MailChimp is an email marketing service provider, founded in 2001. It has 7 million users that collectively send over 10 billion emails through the service each month.
It's a web-based application that works in most web browsers, which means you don't need to download or install any software on your computer. To make sure MailChimp works properly in your browser, you should enable cookies, pop-ups, and JavaScript.
A free account can be setup here, a number of subscription options are available depending on your requirements.
Mailchimp is based on the three main tasks of email marketing: manage subscriber lists, build email campaigns, and review campaign reports.
Manage Subscriber Lists
The foundation of great email marketing is a clean, updated list of email contacts, who we call "subscribers." When you create a list in MailChimp, you're prompted to input default information like who your emails come from and how your subscribers got on your list.
After you've set up your list, you can add subscribers in three ways:
- Paste or type in subscriber contact information.
- Upload from a spreadsheet
- Import from your CRM (customer relationship management) database
Get step-by-step instructions on creating and importing lists.
Build Email Campaigns
The next part of email marketing is crafting the email message itself. There are lots of names for your email—mass email, newsletter, e-blast, e-zine—but at MailChimp, we call each email message a "campaign."
The MailChimp Campaign Builder walks you through creating a campaign, step by step. When it's time to design your campaign, you'll find a variety of basic email layouts you can customize easily without having to know HTML. Many of our layouts use a Drag and Drop Editor, which makes it simple to add, move, delete, and style content blocks. If you want to use the same layout again later, you can save your design as a template for future campaigns.
When you're done setting up your campaign, MailChimp displays all the choices you've made so far and alerts you if you missed anything important. You'll then have the option to send the campaign immediately or schedule it to send at a later date or time.
Get step-by-step instructions to build a Regular Campaign.
Review Campaign Reports
You've clicked Send, but it's not over yet! A key component of successful email marketing is tracking subscriber engagement so you can provide more of what your subscribers want and less of what they don't.
The next time you log in to MailChimp after sending a campaign, you'll see how many subscribers engaged with your recent campaigns right on your Dashboard. You can click over to the Reports section to dig further, and to download, share or print specific reports.
MailChimp's open- and click-tracking tells you how many people looked at your message, which links they clicked, and even their geolocation. Link your Google Analytics account for more in-depth reports, or integrate your e-commerce platform or CRM database to get even more out of MailChimp report data.
Learn more about reports.
For extensive information on how Mailchimp works visit their knowledge base here.