We live in an electronic time. We have smart phones, text messages, facebook, twitter, and then there is email. Email was first, it caused the first paradigm shift away from snail mail. While it is still an effective communications tool, we tend to live with the assumption that people really do read our messages. Our messages may contain important and potentially time sensitive information for our customer, clients, friends but we busy people and email tends to be last on the list.
So how can you leverage email? One amazing tool that I’ve come to love is MailChimp. MailChimp allows you to collect email address with some really simple to setup and use forms to make signing up super quick and easy – notice the one on the left. MailChimp allows you customize the form to your liking, which is perfect so that you can match it to your site.
The real power of MailChimp comes into play with it’s ability to design beautiful looking emails and it’s metrics. MailChimp offers a ton of HTML email templates for your email marketing campaigns. They’ve been tested to render properly in all the major email programs, like Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, Gmail, and more. Looking beautiful is one thing, and as a designer I couldn’t agree more, but knowing how many people opened you email, what they clicked on inside your email, and benchmarks to help you compare how your doing in “apples to apples” comparison with others in your industry.
There are a ton of more advanced features too like A/B testing, email list segmentation, and even sending surveys in HTML emails. It can even connect our email campaigns to your social media presence (Facebook and Twitter for example. ) MailChimp allows you to use as much or as little as your need or want without making it too difficult.
If your a small business (or any size actually), I really recommend taking a serious look at MailChimp. Before you head on over, sign up for our Specials email list.
