bwd-logo-green1

Mailchimp Email Marketing Automation – All You Need to Know

Mailchimp marketing automation is the process of creating a workflow of automated email blasts based on your target audience preferences, customers’ life cycle, and business goals. It has several advantages over sending one-off email campaigns. However, designing an effective flow of emails may be challenging if you are starting and your marketing strategy is unclear.

Email marketing automation tools typically provide structured automation flows with prebuilt settings. One of the most popular tools is Mailchimp. It offers assorted customer journey options, comprehensive features designed to improve the customer experience, convert leads, and achieve high ROI. On MailChimp, you can filter out the preset journeys and choose the ones that better align with your needs:

This blog post covers all the technical features, possibilities, rules, and actions you can use to make your email marketing successful.

How to create a high-performing email automation flow?

Mailchimp Marketing Automation Campaigns are composed of triggers, rules, and actions. First, the trigger is “the action” that starts the automation. An example of a trigger is “Subscriber Clicked campaign” or “Subscriber joined the audience.”  Next are the “rules,” typically composed of conditional if / then statements that define when and how to continue. The final component of email automation campaigns is the “action.”  Actions specify what happens as the result of the trigger. To add up all, here is an example: send an email (action) if a subscriber “Clicked campaign”(trigger) after four days(rule).

Before learning more about creating high-performing email automation campaigns, there are several essential factors that you must take notes of and apply. Let’s try to list them all:

  • Align your email marketing strategy with your business goals and incentives. Start by setting up clear business goals, clarifying your vision, understanding the value you bring your customers, how you can help your customers, etc. Then integrate the overall plan into your email marketing. It should be derived from the overall strategy and coordinated accordingly.
  • The next important thing is a structured and clear email marketing list. How do you acquire new leads, and what’s your plan to convert them? These two questions will define the rules and sequence of actions that the automation cycle will include.
  • Before creating effective email automation, you need to have well-defined channels for capturing leads and customer data. Set up your lead channels to adequately capture, tag, and segment your target audience.    Examples of lead capture channels include integrating your email marketing system with your website (e-commerce), ERP, CRM, or other digital platforms. Learn more about strategies for creating an email marketing list
  • All email marketing platforms provide preset automation options optimized for maximum effectiveness. But it would help if you try to be more creative and stand out from your competitors by providing more value through email marketing.
  • Be thoughtful with the content and design. Ensure the email designs are consistent with the brand identity and the content is attractive for the reader. Otherwise, the open rate and click-through rate will decrease eventually.
  • Customize! Each subscriber should feel that the email is addressed to them personally. Generic emails don’t convert or have a high open-rate.

Benefits of designing comprehensive email marketing flow

To create an effective email marketing strategy based on the “customer journey life cycle.” The emails should aim to engage customers, give incentives to take action, and boost customer loyalty. With one-off email marketing campaigns, not all features will allow you to achieve this level of effectiveness.

  • A well-thought email blast flow will allow you to stand out from competitors by nurturing leads.
  • You will be able to start a conversation and plan out the steps based on the individual needs of each subscriber with triggers and clear timelines.
  • It’s easier to track down and analyze, derive solutions and make improvements over time.

Integrate Your Website for advanced Mailchimp marketing automation options

To unlock all features for automation, you need to connect your website or ERP, CRM or Accounting Software with Mailchimp. For example, on average, companies that integrate their eCommerce store with Mailchimp earn  $619 in extra revenue per month. The setup and some of the necessary features for eCommerce websites are available even in the free plan. You can add multiples eCommerce websites, landing pages, pop-up forms and create automation for each one separately. Here is the list of the websites that you can integrate with MailChimp and links that you can follow to check out how to manage it for each one:

  1. ShopSync
  2. Woocommerce
  3. Magento
  4. Magento 2
  5. Lightspeed
  6. PrestaShop
  7. BigCommerce
  8. Big Cartel
  9. Drupal
  10.  Miva
  11. Eventbrite
  12.  Volusion
  13. Custom Integration

Mailchimp marketing automation examples:

What type of Mailchimp marketing automation can you set up?

There are different categories for automation. Based on their objectives, here are the main automation categories: nurture relationships, sell, re-engage, drive to take action, share information, manage your advice. For each type, Mailchimp provides prebuilt journeys with triggers, rules, and actions.

But you also have an option for creating a custom email marketing automation, where you can change the settings: triggers, set up a specific schedule, post-send action:

Mailchimp Marketing Automation - custom workflows

1) Welcome contacts who subscribed via your pop-up form

Contacts will be added to this journey when they sign up to your audience by subscribing via a pop-up form. It will allow you to build new customer relationships by sending a welcome email and a follow-up email after three days. Also, all contacts who receive these emails will be tagged.

Mailchimp Marketing Automation: Welcome new contacts email automation flow

To set up this flow, you’ll need a standard Mailchimp plan and a specific audience. This journey is in the “Drive audience actions” category.

2) Promote cross-sell opportunities

On Mailchimp, this journey is under the “Sell stuff” objective category. Contacts are automatically added to this flow after they make purchases on your MailChimp integrated eCommerce shop.  Enhance customer experience by allowing access to cross-sell promotions. This journey includes:

  • Two timed emails with cross-selling promotions
  • A separate email to purchasers of both the main product and cross-sell product
  • Tag customers after each email to identify which promotion was successful
Mailchimp Marketing Automation: Promote cross-sell opportunities

3) Recover lost customers

This journey is one of our favorite picks.   This email automation flow will help your marketing team bring previously shopping customers back to your business.   The actions include sending two re-engagement emails spaced 3 and 7 days apart (or set your own delays) to shoppers who haven’t purchased in 90 days.  In addition, you’ll tag active shoppers, maybe shoppers, and stubborn customers based on their level of engagement.

Recover lost customers

4) Identify high-value customers

The objective of this journey is to help you manage your audience. When the contact makes purchases from your website, they will join the flow. This email automation consists of 3 branches. As a result, the flow will sort your customers based on the number of their orders.  Then it will track, analyze, and assign rewards and promotions based on your customers’ purchases.

Identify high-value customers

5. Remind customers to reorder

Remind customers of consumables or services that need replenishing or renewing by using this journey. The action and trigger involve one email for 30 days after the first purchase. You can change the delay based on your business needs. If the customers repurchase the product, they will get tagged accordingly.

Remind customers to reorder

Check more automation flows here on MailChimp.

Design your Mailchimp Marketing Automation for Maximum Results

When designing the email flow, ensure emails have the same styling, plus the design is clean and mobile-friendly. With MailChimp, design can be hard to master. Many nuances lead business owners to hire experts for crafting professional-looking email designs. The templates provided by Mailchimp are editable. You can easily add your logo, pictures, insert youtube videos, etc. However, the options are limited, and the tools available are not easy to adjust to your brand guide requirements completely. For that reason, you can use other marketing tools such as Beefree.io, where you can leverage preoptimized templates and easily import them to Mailchimp to schedule your campaign.

MailChimp Email Templates from MBA Team on Vimeo.

Now it’s the time to use this inspiration and take action to drive revenue for your business. Mailchimp’s email automation features make creating optimized customer journeys easy and effective. You will be able to automate your email campaigns and get the most out of your marketing efforts. Then, continuously track and analyze for further improvements.  Finally, to save time, money, and effort, contact our email marketing experts for help.

Share article with your friends:

Categories

Get a Quote

Use this form for a quote or to schedule a consultation: