Improve Your Sales with Email Marketing
Transcription from Video
Do you need to add contacts to Mailchimp? Are you trying to improve your sales?
Although you may think email marketing isn’t powerful as it once was, the statistics show otherwise. For example: HubSpot email marketing stats show almost 60% of respondents say marketing email influences their purchase decisions. If you want to improve your sales you should be doing some form of email marketing which is why we want to get all our contacts into our MailChimp software and start promoting to them.
We can add contacts to Mailchimp manually one by one or we can upload our lists in CSV or comma separated value file. Those can be created from a spreadsheet program like Google sheets or Excel.
Before you add contacts to Mailchimp you should think about the way you want to organize them within your audience list. Best practice is to keep one list and use the MailChimp organization features of Groups, Segments and Tags to manage your contacts. This way you can send targeted personalized emails. Your emails can be based on your contacts preferences or shared traits like location, products they like and things like that. If you want to learn more check out my videos on using Groups, Segment and Tags. If you haven’t created a Mailchimp account check out this transcript first.
How to Add Contact to Mailchimp List
To add a contact to your list we’re going to:
- Log in
- Go over to audience
- Click on audience. If you had a paid account and had multiple audiences or lists it would show up here. This is a free account so only have one list that I will be adding all my contacts to.
- Add them by going to Manage Audience then to Add subscriber in the dropdown menu. Here’s where I can either add a subscriber or import my contacts. I’m going to show you adding a subscriber.
- Enter the email – the minimum you need is their email
- Add any other information in the forms that you want for example:
- First name
- Last name
- Address
- Phone number
- Birthday
I’m only adding the email and the first name.
- Scroll down
- Click that this person gave permission to add their email them
- Also if this person is already in my audience I would like to update their profile once you have a bigger list you’ll want to check this off.
Adding Tags in Mailchimp
The other thing you should do is use Tags and Tags are internal labels that your list or subscribers can’t see but you can see and help organize your list. For instance this contact could be coming in from a particular campaign or maybe it was a walk into my store.
- Click the plus sign
- Add a tag
- Enter our tag name
- I’m going to put a location and that way if I wanted to send any information to this particular contact and it was location based then I would have that
- I could also put the tag webinar attendee and then would know that this person came in through my webinar
Tags are fantastic to use internally and you should start to create tags for your subscriber. I have a separate video on that topic, you’re welcome to watch.
We’re going to continue on and click subscribe. I now have this contact in my list.
As a reminder any of the fields listed here are created in your sign up form area. For example if you wanted one of the default form fields that wasn’t already listed on this page or a custom field you could choose to go back to the form builder. Add it and it would show up in this form.
Create CSV file for Importing Contacts
In order to import or add contacts to Mailchimp we’ll need to setup our spreadsheet and save it a CSV file. I’m going to use Google sheets but Excel will do the same thing.
Our first row will have all the field labels we want to use in MailChimp and will look something like this.
Now I’m going to add my contact information by pasting contact information into the correct columns.
Now Download the file as a CSV file by clicking File -> Download -> choose CSV
In Excel you would click Save As and click on the drop down in the Save as type field, choose CSV.
Import Contacts into Mailchimp
Now we’re going to import and add our spreadsheet into MailChimp.
- We go to Audience Dashboard and to Manage Audience.
- Click on the drop down and import contacts
- At this point MailChimp allows you either to upload a file or you can copy and paste the information from the spreadsheet. We’re going to upload the file so continue to upload.
- Click on the browse option and upload
- Continue to organize
The default status is subscribe but there are other options such as;
Non-subscribe Contact: where they’ve interacted with your online store but haven’t opted in to receive your email marketing campaigns. This is why MailChimp calls your contact list Audiences, because MailChimp stores more than just email addresses. It stores your customer information and activity regardless if you’re sending them marketing information.
- Continuing on, if you had an already existing audience you’d want to click on this to update any of your existing contacts.
- Click on continue to tag (now I’m not going to go into tagging right now)
- Click on continue to match. This is where we go and make sure that all of our labels we created match up with the MailChimp labels. If they’re green and a check mark it means that it matches up.
- In my demo there is a problem with the address
- Go to edit the column to resolve the problem and usually this is a problem with the format.
- Click on edit and it ‘s alerting me if I want to add a full address or if I have separated my address into separate columns. I actually have a full address and going to click confirm
- To finalize import I’m going to click on complete the import
It show you that we’ve added five contacts to this audience and if I want to view them. You can see the contacts and the information that was imported in.
Import Contacts using Copy & Paste
I prefer to upload a file when importing my contacts but if you want to choose the copy and paste option follow along:
- Click on manage audience
- Import contacts
- Copy and Paste
- Continue to upload
- Copy your information from your contact list
- Continue to organize
- Select the status
- Continue to Tag
- Continue to match
- Match all the columns just like I showed you previously
Remove Contacts – Archive & Delete
To remove a contact you have two options: archive or delete them’
Archive allows you to remove the contact and they won’t be counted towards your MailChimp account subscriber limit and you will retain all the information about them but won’t be able to edit any of it.
Deleting permanently deletes the contact from your account and you will not be able to add them back to your audience unless they subscribe themselves.
How you do this is:
- Click on contacts
- View specific contact
- Click on the contact actions in the dropdown menu at the top of the contact
- Click on Remove contact option
- Choose to either archive permanently delete the contact
Now we’re ready to create a campaign and connect with our existing or potential customers. I have a video showing you how to set up a campaign.
If you’re trying to figure out what exactly you need to get your business online.