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. At present, Mailchimp has been able to successfully position itself as a cutting-edge end-to-end customer growth platform for both SMEs and established entities, promising to perch its users miles ahead of their competitors. 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 Mailchimp automated 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, practicing Mailchimp marketing 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, with Mailchimp marketing automation, your readers are 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. As a result, Mailchimp marketing automation enables you to deliver superlative customer experiences.

Better Retention

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

Improved ROI

When you have configured your Mailchimp automation 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, with email automation in Mailchimp, 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 marketing automation possibilities.

When you click on ‘Automations’, you can choose from Build from Scratch or choose a pre-built journey. Pre-built journeys can be customized as per your requirements. For advanced users, by clicking the Build from Scratch button, you can create custom email journeys. In this route, you are free to specify your own starting points, filters (to decide which customers will take part in a particular journey), and journey points (a set of action and rules constituting the journey). And once your journey is activated, you can view stats and queue by accessing the Customer Journey homepage.

Customer Journeys

Customer journeys in Mailchimp allows you to deliver dynamic and personalized experience to your contacts, making it easy for you to gain their confidence and loyalty.

1. Understanding the Constituent Components

   • Starting points: This is where you add your contact based on the event or action you expect them, and the point from which their journey begins. To exercise greater levels of specificity here, you can consider using filters along with starting points.
   • Journey points: Journey points refer to a set of rules and actions that determine the contours of your workflow. There are several journey points which you can employ, with some of the most frequently used ones being If/Else, Wait for Trigger, Percentage split, Send email, Time Delay, Tag/Untag, Update contact, and Unsubscribe.
   • Customer journey map: This is the canvas where you will be able to visualize the journey you are crafting for your contact. Once satisfied with your journey configuration, you can specify a marketing objective as well before activating it.

2. Accessing and Managing Customer Journeys

   Every journey you configure can be viewed by clicking on “All Journeys” under the Automations tab in your Mailchimp account.

   

Custom Email Automation From Scratch

Clicking the ‘Build from scratch’ 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.

Next, you have to configure the starting points, rules, and actions of your workflow in agreement with your goals and objectives. And don’t worry if you are running short on ideas; to get you started, Mailchimp suggests a host of possible starting points, covering a gamut of interaction and behavorial scenarios. These are spread across various categories such as contact activity, date & special events, shopping activity, and a few more as you can see in the screenshots attached below.

For instance, here’s how the journey takes shape when you choose “Tag added” as the starting point.

As you can see above, you need to add the tag and following things:

• Set trigger with correct tag
• Set the delay
• Setup the email

Eventually, your customer journey map will look like this.

Utilizing Pre-built Journeys

Along with allowing you to curate personalized journeys for your customers, Mailchimp offers a diverse library of pre-built journeys as well. These journey maps come with default starting and journey points.

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).