Mailchimp is a mailing list platform for securely sending emails to mailing lists. Multiple lists can be created (using tags to group people). People can have multiple tags. Recipients can unsubscribe – and they won’t be accidentally re-subscribed if we add them again accidentally. Email templates can be created – including logos, contact information etc.
Sending out an individual email to a large number of people is known as a “campaign” as the main focus of Mailchimp is marketing. The basic steps are to create a new campaign, select the people it’s to go to (by choosing tags), select the email template, add text and photos, and then send.
Log in at mailchimp.com
The username is daolu – the password can be obtained from the usual person.
Concepts
A campaign is an email that is to be sent to a group of people. So every time you want to send a new email to a group of people, you create a new campaign. This is very easy to do, and reflects the marketing focus of Mailchimp. So if you want to sent a newsletter, you would create a new campaign for every newsletter, and name the campaign perhaps with the date, e.g. “Newsletter 25/12/2021”.
A tag is simply a name to reflect an interest or status of a person. This is a key concept for organising people. A campaign is an email sent to people with one or more selected tags. So, to send an email to all students, you would select the tag “student”, and the emails for that campaign would go to all people that have been given the “student” tag. People can have multiple tags, but will receive only one email per campaign.
A subscriber is a single person (email address)
An audience is a group of people, i.e. a mailing list.
Add contacts
The following screenshots and instructions assume you are using a large screen. For mobile, the menu may be in a different location.
Click on “Audience” and then “All contacts” to see all the mailing lists. Then click on “Add contacts” (third tab). This gives a choice of adding a single person or import a large number.
Adding a single contact (subscriber)
If adding a single person, enter their email address, first name and last name. Ignore their address, phone number and birthday.
Then add the “tags” appropriate for that person, and tick the two boxes below:
A person can have multiple tags – e.g. student and any events they have registered for.
Tags are very important – they are the key to organising mailing lists, and sending emails to the appropriate groups of people.
Click on the “+” button to add more tags. If a person has multiple selected tags, that’s OK – they will only receive one email for the campaign.
Adding multiple contacts (import contacts)
This is likely to be the usual way we add contacts. There is no need to worry about contacts already added – they will not be added twice (but tags may be updated, as appropriate). Mailchimp does all the hard work for us here!
First you have to choose whether to upload a file or copy and paste – the format is the same.
Let’s assume you have a spreadsheet of names. To let Mailchimp know which column is the email, which is the first name and which is the last name, the top row must be Email Address, First Name and Last Name respectively. They don’t have to be in order (e.g. you could have Email Address as the third column, as below). Personal data has been removed in the screenshot.
Select all the appropriate data, including the headings (e.g. with mouse), copy to the clipboard (Ctrl-C) and paste into the form that appears after clicking on “Continue to Upload”:
Don’t worry that the columns are no longer neatly aligned.
Then click “Continue to Organize”, then set to “Subscribed” and tick “Update any existing contacts”.
