Introduction

Email marketing can be a very powerful tool for small business. Whether you’re a
brick and mortar looking to supplement your business, an online retailer, a
company that relies solely on email for communication with your customers, or
anything in between, MailChimp can help you scale—and grow—your business.

If you’re reading this guide, you’re probably already familiar with the basic suite of
powerful list management, campaign creation, and reporting features that
MailChimp has to offer. (On the other hand, if you’re just getting started or need a
quick refresher, check out the other training guides in our Resources section.) But
if you’re like many of the other small business owners we’ve spoken with over the
years, you might be wondering if you’re utilizing MailChimp to its fullest potential.

Did you know, for example, that our e-commerce integrations and thorough
reporting features will help you identify, target, and reward your most loyal
customers? Or that our scheduling and segmentation tools can be used to send
location-based messaging to customers in certain cities, states, or countries? Or
that you can even integrate Google Analytics data directly into your MailChimp
account and track clicks from your email campaign all the way through to your
website? You can even use MailChimp to send your internal newsletters .

This guide will highlight many of MailChimp’s tools, features, and integrations—
some exclusive to paid account holders, others available for all users—that can
be particularly useful and empowering for small businesses and online retailers.
We’ll discuss your options for growing your list, utilizing your e-commerce data,
engaging your customers, and more. Along the way, we’ll also provide use-case
scenarios and show you how other small businesses have found success
implementing our features into their own email marketing strategy.

But first: We know most SMBs don't have a lot of extra time. Feel free to skip
ahead to the end of this guide for a quick synopsis, which includes 6 essential
tips. The rest of it will be waiting for you when you're ready.
Tools for Building
Your List
The foundation of any great email marketing strategy is a clean, up-to-date list of
subscribers who have opted in to receive your email campaigns. Not only does
MailChimp make it easy to import your existing list and create, link to, and embed
a signup form to collect new subscribers, but there are several other methods for
small businesses to organically and effectively build up a mailing list.

Popup forms

Popup forms can be polarizing, but when utilized effectively, they can help you
grow your list and give new visitors a positive first impression of your business.

The subscriber popup is a native customizable form that automatically displays

a MailChimp signup form in a popup modal on your website shortly after
someone visits the page. The form can be designed, previewed, edited, and
updated directly though the Form Builder, and all of your changes will be reflected
in real time.

If you’d like something even more customizable, our Integrations Directory also
contains a number of different popup integrations that you can connect with
MailChimp and use on your website. Programs like WisePops and SumoMe will
help you convert web traffic into engagement with mailing list subscribers.

Case studies: Thing Industries, 3D Robotics, and Briefing have all effectively
incorporated popup subscription forms into their website experience. Visit our
blog to learn how—and why—they’ve done it.

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards and Tailored

Audiences

The ubiquitous nature of social media makes it an invaluable tool for businesses
and organizations of all sizes. Our integration with Facebook makes it easy to
add a MailChimp form to your business’s Facebook page , but your Twitter
followers are equally valuable.

If your business has a Twitter Ads account, Lead Generation Cards will let
your followers to sign up for your MailChimp lists directly through Twitter.
Convert more of your social media followers into active, engaged mailing list
subscribers with just one click. When someone subscribes through a Lead Gen
Card, Twitter passes the new subscriber’s name, Twitter handle, and the email
address associated with their Twitter account over to your MailChimp list.

Tailored Audiences is a feature available for paid MailChimp accounts that

allows you to export your mailing list directly into Twitter and target your
subscribers with promoted tweets. Visit our Knowledge Base for all the details
on setting this up in your account.

Case studies: Twitter’s tools can provide an effective—and affordable—means of

advertising your business online. In fact, here at MailChimp, we’ve used Lead
Gen Cards and Tailored Audiences to promote and grow several of our own
mailing lists and better communicate with our customers. We’ve been pleased
with the outcome, too. Looking for even more tips and ideas? We’ve got you
covered.

Facebook Custom Audiences

In the same vein as Twitter’s Tailored Audiences feature, Facebook Custom

Audiences can be used to target ads for your business, product, or service on
Facebook towards a segment—or entire list—of your MailChimp subscribers.

Case study: We’ve been using this tool to advertise to and educate our users
about several of our products, apps, and resources. This blog post shares some
of the lessons we’ve learned and results we’ve seen.

Attentive.ly

Attentive.ly is a social dashboard that gives customers an overview of their

audience’s content and activity across channels like Twitter and Facebook. You
can use Attentive.ly and MailChimp together to find segments within your list that
are interested in key topics or ideas that are also important to you. Then, you can
sync those segments back to MailChimp to create micro-targeted campaigns with
content that’s especially relevant to that audience.

MailChimp Subscribe

Placing a MailChimp signup form on your website and sharing it across social
media will help drive signups, of course, but don’t discount collecting signups in-
person. If you have a brick-and-mortar location or your brand frequents trade
shows or other public events, MailChimp’s free Subscribe app—available for iPad
and Android tablets—can help. Display a tablet near your cash register, at your
booth, or anywhere you’d like, and new subscribers can quickly and easily join
your list.
Tools for Syncing
Your Data
MailChimp integrates with many of the web services that small businesses
already use, making it easy to sync data, import content, and connect multiple
aspects of your business. In our Integrations Directory, you’ll find hundreds of
integrations and collections, from blogging platforms to social media, surveys to
text messaging services. But in this section, we’ll highlight a few of the tools and
integrations that can help small businesses better utilize and understand their e-
commerce data. Using these tools, you’ll be able to sync that data with
MailChimp, track conversions, purchase details, and total sales in your
MailChimp reports, and send targeted campaigns based on your subscribers'
purchase behavior.

eCommerce360

eCommerce360 is a MailChimp feature that can help you track visitors to your
site from campaigns, capture order information, and then pass all of the data back
to your MailChimp account. It connects with a number of different shopping carts
and e-commerce solutions and, once the appropriate plugin has been installed on
your site, will begin tracking purchase activity and attaching the information to the
subscriber’s profile in your MailChimp list. This information will help you learn
what resonates with your customers, and can then be used to create segments
and automation workflows. We’ll discuss MailChimp’s segmentation and
automation features in greater detail later in this guide.

E-commerce integrations
Magemonkey is an integration for businesses that use Magento for their online
sales needs. This integration supports eCommerce360, multiple lists and
interest groups, and API webhooks, so you can sync subscriptions across both
services.

If you sell your products in a Shopify store, MailChimp for Shopify will help
you easily connect and sync that store to your MailChimp account. Once your
customers are migrated, you can take advantage of our eCommerce360
tracking data and quickly put together newsletters to promote your products and
track ROI.

WooCommerce is an e-commerce toolkit for WordPress websites, and its

MailChimp integration lets you automatically subscribe customers to a specific
MailChimp list and interest group after they’ve created or completed an order.

Windsor Circle, along with services like Zapier and Cazoomi, will help you
connect your e-commerce platform to MailChimp and integrate with
eCommerce360, making it easy to track and sync your business’s purchase
data and send targeted messaging to select segments of your subscriber base.
Tools for
Targeting Your
Subscribers
You probably have a lot of different customers or clients on your list, who may all
be interested in different kinds of content and products. Emails sent to your entire
list certainly have their place—announcing a new location, product, or promotion
to all of your customers, for instance. But it’s also effective to send targeted
information to smaller collections of your audience based on their location,
purchase history, gender, and more. Narrowing your focus and targeting smaller
segments of your audience will help increase the relevance of your campaigns.
Our research has shown that sending to a segmented list leads to increased
engagement from your subscribers. And that increase often translates to more
people visiting your website or online store and, in turn, purchasing more of your
products or services.

Segmentation

MailChimp’s powerful segmentation tools allow you to use the information you
have about your subscribers to create and send targeted campaigns. You can use
segmentation tools to send campaigns based on your subscribers' interests,
location, interaction with your other campaigns, and a whole lot more .

Example: As a small business, you may want to segment based on purchase

activity. After a customer makes a purchase, you can follow up a week later to
make sure everything is working correctly or offer tips for their new product.

Advanced Segmentation
If you're a MailChimp Pro customer, our Advanced Segmentation tools can help
you target your customers with even greater precision. Advanced Segmentation
allows you to combine any and all logic in a single segment; create complex
segments based on purchase history, email and website activity, demographics,
and more; and incorporate as many combinations of this data as you need to
define a specific group of customers.

For more information, refer to our Advanced Segmentation Guide.

Geolocation

If your business—or your followers, customers, and clients—is spread out across
different cities, states, or countries, there might be times when you want to
advertise or send unique content based on geographic location. When a
subscriber signs up for your list, we collect their IP address and use it to identify
their location. And as they open and interact with your campaigns, their location
will be dynamically updated, giving you the most current location data available.

If your business balances brick and mortar with e-commerce, you could send an
email advertising a special in-store sale to everyone near your physical location
and send a separate email—perhaps with a unique coupon code or different
messaging—to subscribers who live in a different area.

Maybe you’re a New York-based business planning to attend a conference or

open a new location in London, and your want to get the word out to all of your
subscribers who live in the area. MailChimp’s geolocation tools will help you make
sure you’re sending relevant content to the correct portion of your audience

Case study: BonLook, an online eyewear retailer that sells in both the United
States and Canada, creates two versions of their campaigns—one in English, the
other in French. They use MailChimp to segment their list by geographic location
to deliver messages in the proper language.
Tools for
Automating Your
Messaging
MailChimp offers a variety of tools that will help you streamline your
communication process and automate many of your common email-related tasks.
This will allow you to provide timely, relevant, and customized information to your
subscribers, all while saving you valuable time in the process.

Automation

Since its introduction in 2014, more than 140,000 MailChimp customers have
used our automation features to create more than 503,000 workflows.
Automation, available for all paid account holders, allows you to build a series of
email campaigns that send over a period of time and are triggered when a
subscriber meets your specified sending conditions. We’ve created a number of
prebuilt workflows to help you get started, but you can also create and customize
your own workflows that address the unique needs of your business.

Not sure how to utilize automation for your business? Try scheduling a birthday or
holiday greeting to automatically send to your subscribers when the special day
arrives. Or, you could send your subscribers a follow-up survey—using an
integration like SurveyMonkey or Asknice.ly—to collect feedback about their
shopping experience. You could even develop a series of win-back emails to
encourage inactive subscribers to re-engage, and utilize post-sending actions to
automatically perform a specific list action on subscribers after they receive the
final email in the series. There are countless ways businesses can incorporate
automated emails into the fold, and below we’ve compiled a few more helpful
examples of how other folks are using MailChimp to supplement their business.
Introduce your products to someone who's new to your brand. Jack
Erwin, a purveyor of men’s dress shoes, sends a 4-part automation series to
their new subscribers. The first email, sent when the new subscriber hits a
specific trigger, offers an introduction to the brand's approach to footwear. After
receiving the introductory email, subscribers are introduced to 3 different shoe
collections in subsequent mailings.

Create a series of instructional or educational emails. Little Green Dot, an

eco-lifestyle blog, recently used MailChimp’s automation features—and a little
bit of API customization—to build and distribute their successful 28-day course,
How To Become A Morning Person . They even utilized pre-built recipes to
handle the course’s signup, pre-launch, and wait-list email flows.

Brooklyn Brew Shop uses automation to send out a 3-part series for potential
homebrewers. The first 2 parts of the series cover the processes of making and
bottling the beer, while the third is used to help the subscriber decide what kind
of beer to try next. The third message also acts as a sales tool, used to promote
the other beer making kits and gifts sets the company has available for
purchase.

Reward first-time customers or long-time supporters with a special offer.

LoveKnitting, an e-commerce company that sells knitting patterns and supplies,
sends their new subscribers an automated email to offer a small discount and
free shipping on their first purchase.

Similarly, rock band Wilco recently used MailChimp’s automation features to

surprise their fans with a free download of their new album before it was
available anywhere else.

Send out an email when a popular item is back in stock. High-end retail
brand Best Made uses MailChimp to notify customers when their carefully
crafted, limited-edition products are back in stock at their online store.
Goal

Goal is an optional campaign tracking feature available for paid MailChimp

accounts that lets you trigger automation workflows based on subscriber activity
from your email campaigns to your website. Goal can also be used to create
segments of subscribers, allowing you to send targeted campaigns to your
subscribers based on their Goal activity.

Example: A customer opens your campaign and clicks a link to your website.
There, he visits the men’s shirts page of your online store. If you have Goal
enabled, you’re able to track his activity and send him a follow-up message that’s
tailored to his interests. Curious to learn other ways that Goal can be used? Our
Knowledge Base offers more use-case suggestions.

Mandrill

Transactional emails like personalized password reminders, cart abandonment

notifications, order confirmations, and receipts are often a small business
necessity. MailChimp’s transactional email service, Mandrill, offers a reliable
delivery API that your business can use to send targeted e-commerce content
and highly-personalized, one-to-one messaging to your customers. Mandrill
connects with your MailChimp account so you can view Mandrill activity for your
MailChimp subscribers, and you can even create automation workflows based on
Mandrill events.

Example: After sending an email to your customers to confirm an order, follow it

up with a series of automated emails in MailChimp regarding the product or
service that was purchased. Provide usage or care instructions, share inventive
ways that other customers have used the product, or suggest other products that
might be of interest based on their original purchase.

API
MailChimp’s powerful API provides a way to sync your CMS, shopping cart, and
website with MailChimp. If you’re familiar with programming, utilizing the API will
allow you to automate processes and do more with your data. You can even
create automation workflows that are triggered by API requests—or any other
custom criteria you’ve established through the API. Not a programming wiz? No
problem! Use our Experts Directory to find a third-party, for-hire expert in your
area that can help.
Tools for
Scheduling and
Optimizing Your
Email
Engagement is key in email marketing. A clean list of organically-collected
subscribers who are interested in your business is a great start, but how do you
keep them interested and interacting (via opens, clicks, purchases, etc.) with your
email? You’re aware of MailChimp’s regular campaign creation and scheduling
tools and, if you have a large list, you might even be familiar with the Batch
Delivery feature that will send your email in batches and help prevent strain on
your website’s server. But there are a few other features to explore that can help
you learn more about your audience and maximize their engagement.

A/B Testing

If you’ve ever questioned which day of the week or sending time would lead to
higher open rates, what subject line or “from” name would be the most effective,
or if using different templates, content, or calls to action would affect subscriber
engagement, MailChimp’s A/B Testing feature can provide the answers.

Create up to 3 different versions of a single campaign—testing content, delivery

date/time, subject line, or from name—and send them to sample groups within
your list. We’ll perform the tests, let you know which variation worked best, and
send the winning version of the campaign to the portion of your list that didn’t
receive a test.

Nearly any aspect of a campaign can be tested, and the differences in each
variation can be as minor or as extreme as you’d like, so feel free to get creative.
With each test, you’ll learn more about the preferences and engagement habits of
your audience—information you can use to improve your email marketing
strategy, grow your list, and boost ROI.

Multivariate Testing

Looking for even more testing flexibility? Multivariate Testing, a feature

exclusive to MailChimp Pro, takes the guesswork out of email marketing and
provides you with valuable insight into the tastes and preferences of your
customers. Create up to 8 different variations of a single campaign at once,
testing any combination of subject line, send time, from name, and campaign
content. After you’ve sent your test, Multivariate reports will compile all of the data
for you and help you interpret the results, so you can quickly identify the most
successful variables and implement what you’ve learned in your future
campaigns.

To learn more about this feature, check out our Multivariate Testing Guide.

Send Time Optimization

MailChimp sends a lot of email, and many recipients of those emails are members
of more than one MailChimp mailing list. Our Send Time Optimization feature—
available for paid account holders—analyzes the click history of your subscribers
to identify when they are typically most engaged with MailChimp campaigns, and
uses that data to calculate your optimal send time. We’re always collecting new
data, and only the latest information will be used to make a send time
recommendation for each new campaign you create.

Timewarp
Timewarp is a feature available for paid MailChimp accounts that allows you to
schedule and send campaigns based on each subscriber’s individual time zone.
Businesses often have customers who live all over the globe, and Timewarp can
help ensure that they all receive your email at a specific time of day, no matter
where they spend their days.

If you're a MailChimp Pro customer, you'll also have the option to schedule and
send your automation emails with Timewarp. To do so, just check the Send with
Timewarp box on the Scheduling/Segmentation step as you're creating your
emails.

Example: Your business is based in Toronto. You know that, historically, email
engagement tends to peak on Tuesday mornings, so you decide that you’d like to
send an email to all of your subscribers on Tuesday at 10am. With Timewarp, you
can schedule the campaign to deliver to each recipient at 10am in their particular
time zone, whether they live in New York City, Tokyo, or Paris. We’ll start sending
when the first time zone in the world, UTC +14, reaches your scheduled time, and
continue batching and sending by time zone each hour, until everyone on your list
has received the campaign.
Tools for Sending
on the Go
We’ve spoken with lots of small business owners across various industries, and
we can say one thing for certain: SMBs are busy! There’s not always time to sit
down at a computer and work on an email campaign, but our mobile tools can
help streamline the process.

MailChimp Snap

You might not always have time to create, design, and send a proper campaign to
your customers. But maybe you’d like to send a quick message announcing an
upcoming event or the arrival of a new product in your store. For that, there’s
MailChimp Snap, a free app available for iPhone and Android that allows you to
send a quick, photo-based email campaign to your MailChimp list. Just snap a
picture, include a note and a link to your product or website, and send it out to
your customers.

Case Study: The Detroit Bus Company uses Snap to delight their subscribers by
sharing some of the best photography of Detroit, old and new.

MailChimp Editor

MailChimp Editor—available for iPad and Android tablets—gives you the tools
you need to create, edit, collaborate, preview, test, and send a campaign directly
from your device, just as you would on your computer. Editor will sync with your
MailChimp account, so you can easily access and edit any of your existing draft
campaigns that use a drag and drop template or build a brand new campaign on
the go, whether you’re on or offline.
Tools for
Analyzing Your
Data
MailChimp offers insightful tracking and reporting data. But if you have our
Google Analytics and eCommerce360 integrations installed, you can also easily
identify who’s clicking through to your website, how much revenue your campaign
is generating, and which of your products are the most popular. Review this
information for every campaign you send—it’s full of insights and feedback that
will help make your next email more successful than the last. There’s even a
MailChimp Mobile app for your smartphone, so you can view your reports while
you’re on the go.

Analytics360

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can integrate with MailChimp to add
Google Analytics tracking to all of your MailChimp campaigns, archives, and list
pages. This integration will let you track clicks from your campaigns through to
purchases on your website, and the results will be compiled in the Reports
section of your MailChimp account. We’ll pull in campaign ROI, campaign cost,
revenue, goal information, conversion rate, and more.

Comparative Reports

Comparative Reports, a feature available exclusively in MailChimp Pro, will

provide you with the flexibility to interact with your data just like our own research
team would. You can analyze your performance over time by aggregating and
comparing campaign results, or discover hidden trends by creating advanced
segments within your reports—after sending a campaign. MailChimp does all the
heavy lifting for you, eliminating the need to export and combine all of your data
manually. When you’re done, you can share your findings with the whole team
and schedule your reports to automatically regenerate as new results come in.

For more information, refer to our Comparative Reports Guide.

Reporting integrations

Power BI is Microsoft’s analytics platform that gives small businesses the

power to dig deeper into their email marketing analytics and visualize their
account data in new ways. After importing your MailChimp account data into
Power BI, you can compare metrics across campaigns, discover trends over
time, view open rates across all campaigns, and more. Read our blog post to
learn more about Power BI.

Email Aptitude’s Pro Reports give MailChimp users the ability to aggregate
their reporting data, organize reports by category, view side-by-side campaign
comparisons, and a whole lot more.
TL;DR
Use our segmentation tools to send targeted messages to your
subscribers. You can segment by your customers’ interests, location,
engagement history, purchase activity, and a whole lot more . It will improve the
relevance of your campaigns, and have a positive effect on your engagement
rates. If you'd like to target your list with even greater precision, check out
MailChimp Pro's exclusive Advanced Segmentation feature.

Optimize your sending time. MailChimp’s A/B Testing and Send Time
Optimization tools—along with Multivariate Testing, a feature exclusive to
MailChimp Pro—will help you identify the best time to send a campaign to your
list. Want to send an email that hits inboxes at the same time for all of your
subscribers, no matter their time zone? Try our Timewarp feature.

Integrate your e-commerce platform with MailChimp. MailChimp integrates

with many of the tools and web services that small businesses use every day,
so you can easily sync, connect, and track your data.

Utilize automation workflows. MailChimp’s automation tools will help you

streamline the communication process and allow you to provide timely, relevant
information to your subscribers. Our prebuilt workflows will help you welcome
new subscribers, create a series of instructional emails, notify customers when
an item is back in stock, send an email based on subscriber activity , and more.

Experiment with different types of forms. In addition to MailChimp’s regular

hosted and embeddable form options, there are a number of other forms
available to help build your mailing list. Add a subscriber popup form to your
website, use MailChimp Subscribe on an iPad or Android tablet to collect
signups at a trade show or your bricks-and-mortar location, and share your
form across social media to help turn your Facebook and Twitter followers into
engaged subscribers.
Maximize your reporting data. Your MailChimp reports are full of valuable
information, providing important insight and feedback that can help you
determine the success of your campaign. In just a few clicks, you can find out
which subscribers are clicking through to your website, which of your products
or services are the most popular, and even how much revenue your campaign
has generated. If you'd like to dig even deeper into your data, check out
MailChimp Pro's exclusive Comparative Reports feature.
Resources
We’ve covered a lot of information in this guide, but there’s even more on our
website. Visit our MailChimp Pro features page to explore the powerful suite of
tools we've developed to help you grow your business and improve your email
marketing performance. Learn about HTML email and building MailChimp
templates in our Email Design Reference. Let the beautifully designed campaigns
that other MailChimp users—from the small business sector and beyond—send
inspire you on our Inspiration Board. Connect with third-party MailChimp experts
for help with anything from strategy and design to development work with the API
in our Experts Directory. We’ve also got a number of other guides , a lot of
research to share, and a helpful support team.