Episode 55 Transcript – Mail Chimp

Hey! You are live with Jessi Johnson and what I want to talk about today is Mailchimp. A wonderful program that is web based which is used for managing your email campaigns, database and stuff like that. Before I do, congratulations to Cece Kim. She was the winner of the $25 gift certificate for Cactus Club which she chose. I’ll be sending that out this week. We will be having more contests later just for those who actually pay attention to the videos, you can enjoy. What I’m going to show you here is Mailchimp. I’m not sure how well you’re going to be able to see this. See the chimp? Pretty cute. www.mailchimp.com. Once you register for an account, they give you 600 credits of free emails. You can do a per email charge or you can do a monthly charge so if you’re sending out to a database of 500 you might only be paying $10 or $15 a month. 50,000 is probably going to cost you $500 a month. I’m not sure, these are just rough numbers. Once you set up your account, on your initial dashboard, it has basic information on your log but when you first come into it, what you want to do is create a list and it will ask you a bunch of questions. These are my current lists I’ve got. As you can see here, Home and Mortgage newsletter, which is a newsletter for my realtors for their database, other referral sources and my Outlook contacts. Now as you can see, I don’t know if you can see on that end, there’s not many that are posted because I haven’t actually uploaded them yet. I’ve got my realtors, my newsletter subscriptions, clients. So once you create these lists it allows you to pick a to and from, sort of like who it came from, which email to reply to, stuff like that and you can put little notes in there. It’s really quite neat but the concept of this is that it sends the emails out one at a time. If you look over here at my other screen, dual screens you can’t go wrong, this is my Home and Mortgage newsletter that I send out from the realtor. We’ve got Amy Rozier and that sexy individual down there is me. This goes out to her clients once a month and I send it through Mailchimp. We’ve got a whole other program that goes with this but it allows me to send them out one by one. You don’t have spam. It’s done on HTML documents. HTML documents are documents which can send pictures, images, whatever you choose but it’s not an attachment. You just open it up because that image and everything about it is hosted on a website server somewhere. It’s a pretty small email with lots of potential plus it’s interactive so I can put website links, stuff like that but back to Mailchimp. Once you create your lists you simply create a spreadsheet and import your lists whether it’s from outlook, your CRM, your contact management software, your cell phone, whatever. However you stick them in there, it’s up to you. Once you do that, then you create a campaign, which lists. I did a weekly test run. I haven’t really done this yet because we have been using a different program prior. Once you set up your campaign, say I send out a weekly newsletter if I were to do that, I pick up my newsletter and drop it in there. Pick which lists I want it to go to and I send it out. There’s so many more options I’m not even touching the tip of the iceberg. Once you’re done, here’s the cool thing. Let’s see if I got any reports here. Here’s an example. If you look at this when it pops up, literally pops up, you get full reports. Who opened your email, bounced, that means the email doesn’t work or doesn’t exist, who never even opened it, click rate meaning did they click on it and what did they do and then it shows where they went after. It looks like someone went to www.jessijohnson.com. I’m not going to lie. I think that was me. That’s really all I have about it. Do explore on your own. Anyone who does any type of marketing. I’m involved in music as well so even if I have a big gig coming up I might want to send out a newsletter to everybody and this is a great way of doing it because it sends them one by one. You know, who’s actually paying attention to what you are saying which is nice because if someone doesn’t open your email for six months, then you can get rid of that contact because they probably don’t really care what you’re up to and you don’t want to bombard them with information and fill up their inbox. I hope I didn’t talk too much on that. You can reach me at www.firsthomeinfo.ca or www.jessijohnson.com. Have a good day! Bye.