MailChimp New User Checklist

Welcome to MailChimp! Here's a handy checklist we put together to help our new customers get their accounts up and running smoothly.

1. Setup A "Test" List
2. Design and Send Some Campaigns To Yourself
3. Check Your Stats
4. Setup And Import Your "Real" List(s)
5. Customize Your Opt-In Process
6. Add Your Signup Form To Your Website
7. Buy Email Credits

1. Setup Your First "Test" List

The very first thing you should do is setup a managed list. That's because you can't really create and send an email campaign until you have a list to send it to.

Tip: You don't have to import your "real" customer email addresses yet. You can just set things up in MailChimp like you'd do for your "real" list, then subscribe a handful of "test" email addresses that you own. For example, you probably have a "work" address, and a few "home" addresses (with Yahoo!, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, etc.). You might even have a few co-workers who would volunteer to be testers. The point is to send tests to yourself and see how your campaign looks in as many different email programs as possible, to simulate "real world" conditions.

To setup your first list:

1. Log in to MailChimp.
2. Click on the "Lists" tab in the top navigation.
3. Click on the "Create New List" button near the top of the page.
4. MailChimp will now walk you through the steps of building your list...
5. Fill in all the forms as if you were setting up your "real" customer list (even though we're just going to import "test" addresses in the end). Entering realistic data for this first list will help you understand how we use that data in your signup form and email templates.
6. Towards the end of the wizard, MailChimp will ask you if you have a list to import. Why don't we practice? Click "Yes, I have a list to import" and on the next screen, you'll see a diagram of how we need your Microsoft Excel file formatted, so that you can copy-paste from it right into MailChimp.
7. Even if you only have one or two test addresses to import, this is good practice for later, when you want to import your "real" list.
8. Open up Microsoft Excel, and type in a few test addresses exactly in the order we show you at the top of the page.
9. Copy-paste from that Excel file straight into the field below the diagram (see below).

After the list is setup, you'd normally jump in and start customizing your signup form, and adding links to your website. However, most free trial members don't want to get into that stuff until they've played around with MailChimp first. Let's wait till later before we start customizing. For now, we just want to send some test campaigns to see how MailChimp works.

Click the "Dashboard" tab in the top navigation when you're finished adding your test members.

2. Create Your Campaign

Now that you have a list to send an email to, let's create an email!

On the Dashboard screen, click the big "Create Campaign" button. MailChimp will ask you to select the type of campaign you want to create. For now, just pick "Regular campaign."

Next, pick the list you want to send the campaign to. You'll probably just have one test list for now, but eventually, your Lists screen might have lots of lists to choose from. Click on the list name, then hit the "Next" button.

Next, you need to enter some basic campaign settings, like your Campaign title (for internal reference), your subject line (here are some writing tips to get people to open) and some tracking preferences. This is the most boring step of creating a campaign, but it's necessary. Read through all the little help icons and tooltips on the screen just this once, and you'll be golden for all your future campaigns.

Now the fun part. Design! You're probably noticing by now that we're a little different from all the other email marketing solutions out there. We don't overwhelm you with 1,000 lame templates, each one ever-so-slightly different from the other (we feel so sorry for the poor soul who has to sit there and come up with all those crap-tac-u-lar stock designs). At MailChimp, we give you a set of really flexible layouts that can be customized any way you want (see some customer examples). The layouts are rock solid, and have been tested to render properly in all the major email programs. Pick a layout that you want to use for your email campaign:

After you pick a layout, you can customize the design, and enter content! It might help if you watch this 3-minute, 36-second video (includes monkeys!).

Basically, you tweak your design and edit your content in one simple, point-and-click screen. Here's a diagram of the interface for building and designing your campaign:

Enter Some Content
You should take a moment to enter some content for your first newsletter test. Don't put in too much gobbledy-gook or placeholder text, because spam filters don't like "fake content" (spammers try to load fake content into their messages all the time). Try entering some real content. If you've got writer's block, go scrape content off of your own website, and paste it into MailChimp. Try making some hyperlinks that you can click on when you send your campaign to yourself (that way, you can test click tracking in a later step).

Send Yourself a Campaign!
After you've got some content entered, click next. MailChimp may ask you to enter a "Plain-text version" of your HTML email. This is a plain, no frills copy that would display for people who use old email programs that can't (or won't) display pretty HTML emails. Sometimes, the plain-text email will show for people who use mobile devices. Nobody enjoys doing the plain-text version of their email campaign. It's boring. It's ugly. It's no fun. But it's totally necessary. Sorry. We highly recommend you take it seriously, and enter content that's as similar to your HTML email as possible. If it's too different, some spam filters penalize you for it (spammers are lazy, and usually leave the plain-text version blank).

After you've sent the campaign, give it some time to get to your inbox. Depending on which ISPs you use, it might take a while (AOL is notoriously slow). Very often, your first email campaign will end up in your junk folder. That's because it's the first time your spam filter will have heard of MailChimp (or at least received an email from our server claiming to be form you). Here's an HTML email troubleshooting guide for you.

Save as template
And don't forget that when you're finished designing your campaign, you can save it as a template, so you don't have to do all this work again the next time you send a campaign! If you're a web designer setting up an account for your client(s) you might want to go ahead and build templates for different occasions, like:

• Quarterly Newsletters
• Weekly Promos
• Letters from the president
• Internal Newsletters to Employees
• Holiday e-Postcards

3. Check Your Stats

After you've sent the campaign to yourself, check your email. Your email program will probably have all the images in your email turned off by default. That's normal. Email programs do that because spammers send yucky pictures sometimes.Go ahead and click "show images" button, and you'll see your HTML email in all its Technicolor glory. Cool, huh? Now click on some links in your email.

Now for fun, log in to MailChimp, click the Campaigns tab, then click on the "stats" icon for your campaign:

We'll show you how many times you opened and clicked in the test campaign, how many bounces you got, and more:

Cool, huh? That nerd in the back of class was right --- numbers can be fun.

4. Setup And Import Your "Real" List

If you like what you see, and you want to continue using MailChimp, you can now setup your "real" list, and import any customers you might already have.

Go to the Lists screen and create your new "real" list. You can just edit the test list that you started with, but if it's not even close to the "real" list you want to setup, it'll be easier to just delete your test list, and start over from scratch.

5. Customize Your Opt-in Process

After you've setup your "real" list, you can totally customize the opt-in process to match your website look and feel.

1. Log in to MailChimp.
2. Click on the Lists tab.
3. Select the list whose forms you want to customize.
4. Click the "Design signup forms and response emails" link.

The Form & Email Designer will open up. You'll now edit one template, which will work for your entire opt-in process (signup forms, thank you pages, welcome emails, etc.) Here's a 3m:26s demo video that shows you how to use it.

Customizing The Double Opt-In Process:
When people sign up for your list, we use the double opt-in process (learn more about double opt-in, and why we use it). You can customize every single step of this process. Here are some ideas:

Your Signup Form: MailChimp hosts your list's signup form on our website. You might tweak the look and feel of this page, so that it looks like your website. You can use your own colors and fonts and upload your logo. If you have HTML experience, you can go to that page that we host, view the source code, and embed that form on your own website. If you have programming experience, you can use our API to submit data from your site (such as from a shopping cart) to your list on MailChimp "behind the scenes." If you're not that experienced with HTML, just link to the form we host. We'll provide you with a link to point to this page on our website. Or, you can hire a MailChimp Expert to do it for you!

Thank You Screen #1: Right after a subscriber clicks the "Subscribe" button, people see the first "Thank You" screen. On this page, you might want to include some of your own "thanks for joining" text, and remind them to be on the look out for a confirmation email.

Confirmation Email: You want to keep the confirmation email fairly simple, because the main goal is to get the recipient to click the activation link. Don't add too much content, because it might distract them, or it might even get flagged by a spam filter. Keep it lean and efficient. Wait till they've confirmed before you talk too much.

Thank You Screen 2: Okay, once they click the activation link in your confirmation email, they're taken to this screen. This is a really simple "thanks, you're now on the list!" message. You might use this page as an opportunity to ask the member to add your email address to their "trusted sender" or address book so that "our future messages won't get accidentally spam filtered."

Welcome Email: Use this opportunity to set their expectations about how often you'll be contacting them, and what kind of content you'll be sending. Mark Brownlow's Email Marketing Reports blog has some good tips for you. If you plan to keep an online archive of past newsletter issues, go ahead and provide a link here (here's an example of MailChimp's). Tip: We've seen some of our customers place 10% off promo codes and "gifts" like that in their welcome emails.

Unsubscribe Form: Most people will never see this page, because if they click the "Unsubscribe" link from your emails, they're removed from your list instantly, and taken to the "Thank You" screen (below). But just in case, you might want to customize this page and place a link on your website that just lets people "Unsubscribe from our mailing list." You sometimes see these links in a website's privacy policy, or even at the bottom of their signup forms.

Unsubscribe "Thank You" Screen: This is the page your recipient would get if they clicked the "Unsubscribe me" link in the footer of your email. There are a couple things you should consider for this page. First, some of your recipients might forward your email to their friend. That "friend" will sometimes get mad, because they think they've been subscribed to your list, and click the "unsubcribe" link (unwittingly removing your original recipient from your list). That's why whenever someone unsubscribes from a list, we send one last message confirming their removal (in the next step). But on this "thank you" screen, there are some things you should say. First, tell them they've been removed. Next, you might include a link back to your signup form, "just in case it was a mistake." Finally, you might consider linking to an exit survey, asking them why they're opting-out. We recommend www.surveymonkey.com for all your surveys (they're not related to MailChimp in any way).

Unsubscribe "Goodbye" Email: After someone is unsubscribed from your list, we send this last goodbye message. First, you should make it clear that they've been removed from your list. After that, you might include the following: ask them to bookmark your website or blog or RSS feed, so they can continue to receive updates from you; include a link to your signup form, just in case the opt-out was a mistake; include a link to an "exit survey" (we highly recommend SurveyMonkey.com) to get feedback about why they're leaving; include your email address, so they can send you feedback directly. We do this at MailChimp, and it's always a learning lesson to go through our exit survey results.

6. Add Your Signup Form To Your Website

Now that you've customized your entire opt-in process, you can link to it from your website. There are a few ways you can do this:

A. Just link to your signup form (easiest way):

1. Log in to MailChimp.
2. Click on the "Lists" tab in the top navigation.
3. Select your list and you'll see its "Signup Form URL" icon.
4. If you know how to code a link, just point to this URL.

If you need some coding examples, follow these steps:

1. Log in to MailChimp.
2. Click on the "Lists" tab in the top navigation.
3. Select your list and then select the "Integration Code" link
4. We'll provide you with some sample code you can place on your website.

B. Embed the signup form on your own website (you'll need HTML knowledge):

1. Log in to MailChimp.
2. Click on the "Lists" tab in the top navigation.
3. Select your list and you'll see its "Signup Form URL" icon.
4. Go to that URL in another browser window.
5. View the source code for that signup form. That's the code you'll need to embed on your website.
6. Before you go any further, read some tips here.
7. It's important to actually practice signing up from your hosted forms, just to get a feel for how the error messages work (like if someone forgets to enter his email address).

C. Use the MailChimp API (you'll need a programmer):
Some people have an e-commerce order form on their website, and they want to add a checkbox for, "Yes, send me your newsletter, too!" You can seamlessly pass their data over to a MailChimp managed list, using our API. If you're not a programmer, you can hire a MailChimp Expert here.

7. Buy Email Credits, or Select a Monthly Plan

Before you can send email campaigns, you'll need to buy email credits or select a monthly plan. Just click the "Activate my account" link in the top of every page.

While you were busy getting started, creating your test list, and customizing your templates, a member of our review team probably investigated your account and pre-approved you to purchase credits. This human review process is the best way we've found to keep our system free of spam (so your emails won't get spam-filtered). Sometimes though, we can't pre-approve accounts fast enough (after all, we're human!). We might be running behind, or we might have some questions about your list collection process. You might get an error message saying, "Your account hasn't been approved to buy credits yet." Don't panic. It'll send us an automatic email telling us that you really want to give us some money, and it would behoove us to review your account soon. We'll be in touch with you very shortly.

8. Send Your First Campaign!

You should be all set to send your first campaign now. Here are a few final words of advice before you send:

• Don't make these common mistakes
• Always, always, always send yourself plenty of tests before you send. Trust us, you probably forgot something in your first three drafts. At MailChimp, we usually send ourselves about 5-7 tests before we send our final newsletter out to our list. Here's a checklist for testing, if you're paranoid like we are.
• No matter how hard you try, you will inevitably make some mistakes. We've sent "Happy Thanksgiving" emails on Christmas before. Hey, everybody goofs. It's so embarassing, because you're probably sending to hundreds or thousands of recipients. Don't sweat it. In the scheme of life, this is just an email newsletter.
• Bookmark our Free Resources section and our MonkeyBrains blog. Just visit every once in a while to see the latest email marketing best practices, showcases, and news.
• We're always looking for emails to showcase on our website. If you've got a campaign you're really proud of, let us know about it!

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