements, registrations, or cart abandonment, the emails demand certain actions from the subscribers. This way, your chances for subscriber engagement is quite high with mailchimp automation emails.

Improved Loyalty

When your email newsletters provide the right information that helped them get a solution or provided timely assistance, your customers feel valued and begin anticipating your emails. Moreover, they are more likely to recommend you amongst their peers.

Consistent Communication

When someone receives an email in context to a specific action they took, it maintains the consistency of the communication. E.g. : When the subscriber abandons a cart and receives a cart abandonment email featuring the images of the products they left in the cart, they can make faster correlation and get back quicker.

Better Retention

Getting timely assistance can be the difference between a good and a bad user experience. As long as your mailchimp automated emails continue to provide value to the customers, they are bound to stick around.

Improved ROI

When you have configured your emails to be the gentle push for your customers at certain crossroads, they will complete the specific tasks (such as updating customer profile) and this can contribute to the ROI as well as the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers.

Easily Scalable

The time needed to set up an email automation is the same in Mailchimp - whether you have a mailing list of 50 subscribers or 50,000 subscribers. So, using email automation, you can scale your email marketing campaigns on-the-fly without disturbing your running campaigns.

In a joint study conducted by GetResponse and SmartInsights, they surveyed 585 marketers from a mix of B2B and B2C marketing models. As per their responses, the biggest marketing automation benefits can be divided into 6 sections:

• saving time (30%)
• lead generation (22%)
• higher revenue (17%)
• customer retention (11%)
• monitoring marketing campaigns (8%)
• shortening the sales cycle (2%)

Now that we are acquainted with the importance of email automation and have understood the benefits it brings to the marketing campaigns, it is time to put the knowledge into practice. Before we jump head first into setting up flawless Mailchimp Email Automations, it is important to have all the tools and prerequisites in place.

How to set up Mailchimp automation campaign

Mailchimp Automation is a robust platform and offers a multitude of different marketing automation types.

When you click on ‘Emails’, you can choose from different premade automation workflows that can be customized as per your requirements (as seen in the screenshot below). For advanced users, by clicking the custom button, you can create custom email automation workflows, which shall be explained later.

Pre-set Mailchimp Automation Workflows

1. Tags

   Mailchimp provides the option to add tags to individual subscribers by editing their entry.

   

   You can set up a trigger condition where a specific email is sent to the customer when you add a tag to their profile.

   

   This is greatly helpful when you use tags to update the position of a lead through a sales funnel. So, when you add the ‘Sales Qualified Lead’, the subscriber automatically starts receiving sales-oriented emails. As you can see above, once you have the necessary tags added, you can:

   • Choose the trigger duration
   • Add segmentation criteria
   • Set the schedule for email sending
   • Decide action to be taken after the email is sent

   All that is left is to add the relevant email templates, specify the subject lines, add return address and you are done.

   

   

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2. Subscriber Activity

   As mentioned earlier, certain emails can be sent when a subscriber takes an action, and triggers based on subscriber activity is one of them. Under the subscriber activity trigger conditions, you can:

   • Welcome New Subscribers
   • Respond to subscriber updates
   • Respond to subscribers from Pop-up forms

   

   Under the welcome new subscribers trigger condition, you further have three options:

   • Send a single welcome email
   • Send an onboarding series
   • Create an education series

   The education series can be great for onboarding customers who have made a purchase and need to be sent how-tos and ‘introduction to the features’ emails.

   

   In case of ‘Respond to subscriber updates’, you can create individual mailchimp email automation series when

   • Added to a group
   • Removed from a group
   • The List field value is changed

   

   In case of responding to subscribers from Pop-up forms, the trigger condition is quite obvious. When you use Mailchimp’s pop-up forms for lead capturing, you can use the trigger condition for sending custom onboarding emails.

   

3. eCommerce

   The most vital email series for ecommerce store owners. The triggers in this section are made for sending different email series related to ecommerce shopping. Here you can find the different triggers to set up welcome, cart abandonment, loyalty, order notification email series.

   

   Similar to the welcome email triggers, you have the option to send a single email or an email series for certain ecommerce emails such as retargeting, win back, and cart abandonment.

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4. Date-Based

   Why remember the birthdays of every customer to send them birthday greetings on the special day? With the date-based trigger conditions, you can set up email automation campaigns to send emails on every subscriber’s birthday, anniversary, or any date-specific holidays or occasions. The advantage of this trigger mailchimp automation is that you can set up email automation for all year round and have Mailchimp automatically send those emails. Ecommerce store owners can send subscription or product reorder reminders using the recurring dates trigger. The different trigger conditions available under date-based trigger conditions are:

   • Audience Added Date
   • Happy Birthday or anniversary emails
   • Specific date
   • Recurring dates

   

5. APIs

   As mentioned earlier, with API integrations you can send special automated emails based on the triggers that happen outside Mailchimp (Online store, CRM updation, API callouts, etc.). Inside, you have the option to choose from API 3.0 callout trigger or API event trigger based on the trigger requirements.

   

Custom Email Automation From Scratch

Clicking the ‘Custom’ button, you open up a new world of innumerable possibilities.

Once you choose the audience from the existing list, you move ahead to create your email automation workflow.

Similar to the pre-made templates, here too, you have the option to set up the triggers, schedule for email send, segmentation conditions, as well as post-send actions. The splitting difference between the pre-made and custom email automation workflows is the range of triggers available. In the custom mailchimp email automation option, you have a plethora of options to choose from.

Transactional Emails

Triggered transactional emails are an integral part of ecommerce email marketing that are only sent when a customer places an order and a series of emails need to be sent to keep them updated on the different stages of their order. These email automations are different from earlier mentioned ecommerce triggers and are managed in Mandrill (The transactional email tool by Mailchimp).