The latest tool is a must have for communicating with your clients and customers. MailChimp is indispensable when it comes to sending out email newsletters. Once again, our post is about the actual tool we use; however, there are many other tools that can get the job done when it comes to keeping your clients informed; MailChimp just happens to be our choice!

Why Email – I Thought Email Was Dead

Some of you may be wondering why you would want to keep using an email communication tool like MailChimp when there are countless other ways to engage your customers. FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other social media platforms do provide awesome mediums for communication; however, you do not own anything that is posted there. Another issue is that any of these platforms can (and have) change their algorithms to affect when and how often your posts are displayed to your audience.

With the above drawbacks outlined, enter in email. Email provides you a direct entry into your customer’s inbox without regard to any algorithms. Also, once you have an email address and consent to send emails, you have that information. It is important to remember to not misuse this access to a user’s inbox as users can easily unsubscribe or push your emails into their spam folder.

Use the Right Tool

Now, that we understand why we want to still communicate via email, it’s important to find a great tool. For The Urban Geeks, MailChimp has been that perfect tool for us. To be honest, the only issue with us is that we haven’t leveraged the tool as much as we should which is changing in 2020.

Collecting Emails

MailChimp provides many different ways for us to collect email addresses. To get started, we used their manual process to add in our initial list of email addresses from our clients. Now, we use their API via other tools to automatically collect emails of prospective clients when they complete our contact form or design brief.

One email collection capability that we do not leverage now but may in the future is their form creator. The form creator allows you to create simple and complex forms to easily embed into your website.

Templates/Design

Now, that we have email subscribers in MailChimp, we can leverage their easy newsletter creation tool. They provide templates as well as the ability to upload your own templates. Once in the newsletter creation tool, MailChimp makes it super easy to add text, links, and images to our newsletters. They also give us the capability to preview how the newsletter will look on all devices – mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Automation

Automation is something we haven’t leveraged just yet, but I have used it with other businesses. It can be a powerful tool to keep customers engaged and going through different workflows while freeing up time for your team.

MailChimp continues to build upon their platform so there new features that we haven’t had the opportunity to try out. Also, MailChimp does a great job at providing analytics on how well your email campaigns are performing.

MailChimp has and will continue to be one of the foundational tools we continue to grow with. As mentioned in this post, we currently only leverage a small portion of the features they offer. At $9.99, the return-on-investment received from MailChimp is much greater than the cost. The Urban Geeks are also evaluating whether we should join MailChimp’s partner program and get some certifications. Overall, MailChimp provides a very capable platform to communicate to your customers via email. Be sure to check them out using the link below.

Try Out MailChimp | Tools We Use Series