3. Table Of Contents Why Should I Care About Email?
by Tina Seamonster of Hello! Craft
I’ve had an online business for the last five years and only recently began
Introduction by Tina Seamonster ............................................................................................................................... 3 to send email marketing. It’s not that I didn’t know how—sending email
Build Your Mailing List ............................................................................................................................................. 4 newsletters is a big part of my day job. I think a lot of small businesses
mistakenly dismiss email marketing as a tool because they don’t want to
Create a signup form ............................................................................................................................................................... 4 “bother people.” I know that was how I felt. This past year, I finally got
Add a signup form to your Facebook fan page ............................................................................................................................ 5 over that feeling and have learned to love email marketing. Need to be
Gather signups from your iPad or computer ............................................................................................................................... 6 talked into using email as a marketing tool? Here’s my take on it.
Scan QR codes with Pyow! ...................................................................................................................................................... 6
1. If you already have a customer or fanbase, your emails will be
Create A Beautiful Newsletter ................................................................................................................................... 7
welcomed. Have you seen multiple customers come back year after year to
Etsy template ......................................................................................................................................................................... 7 purchase holiday gifts from you? Those people like you! They want to hear
Amazon template ................................................................................................................................................................... 8 from you and know about new products or sales. People who like you want
eBay template ........................................................................................................................................................................ 9 to hear from you. If you can present your information in a genuine and
meaningful way, they will be excited to see what you are doing.
Start from scratch ................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Pre-designed templates ......................................................................................................................................................... 10 2. If you don’t currently have a customer or fanbase, you DO have family
Online Seller Integrations ....................................................................................................................................... 11 and friends. And likely you are the most creative person you know and
PayPal ................................................................................................................................................................................. 11 the people around you want to hear about it! They are inspired by you, so
go forth and inspire! Seriously. You likely don’t know how much people
Chimpified ............................................................................................................................................................................ 11
around you believe in what you are doing and want to know more about it.
Magento/Magento Go ............................................................................................................................................................. 11 The people who already love you are the best word of mouth you’ve got. So
Short Stack/Media Feedia ....................................................................................................................................................... 11 present them with something awesome that they can forward on.
Get Social ............................................................................................................................................................. 12
3. MailChimp has amazing features just for people like us. I’m currently
Auto-post to Facebook and Twitter .......................................................................................................................................... 12
enjoying the PayPal integration that allows all of my customers to sign up
Add a Facebook Like button to your campaigns ....................................................................................................................... 12 for my newsletter upon check out when they make a purchase with me.
Enable Facebook comments .................................................................................................................................................. 13 The RSS-to-email feature allows you to automatically send a newsletter to
Social Share button .............................................................................................................................................................. 13 your list when you update your Etsy shop. And pushing your newsletter out
to social media has never been easier.
Sharing with merge tags ........................................................................................................................................................ 14
Tracking And Reporting .......................................................................................................................................... 15 So don’t be afraid to bother people. You’re awesome. Let Mailchimp help
Standard reports ................................................................................................................................................................... 15 you tell everyone about it.
Social tracking ..................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Tina Seamonster is a podcaster, blogger and mom to twins. She’s the
Communications Director for Hello Craft, a non-profit dedicated to the
advancement of independent crafters and the handmade movement,
where she hosts a podcast that collects stories of making and buying
handmade. Her Etsy shop is full of zombies.
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4. Build Your Mailing List
Easily add your form to your website or blog by embedding it. Embedding Now, go to MailChimp’s Facebook app page. It’s not a good idea to do a
your signup form means people will be able to sign up for your mailing list general Facebook search for the app, or the process will get funky and not
without going to a separate website. Your form will simply show up within work as expected.
your web page whereever you add the embed code.
Click the Add to My Page option on the left side of the screen.
Start by clicking Create embed code for small form.
If you have more than one page attached to your Facebook profile, you will
see all of the pages listed in the pop-up window. Click Add to Page only
for the page you want to have the MailChimp app. Close the pop-up once
First thing’s first: If you want to send out email newsletters, you’ve got to Once you’ve entered your list information, click Save, and your list will
it has been selected.
have a list of subscribers. Don’t worry if you haven’t been collecting email be created. Now it’s time to customize the signup form for this list. Click
addresses at craft fairs or online. MailChimp makes creating a signup Forms to get started.
Now, go to your main Facebook account menu and click Use Facebook as
form, collecting subscribers and managing lists a piece of cake.
Page. Do not click on Switch. Click on the name of your page only.
One thing you should know—there are laws that guide how someone can
Click on the Email Signup tab on the left side of Facebook, and you’ll see
send bulk email (email sent from one person to many people). These laws
that your accounts have been connected. Clicking the tab also gives you a
are defined by the CAN-SPAM Act. The most important thing for you to Here you can design a smaller version of your signup form. You can full list of instructions for completing the signup-form setup. Once you’ve
know is that you shouldn’t add someone to your email list unless they also customize the form label and set the form width. If you don’t set a gone through the list and allowed permission for MailChimp and Facebook
specifically agreed to receive this kind of email from you. We’ll handle the specific form width, it’ll be determined by the parameters within the page to share information, you should see the option to select the list you want
other stuff, like unsubscribes and preventing duplicates. where you embed the form code.
Use the Build It tab to determine what information you want to collect attached to your signup form.
from your subscribers. Of course you’ll grab the email address, but you
Create a Signup Form may want to collect first name, last name, address, and birthday. Select the list, click Submit, and you’re all set.
MailChimp makes creating a signup form and managing your subscrib- Use the Design It tab to change your form’s colors, header design and
ers easy. Log in to MailChimp to create your first list, which will hold all more. You may want to import your store’s header into your signup form
your new subscribers. To create your list, click Lists from your MailChimp as your form’s header image, or skin your form with colors that reflect your
dashboard. Then click Create list. Etsy shop’s branding.
Once you’ve finished creating your signup form, you can add the form to
your site and link to it in as many places as possible. If you want to link to
your sign-up form (for example, from your store website Twitter page, etc.)
just copy the shortened eepurl link.
Once your embed code is customized, MailChimp will give you the HTML
code that you can copy and paste into your site or blog’s existing html.
Enter the requested info about this list and your company. The permission
reminder is particularly important. Reminding subscribers why they’re re-
ceiving emails from you helps prevent them from clicking the This is spam Add a Signup Form to Your Facebook
button and falsely reporting you as a spammer. It’s just a short sentence Fan Page
or two, explaining how a recipient joined your list. For example, this list’s
permission reminder says “You are receiving this email because you opted- Facebook fans who aren’t on your mailing list might be missing out on
in at Generitech.biz.” your newsletter content. But you can also add your signup form to your
Facebook fan page using our Facebook integration. It’s more effective
than linking them to an outside form, because sometimes it’s more com-
fortable for people to stay within Facebook than go to an unknown web-
site. Once you’ve installed the Facebook application to your MailChimp
account, here’s how to add a signup for to your Facebook business or fan
page.
First, open your browser with one tab logged into your MailChimp account
and another tab logged into your Facebook account.
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5. Create A Beautiful Newsletter
Gather Signups From Your iPad or Computer Scan QR Coupons With Pyow!
Even if you put your digital signup form on all your sites and blogs, it’s Pyow! makes it easy to create QR coupons, send them to your subscrib-
a good idea to collect email addresses at craft shows, book readings ers, and use your iPhone, iPod touch or just about any smartphone to scan
and other public events where you’re selling your products. You can use them from anywhere. After you download the app, you can insert a QR
a physical list and import it into MailChimp, or you can use one of our code directly into your campaign, specify how many times the coupon can
signup apps to simplify the process. Chimpadeedoo is an iPad app that be used, scan a printed coupon or scan it on a smartphone, and even find
collects signups and automatically imports them into your MailChimp ac- out how many people used the coupon. Here’s how:
count. Chimpadeedee is a desktop app that does the same. You’ll notice that your Etsy Store header is the email template’s header.
Inside the content editor, use MailChimp’s QRCOUPON merge tag, which
Etsy Template
Once you’ve downloaded the app and connected it with your MailChimp
account, just touch the top-right corner—regardless of whether your iPad We’re more than just email geeks here at MailChimp—we’re crafty email
is oriented horizontally or vertically—to access the control panel. There, geeks. So crafty, in fact, that our developers crafted an awesome integra-
you can change your theme, choose the list you’d like to add people to, tion with Etsy that allows you to create an email newsletter with your Etsy
edit your on-screen details and more. header and store items already added. All you have to do is add a nice
note to your subscribers and click send. Now you don’t have to worry about
making sure your campaign looks just right, because our crafty developers
automated that part for you. Yay crafts! Yay developers!
To set up the Etsy template, start by creating a campaign as your normally
would. Go to your MailChimp dashboard. Click Create Campaign, and
select Regular ol’ campaign. Select your list, enter the requested info.
In the next step, we’ll ask you to select a template. Click the AutoConnect
In this case, the text, “$2 off any coffee drink,” is the description that ap- You’ll also notice that your Etsy items’ images, names and prices have
category, and choose the template called (you guessed it) Etsy.
pears whenever you use Pyow! to scan the QR code. It’s only visible to you been populated in the template content. Easily add or delete squares and
while you’re putting the email together, not the recipient. rows as desired.
Finally, the “5:2” determines the frequency and size. The “5” is how
many times the coupon can be used by that recipient. You can set that
number higher if you want to promote coupon sharing. The “2” is the size
of the QR image—1 is small, 10 is ginormous.
And the best part is, Chimpadeedoo can collect signups while you’re
offline and import them into your MailChimp account when you have Once you select the template, we’ll ask for your store name. Enter it, and
internet access. click Connect.
Chimpadeedoo is available for free on the iTunes app store.
If you don’t have an iPad, you can collect signups on location from your
computer, using our Chimpadeedee desktop app.
Just like Chimpadeedoo, click the top-right corner to access your settings. To see what your email will look like when it is rendered in an email ap-
You can select a theme, enter descriptive text, and lock it with a password. plication, click Popup Preview.
Chimpadeedee is available for download from MailChimp Labs.
Then we’ll ask you to decide if you’d like MailChimp to pull in your
featured listings or a specific category of listings. Make those choices, and
MailChimp will auto-magically create an email template for you, with your
own content and Etsy’s look and feel.
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6. Popup Preview is a quick and easy way to make sure everything is looking
Amazon Template eBay AutoConnect Template Start From Scratch
right before you send the email to your subscribers.
If you’re an author, there’s a good chance you sell your books on Amazon. Many online sellers use eBay to sell a variety of goods. Much like our other Don’t want to use our AutoConnect templates? No worries. We’ve got a ton
com. MailChimp’s Amazon AutoConnect template makes it easy for writers AutoConnect templates above, you can plug in your eBay screen name— of templates, so you can come up with something that looks exactly the
to build and sell to their fan base. which automatically populates the template—and customize from there. way you want.
Create a campaign as your normally would, clicking the AutoConnect Create a campaign as you normally would, clicking the AutoConnect cat- If you’re up for doing all the designing and customizing yourself, check
category and choosing the Amazon template. After entering your name and egory and choosing the eBay template. After entering your screen name, out our start-from-scratch templates.
selecting the appropriate book, the template pulls information to match the template pulls information to match your profile, making it easier and
your profile. faster to send campaigns to your followers.
You can also send a test to yourself if you want to see what the email’s
going to look like in the inbox.
Select a layout, then use our Template Designer to design the Header
Image and colors of your template. After you choose one of the start from
scratch templates, click Design header.
iTunes Template
When people discover great music, they like to share it. If you’re a musi-
cian, MailChimp’s iTunes template makes it easy to share your work in
such a way that your subscribers can pass it along to their friends. You can
use the template to announce a new record or song, or even just to remind
people about your music.
Create a campaign as you normally would, clicking the AutoConnect
category and choosing the iTunes template. After entering your name, we’ll
find your available albums and you can select the one you’d like to include
in your campaign. From there, you can customize the message with a mes- Then select from the options in our header gallery.
sage to your fans or a review or testimonial from iTunes.
There you have it. If you want to send a professional email newsletter to
update your Etsy fans when you have new items, but you don’t have lots
of time to customize it, then give our Etsy template a try. We think you’ll
love it.
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7. Pre-designed Templates Integrations
Don’t miss our Pre-designed templates in the template gallery. They’re MailChimp integrates with hundreds of popular web services, making it
customizable, but they give you a head start in the design area. You can convenient for you to sync data, import content, and analyze how your
narrow them by category, so it’s easy to find a good fit. newsletters are affecting your business. There are a number of inte-
grations that are helpful for online sellers. Here are a few of the most
popular.
PayPal
While accepting payments via PayPal, you can automatically add custom-
ers to your MailChimp list instantly. This is especially useful if you sell
products on Etsy, eBay, or your own store.
Chimpified
If you sell your products in a Shopify store, Chimpified makes it easy to
connect that store to your MailChimp account. Once your customers are
Here’s an example of a pre-designed but still customizable template from
migrated, you can take advantage of our Ecommerce 360 tracking data
our gallery:
and quickly put together newsletters to promote your products.
Magento/Magento Go
Magento is a flexible, feature-rich eCommerce platform. If you use Ma-
gento or MagentoGo for your online seller needs, these integrations make
it simple to sync customers and add signup pages.
Short Stack/Media Feedia
These integrations connect your online business with Facebook. Add cus-
tom tabs, distribute special deals to and collect opt-in emails, all from the
comfort of your Facebook page.
You sell wonderful things in your online store, so your fans expect wonder-
ful email newsletters too. Whether you want a template that’s completely
automated, one that’s already designed and only requires your content, or
one that’s totally customizable, we’ve got you covered.
And if you’re a designer and want to code your own HTML emails, check
out our simple and powerful template language.
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8. Get Social
Enable Facebook Comments And when they click that button, they’ll go to your campaign archive page
with the Facebook comments window open.
All MailChimp campaigns have a Facebook Comments functionality. If
you’re sending out engaging newsletters, your subscribers are probably
going have thoughts or responses after reading them. Maybe they have
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter provide excellent oppor-
Add a Facebook Like Button to Your comments on some of the new products you announced in your newsletter.
tunities to promote your online store and connect with your audience on But sometimes, people just don’t care enough to reply to your email—
a more personal level. Facebook and Twitter allow you to create conversa- Campaigns Facebook Comments are familiar to your subscribers, and they allow you
tions with your customers so they can get to know you better. to keep the conversation going with your fans even after you’ve hit Send.
Our Facebook Like merge tag allows your readers to like your campaign
MailChimp is integrated with Facebook and Twitter, making it super easy and share it with all their Facebook friends. Place this merge tag any-
Activate Facebook Comments for a campaign in your campaign setup
for you to meet your fans where they are. where in your campaign, just like regular text:
screen. All you have to do is check Allow comments.
*|FACEBOOK:LIKE|* There’s a checkbox option for them to post the comment to their Facebook
Auto-post to Facebook and Twitter profile and share your newsletter with their friends. They can also see
And it’ll turn into a handy little image that says “Like.” comments from other subscribers within this window, and if they want,
If you’ve already connected the Facebook integration by adding your sign-
comment to each other—just like you’d see on a blog post or news article.
up form to your business page, you can to choose to have your campaign
auto-post to Facebook during the campaign-creation process. You can also
connect the Twitter integration at this point, to have us auto-tweet your
campaigns every time one goes out.
Set it up by selecting Send to Twitter and/or checking the Auto-post to Then simply insert our *|FACEBOOK:COMMENTS|* merge tag anywhere in
Facebook box. your campaign, like this:
When a subscriber clicks the Like button, they’ll go to your campaign
archive page. A window will pop up, showing the friends in their network
that also liked the campaign. They’ll confirm that they do indeed like your
newsletter, and we’ll give them the option to add a comment to the like.
You’ll receive email notifications from MailChimp as people comment on
When your subscribers receive your newsletter, they’ll see a neat little your newsletter, so you can keep track of the conversation and join in.
comment button.
Social Share Button
If you want to tweet your campaign after it’s been sent or promote it on a
social network other than Twitter, use the Social Share button that appears
beside your sent campaign in the Campaigns dashboard.
Then they’ll click Post to Facebook, and the like will appear in your
subscriber’s Facebook feed for all their friends to marvel at.
We’ll create a shortened version of your campaign archive link called an
EepUrl. Plus we’ll measure retweets, shares and clicks on these posts.
Auto-posting to Facebook and Twitter is one of the easiest ways to share
your newsletter content and new Etsy store items with all your fans and
followers.
When you click Social Share, you’ll have the option to share your cam-
paign on Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious.
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9. Tracking and Reporting
Sharing With Merge Tags SocialConnect merge tags
In addition to sharing your own campaign, MailChimp allows you to offer Chances are, some of your newsletter subscribers have Twitter and
your readers a way to share your campaigns. We’ve got lots of options for Facebook accounts but aren’t following you there. You can place this
sharing on social sites with merge tags—all you have to do is place the merge tag anywhere in your campaign to give your subscribers links to
relevant merge tag anywhere in your campaign, and the sharing options follow you on Twitter and Facebook:
will appear when the newsletter goes out.
For a lot of email marketers, the best part of sending email newsletters
Social Tracking
is looking at the stats after a campaign goes out—it’s kind of like viewing
*|MC:SOCIALCONNECT|* your sold orders and feedback on Amazon or eBay. How many people
When you place the *|MC:SHARE|* merge tag in your template, MailChimp MailChimp’s Social Stats allow you to watch your campaigns make their
opened your newsletter? How many clicked? What did they click? What
will add links to more than 20 social networks. If you want to limit the net- It’ll look like this: way around Facebook and Twitter. To find out how many people like your
didn’t they click? Did they like the content?
works in the social share merge tag, you can use *|SHARE:SITE_NAME1, campaigns, click Reports in your MailChimp dashboard. Select a cam-
SITE_NAME2|* to specify which sites are included. For example, *|SHARE paign and click Social Stats.
Once you’ve sent a campaign, sit back, relax, and wait for your stats to
:Facebook,Twitter,Digg|*.
come in. MailChimp offers insightful tracking and reporting. Review this
Facebook stats
information for every campaign you send—it’s full of clues and feedback
We’ve covered Facebook like, comments and the Social Share Merge Tags Use this merge tag to link to Twitter only: that will help make your newsletters better and better. Just like when you
already. Here’s a directory of all our social merge tags. The like stats are located under Facebook Activity and organized by sub-
receive feedback at your online store, you make adjustments or keep doing
*|SOCIALCONNECT:TWITTER|* scriber. You can see how many times each subscriber liked your campaign,
what you’re doing accordingly.
Twitter merge tags and how many other likes they generated. For example, if Ben liked your
And this one for Facebook only: campaign once, and five of his friends saw your campaign in his feed and
If you want to include some Twitter content in your email but the Standard Reports liked it too, then you’ll see one Like for Ben, and five Friends Who Liked
Twitter-themed template is a little much for you, try mixing and *|SOCIALCONNECT:FACEBOOK|* by his name.
matching these options: MailChimp’s standard reports use neat, easy-to-read graphs, tables and
And remember, merge tags might look confusing, but they’re so simple. maps to show you things like opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. To We also keep track of all comments on your campaigns via our Facebook
*|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE|* You place the tag in your campaign when you’re adding content, and we access your reports, go to the Reports tab from your MailChimp dashboard Comments integration.
take care of the rest. and click View report next to the desired campaign.
This merge tag brings in the background from your Twitter page, your
avatar, your follower count, a follow button and recent tweets.
*|TWITTER:PROFILE|*
This one brings in your background, avatar, follower count and a follow
button. It won’t pull in recent tweets. Twitter stats
*|TWITTER:TWEETS(NUM)|* MailChimp lets you watch your campaigns travel around the Twittersphere.
Twitter stats are located in the same place as Facebook stats.
Remove (NUM) from this tag and replace it with the number of tweets
you want to see on your campaign. So if you want five recent tweets,
use *|TWITTER:TWEETS5|*. You can combine this with
*|TWITTER:PROFILE|* to really customize what you’re sharing.
Facebook merge tags
We even offer maps that allow you to see where in the world the people
Try out these Facebook merge tags for a customized Facebook campaign: opening your emails are located.
*|FACEBOOK:FULLPROFILE|* Under Twitter Activity, you’ll see how many times your campaign has been
tweeted and retweeted, who did the tweeting, and a timeline of all tweets.
This tag pulls your Facebook profile and wall posts, just as our
Facebook template would. Only tweets that include our EepURL link for your campaign are included
in this report, so you might have even more tweeting going on than you
*|FACEBOOK:PROFILE|* think if people are writing their own tweets and linking to your campaign.
This one pulls your Facebook profile without wall posts. --
*|FACEBOOK:POSTS(NUM)|* If you’ve read this guide and still have questions, visit our resources, sup-
port and online training pages for further information.
And this one includes your Facebook posts. Just replace the NUM with
the number of posts you’d like to include.
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