Blog
A collection of articles, tips and resources to help your business flourish and grow. If you find them helpful, or have any comments or suggestions for topics please do let me know.
Featured
A collection of articles, tips and resources to help your business flourish and grow. If you find them helpful, or have any comments or suggestions for topics please do let me know.
Your contacts subscribed because they want to hear from you. And email marketing simply can’t work for you if you don’t send emails…
But there are never enough hours in the day so here are my tips to make it all quicker and easier, gleaned over the course of 14+ years of doing this. A 5 minute read that will save you HOURS and mean that Mailchimp can work harder for you and your business.
The subject of images comes up a LOT in my day to day as I work with clients on their Mailchimp accounts. I have rarely come across a client that has been using more than 2 o 3 of these tips, despite them being incredibly useful at a) make your life easier and b) making your emails work harder for you.
So here are 10 tips to make images work more effectively and efficiently for you in Mailchimp:
Email marketing takes time, energy, resources and, very often, money. Testing means you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t to avoid wasting them all.
We can all make educated guesses, but they’re just that. If we don’t test, we don’t actually know! So here are 5 things to test regularly...
I get asked this question a lot. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, have a look at the All contacts part of Mailchimp and scroll right a bit in your “spreadsheet” - chances are some of your contacts have a grey label that says “Cleaned”.
Find out what it actually means, how it happened and what to do with your cleaned contacts now...
I’ve talked about buying email lists before (and why you almost certainly shouldn’t). But how DO you grow your mailing list?
Key to this is that you should be aiming to grow it with the right sort of people - who are...
A few experiences lately means I need to ask you this VIQ (very important question)…
Do you actually know what your email subscribers experience when they try to sign up for your emails / newsletter? Have you actually looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes lately?
Initially, this question was prompted by
Recently I sent an email out about using AI for Mailchimp etc. You can read it (and subscribe so you don’t miss future ones) here.
Below are some tips and demos of how to do some of those things. Lots of them use Chat GPT, but others are using some different tools I’ve find and like. Enjoy!
Your Mailchimp archive is a page where potentially all of your past campaigns can be publicly access. That makes it both a blessing and a curse - great if you shape it to benefit you, potentially dangerous if you ignore it and merrily get on with your day without ever making a few tweaks. Read on to find out more...
Mailchimp folders are incredibly helpful, but despite that are a very little-used function. After years of doing this, I could probably count on one hand the number of accounts I’ve worked on that had them set up. But I HAVE dealt with a lot of messes because they weren’t.
As a complete bookworm who storms through books faster than I can download them, I’ve recently started asking new subscribers for their recommended reads.
Here’s a gradually growing list of your recommendations to enjoy - I'm going to keep adding to this so come back again!
I’m just back from a truly wonderful holiday in beautiful Croatia, staying in a little harbour town called Cavtat right down at the bottom.
While we were there had a little guided tour of nearby Dubrovnik on a Tuk tuk. Our guide Toni (who incidentally looked like
Out of Office replies - it’s lovely to set your own up and go off on holiday, it’s less lovely when you send out an email campaign and get swamped by them flooding into your inbox.
Did you know that there’s a little tick box in the back end of your Mailchimp account settings that means you can stop the flood. coming back to you?
Mailchimp has been changing things around yet again. If the display of your contacts page is not looking and behaving differently yet, it will do very soon.
You’ve probably (hopefully) heard me banging on about archiving your unsubscribers before. If we ever worked together in any way then you definitely will have done.
Why is this important? Money. And how do you do it? Watch this video for a simple walk-through.
It’s been an interesting day today.
One of the services I offer is a Mailchimp Etc. Mini Action Package. It takes just 2 hours of your time (more of mine) and each one varies depending on specific needs and issues.
To give you a feel for what happens, here are little case studies of two of these sessions that I’ve done today. One immediately generated a 7-fold return on the cost of the session. That’s because I have over 13 years’ experience, meaning I know exactly what to look for.
In the last 13+ years of doing this, the conversation about whether to buy an email list, or how to use one that’s already been bought, comes up fairly often.
Here are some things to think about, and two little case studies that illustrate how it works in practice.
Unless you’re on a free Mailchimp account, every single contact in your Mailchimp account has an associated cost. So that means it needs to earn its keep for you. What is YOUR Mailchimp account costing per contact? Is it generating more revenue than that? Are you monitoring it? Are you tapping into its potential? And could that ROI be improved? Almost certainly.
Here are my 8 top tips to upping yours.
A plain English guide to what Mailchimp authentication and dmarc means when it comes to the new rules from Gmail and Yahoo, if it affects you, and if so, what you need to do.
If I could have a pound for every time I’ve started working with an organisation’s Mailchimp and they’ve said:
“I wish we’d started collecting that data sooner”…; OR
“Someone else used to look after our Mailchimp but they’ve left and we don’t understand what’s going on.”
Here’s how to future proof your Mailchimp. Trust me, you’ll be really glad you did this.
What would happen if your Mailchimp account got hacked tomorrow? Or you inadvertently breached a rule and your account was suspended (hopefully temporarily)? Or someone working on your account did something they shouldn't have? Or you deleted a box in your sign-up form and lost all the individual data sitting behind it?
Probably a disaster? Here’s how to protect your data just in case…
A while back Mailchimp asked if I’d be on their global Customer Advisory Board (CAB) this year - a small panel of Partners (Mailchimp experts) and 6 of their most innovative customers from around the world. Needless to say I said “Yes”. And then I went to Atlanta…!
Updated version. You know when you receive emails from big companies that look like a web-page with their website menu on the top? Not only do they look good, but they're also a brilliant way to showcase what you do in a glance and drive people to your website.
The best way to do it depends on whether you’re using Mailchimp’s Classic or New Builder as they both display differently for the recipient. Here’s are two quick and easy ways to DIY it on your own Mailchimp emails and newsletters without any programming skills.
Spam folders an be a pain in the bum if you send "bulk emails” or a newsletter using a tool like Mailchimp. It’s almost inevitable that some of your emails will end up in junk folders, but there are lots of things you can do to minimise the risk. Here’s tip 1
It can be a fine balance making your email marketing memorable without being gimmicky, especially if your brand is quite serious. So here’s a simple DIY-tip that can give it a little va-va-voom by making very simple GIFs to animate your logo or other images within emails.
During the course of running networking events and workshops and coaching my clients, the subject of what people charge for their services and how much they can then pay themselves comes up a lot. And invariably it’s not enough for various reasons. Here are 5 things to consider when working out what to charge and how to pay yourself fairly.
If you have a business there’s a fair chance that you:
have a blog on your website
have an emailing list
don’t have enough hours in the day.
Like anything in life, the more the mundane tasks of running a business can be left to technology to reduce the time they take, often (but not always) for the better.
One of the things Mailchimp offers to remove a task is an "RSS feed" automation. What does that mean in plain English, would it be right for you, and if so, how do you go about setting it up? Read on to find out more.
I’m lucky to live right opposite a church with a wood behind it. In fact, I can see it right now if I look up from my desk. It’s a cloudy day and the trees are still bare but you get the idea.
Much to my delight but to the consternation of others and exclamations of delivery men, the church bells ring every 15 minutes. And it’s very interesting what I’ve come to notice coincides with those dongs. My phone often buzzes as a little flurry of email marketing comes through on quarters and particularly on the hour while the church bell is counting them out. At certain times of the day there’s a big swoosh of them together and my inbox suddenly fills up. Here’s what you can learn from those patterns and how to apply them in your own email marketing…
It doesn’t matter how fabulous your email marketing and newsletters are if no one ever opens them. So what’s normal? Where do you stand in that range? How do you improve it? And why it’s about more than open rates.
I had an enquiry recently for help with Mailchimp. Early on in our conversation, the man (let's call him Bob) said that their website sign-up was all working fine but they needed help with templates and automations.
However, I like to try things out for myself and make sure anyway so I subscribed to their mailing list via their website.
When I signed up I very quickly discovered something that he had completely missed because he hadn't recently gone through the front end sign-up process "wearing the eyes" of a website visitor. And that error was a big one.
Once your website is up and running and you're busy working in your business, it's very easy to move on and assume those processes are still doing their job. However sometimes they break, the app/plugin integration gets glitchy or things simply get outdated. When was the last time you checked yours? It’s crucial you do this from time to time. Here’s how…
In the course of helping businesses with Mailchimp and email marketing and what pops into my inbox, I see a LOT of scope for improvement when it comes to e-newsletters.
Here’s my guide to 7 things that every email newsletter should contain regardless of your business type or customer base.
No?
Go do it.
Here’s why…