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 However sometimes they break, the app/plugin integration gets glitchy or things simply get outdated.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.

I speak to a lot of people who feel they need to move away from Mailchimp because they have over 2,000 people in their audience so need to pay and don't want to. Instead of moving and spending time and energy on changing everything, here are some simple things you can do to help retain the free version or reduce your spend.

A bit like social media, the success of your email campaigns is in part due when they land in someone’s inbox. The trick is to have it arrive at a time when it’s relevant to them and they’re checking emails, and before their inbox fills up with other mail that could take their attention away from yours. All that depends on:

1. Who your audience is and their lifestyle

2. Whether you’re selling business to business, business to entrepreneur, or business to consumer

3. What sort of things you’re emailing about?

Read on for some tips and food for thought.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant the content of your email marketing is if nobody ever opens them and actually reads what you have to say.

A huge factor in whether or not someone opens your emails depends on the subject and preview text.

This blog will focus on how to make use of Mailchimp’s features to structure your email subjects and how to word them to give your emails the best chance of being opened and read.

I speak to a lot of business owners who don’t collect email addresses because they don’t plan to do email marketing.

However, that it NOT a reason not to collect email addresses. Even if you don’t plan on doing anything with them for the foreesable future, here’s why every single business out there should be collecting them…

Firstly, I’ll start by saying this… S I Z E. I S. N O T. E V E R Y T H I N G. It’s better to have a small Mailchimp audience of 100 people who hang on your every word than 100,000 who don’t care, especially when you have to pay for them.

But despite that, we all want more people to sign up because we want more of those people. And let’s face it, a big list feels like a mark of success just like our social media followings. I get that. The key is making sure that they are the right people.

So here are my top tips on how to grow your list in the right way.

If you have a business and use email, there's a fair chance you've had problems with your emails not reaching customers' or prospects' inboxes. Particularly if you send out email marketing to lists of people. Even if your emails get through spam filters unscathed without being dumped into the Junk folder, you then have the delights of "responsive inboxes" to tackle.

The trouble is that these filters don’t always get it right. And one person’s junk is another person’s livelihood.

So here are my 12 top tips to help your business emails stop ending up in spam folders

Life threw something awful at my family recently and sent a big fat reminder that none of us know what is around the corner.

The chances are that if something awful happened tomorrow, your loved ones would be able to sort out your personal affairs if you couldn’t. But if you’re a business owner too would they know how to sort them out? Who your clients are and how to contact them? How to access your website? Who your accountant is? Etc etc etc?

No, neither would mine.

So join me in taking these steps right NOW, because we don’t know what’s around the corner.

The trick with successful email marketing is to add value and create engagement content that is what your customers want to read. And that’s not necessarily the same thing as what you really want to tell them (i.e. how amazing you are and how they should buy from you). If your audience gets used to your emails having useful, interesting and relevant content, they’re more likely to open and read the promotional bits you send them too.

Read on for tips and advice about structure, what to call it, and 30 ideas of content you could include

Today the air was blue. I said words that have not passed my lips since the teenage rebellion years. My hubby ventured into my office briefly to see what was happening then went away and hid.

Why?

Well, I spent 3 hours, yes 3 HOURS, sorting out my stupid **!$%^£ printer when I was trying to print a 30 sheets of paper. If I apply my hourly rate to that time vs the amount I actually earned, the result was one heck of a minus figure. And if we sit down and look at it, there are so many small, medium and even large elements in our processes and procedures, tools and equipment that can have a similar effect. Have you ever actually sat down and quantified how…

Now, I like to receive a nice bit of blackmail, an offer from an African prince to share his fortune, or handy penis enlargement tips as much as the next person, but it does irritate me when they don’t target their audience.

I mean really, I’m sure they’d have so much more success if they just segmented their contact database more effectively (which I’m sure is GDPR compliant of course), and then send targeted emails just to …

One of the benefits of Mailchimp is that you could quite easily add tags for e.g. “male” / “pervert” / “stupid” etc. and then send targeted emails just to that segment of your database. And you could schedule them to…