Email Marketing: Optimize Your Message and Yield High Open Rates with MailChimp

Among Lúgh’s many digital services, we have extensive experience in email marketing, having designed countless newsletters and email blasts for clients as well as ourselves. The example below is a newsletter we did for our client VERG, promoting their spring open house. (You can check out some of the other collateral we’ve designed for VERG on our website.)

Despite the strong adoption of instant messaging and social networking, email doesn’t seem to be going out of style any time soon. In fact, one study shows that an average 269 billion emails were sent per day in 2017—and that number is projected to grow at an annual rate of 4.4%, reaching 319.6 billion by the end of 2021!

Email has defied the odds, continuing to be an effective marketing tool in a fast pace digital era. The challenge is optimizing your emails to yield high open rates and avoid being labelled as spam. This is where email applications like MailChimp become useful. MailChimp allows you to send thousands of emails at once, enabling the creation and management of mailing lists and newsletters, as well as the automation of email campaigns and collection of leads. The software also offers hassle-free integration with your website and is extremely easy to use, with no coding required. Best of all, there’s a free option!

Based on our years of experience working with MailChimp and knowledge of the application, we’ve outlined some additional ways that your business can benefit from its use:

Reputation & Deliverability

Sending a quality email via a reputable provider is essential for successful delivery and open rates. In addition to being one of the most popular email apps, MailChimp dedicates a large amount of resources to fighting spam with very restrictive sending policies. It also provides users with tips and examples, such as effective subject lines and how to capture opted-in addresses for your leads list, to avoid the dark and sad place that is your recipient’s spam folder.

Cost

MailChimp’s free version is perfect for small businesses. To qualify, businesses need to have less than 2,000 subscribers and send under 12,000 emails per month. For larger companies, MailChimp’s pricing is pretty straightforward. Users pay a subscription fee for features, then a tiered base payment for subscribers. For more advanced email marketers, MailChimp offers a $199/mo service to help with automation, multivariate testing, etc.

Easy Integration

MailChimp is very developer and integration friendly. Users can import names and email addresses in bulk, enter individual entries, create forms, and integrate with other apps and contact programs. Moreover, MailChimp integrates with CRM and contact management systems so you can align your email campaigns with customer activity to yield optimal results.

Usability

MailChimp launches a new version of their software on a monthly basis and provides ongoing customer support to enhance usability. Their Dashboard is big, simple, and filled with useful tips for a streamlined workflow.

Growth and Segmentation

MailChimp can help grow your mailing list through lead generation tactics, such as easy-to-use and customisable signup forms that can be embedded on your website. It also allows users to segment their mailing lists according to specific criteria, which enables tailored messages for different audiences.

Performance Tracking

MailChimp offers campaign performance insights, including open rates and the amount of people who are subscribing and unsubscribing. These reports help indicate whether a campaign is successful and can determine what elements are working versus what needs to be tweaked.

Helpful Templates & Designs

Email design can become complicated when considering all of the variables, such as different devices, branding, messaging, content, and more. What’s great about MailChimp is that it has a huge range of email templates to get the design process going. There’s also “merge tags” that automatically pull information from an account’s database, such as the user’s website and social info, to speed things along. Designers even have the option to automatically convert designs into plain text mode for increased deliverability!

Need help with your email marketing strategy and design? Book a free consultation with Lúgh Studio today.