Exclusive Q&A With Robin Adams of MailChimp Answers

Good evening, good afternoon, good morning. Welcome everybody in the Boost Lee Academy. If you are watching this live, please do me a massive favor in the comments, just put hashtag live, let us know where you are tuning in from in the world and give us a little mood check in. Number one for absolutely rubbish, number five for amazing. Let me see how everybody is feeling in here this evening. So for those of you who watch on the replay, thank you so much for checking this out. This video is going to be stored and saved in the vault in this group for many weeks and months to come. So if you don't catch this live, do not worry, it is being recorded. It amazes me now how many people still ask me, is this being recorded? Everything gets recorded. So you are, you are. All right. So let me just have a quick shout out to a few people. Nikki, Julie, live at 5. Amazing. Nikki Shropshire, Paula, checking in at 4, which is nice. Tracy, North Wales, Suzanne in good old Yorkshire. Tanya, A five can remember one if one or five. That's amazing. Okay, welcome everybody. So very, very, very special live training tonight. And like I say, this is going to be good for a while. Now I fully admit to every single one of you then I base what I teach you and train you or provide for you based on your recommendations. And we had a couple of our group members in the Bruce Lee Academy spend the last couple of months doing other challenges with other people, which is amazing. And this one challenge that Julie and another couple of members did, they, they raved about, it was all about mailchimp. And a name kept propping up. You gotta get Robin Adams. You gotta get Robin Adams. You gotta get Robin Adams. And, and so I reached out to the guy and you know, we, we, we set a date which is today and we set a topic which is fantastic. And what we're gonna do tonight is Robin's gonna walk us through a 20 to 30 minute presentation about mailchimp. He's gonna go right to the basics, which is amazing. He's gonna unpack it all and he's going to tie it together nicely and then we're going to finish with Q and A. Now we've got Q and A from people that couldn't make it live. We'll go through a few of them and of course, if you've got any questions for those that do watch this live, you will also get a chance to ask questions as Robin is going. We can't answer them all because we'll be here until tomorrow. But we will try, I will try and pick out the best. So without further ado, I want to bring on the main man himself. Let me just flip my screen slightly so we can get Robin in as well. Robin, buddy, thank you so much for doing this. Could you just spend a couple of minutes just giving everybody a brief outline about yourself, about what you do, where you are in the world, and. And then, yeah, we'll. We'll crack straight in the floor, as they say is yours.

Which basically means that I. Technology and looking at things. Have we got. Is it muted, Mark? Because I've just seen some messages for.

One minute we didn't have. Sam, keep on going, buddy.

All right, I'll bang on. All right. So basically about 10 years ago, I started working with small businesses, start working for myself and got into helping small businesses from a general point of view. Did some WordPress stuff, web design, got involved in video, did that for a couple of years, and about four or five years ago had basically reached an understanding of mailchimp, where I suddenly realized that it was a good opportunity for me to help other people with Mailchimp, really getting into what people want to use Mailchimp for. So I always jokingly say I'm 51% marketer and 49% geek. And the geek stuff really helps from the mailchimp side of things. So pretty much for the last four years, my business has grown and developed 100% focused on using Mailchimp and helping businesses of all creed color all around the world to get to grips with mailchimp. And in the last 12 months, I've become a mailchimp partner. I'm certified, so I've gone through mailchimp's training program. So I'd like to believe I know what I'm talking about now. And I've got a little badge to prove it, as it were. And you know, the big thing that I did was when I niche down into mailchimp, I launched my Facebook group, which is the mailchimp answers Facebook group, which is now the largest community of Mailchimp users in the world with nearly 10,000 members in there. And that's a great place, completely free. It's not just me, there's a number of other experts in there as well. And we basically share the information and help people get more from mailchimp. And then if they want to go to the next level and actually have me working with them on a one to one basis on their account and obviously how it integrates with their overall marketing approach, then, you know, kind of like they can do that as well. So Pretty much when it comes down to mailchimp, yeah, I'm your man.

Nice. Yeah, we were having a nice chat before we, we came live and yeah, it's fantastic to be able to have the opportunity to have, have you in the group and, and going through Melchin because as, as I was saying, I would say about 90 of the people that are watching this live, 90 of the people that are tuning in on the replay will. Will already know of mailchimp will be using mailchimp in some way, shape or form. We do a thing here which is all about a five, five day giveaway and we. I show hospitality owners how they can use the power of Facebook giveaways to increase your email list. And that day of training we use mailchimp. So everybody has like a, like a sort of general idea but I really wanted to get you in because you niche down fully on mailchimp, which is awesome to be able to do this. So in the comments everybody, and yes, it was my bad, it was my bad with the sound. I had Robin muted but we are good. If your phone isn't working, if your computer isn't working, just refresh the screen, come out, come back in and it will be absolutely fine. But for everybody in the comments section, I just want for you to let Robin know how you would rate your level of mailchimpness. So one for absolutely rubbish. I've looked at it, I never sent an email before. That's one. Five would be. Yeah, I'm sound, I know what I'm doing. I'm used to tags, I'm using the automation, I'm sending campaigns at least once a week. So let's give yourself a little rating. 1 for rubbish, 5 for amazing. Whilst we're doing that, Robby, could you. Because you're going to share your screen.

Yep.

So could you just line that up? Touch wood.

Already I'm sitting here kind of like I've. I actually even logged into my system and tested it earlier today to make sure that it worked with. So, so hopefully if you share your screen, I've got my presentation up here and I should be able to go for it.

So in Skype you should be able to click that share screen button and.

Yeah, I can just find my. Where is it now? I've got to bounce over to Skype.

All right, so while we're doing that, we've got some ones, we've got some frees, we've got. Yeah, we've got quite a few frees, which is nice. Let me know when your screen is up and we will.

Yeah, we've got it now, so we're ready to roll. All right, so if you just want to confirm that I've selected the screen, I do actually have to click the start sharing button as well. That's always a good sign.

There you go. All right, so I'm gonna click on this and I'm gonna get rid of that and. Right, we can now see your screen. So Robin, I'm gonna leave it with you, buddy. Off you go. And great stuff.

Okay, so. Yep. So kind of like as Mark was saying, what I'll do is I've basically got a little presentation which is it's a good multi level presentation for one to a better word. In terms of those people who've never used mailchimp before are at the one level, there'll be some stuff for you to take away and to think about. And even if you're at the 3, 4 or 5 level, there'll be stuff that you can actually go. So some good general stuff to go through here. And then once we've done this, it may raise some questions, but hopefully we'll be able to answer some of the stuff that we've got. So without further ado, we'll bounce in. So like I said, going to focus on something that I call the nine mistakes of mailchimp. So these are the nine things that me having spent a lot of time working with mailchimp, a lot of time with different types of users, these are the things that I've picked up that basically cause mailchimp people, cause people problems when it comes to using mailchimp. Okay, so let's get into it. The nine mistakes of mailchimp. Wait for my computer to slowly work through. There we are. Right, so just to give you a bit of background because I can see a couple of you have said. I see Joe, you've said that you've not actually used it and quite a few of you are at the, how should we say, they're getting the ball rolling with regards to mailchimp. All right. Mailchimp is probably one of the oldest Internet businesses that's out there. It's been around one form or another for nearly 20 years. And it is, as far as anyone can say, it is the biggest email marketing system or EMS in the world. And it's got over 10 million users, which obviously shows that it seems to be doing something right. So why has it got those 10 million users? Well, first of all, because it's good at what it does. Mailchimp sends emails it allows you to create and send them and get them delivered. That's. It's kind of like reason for existence. So it's very clear and good at making sure that that is covered. It's pretty much free for all functionality. So certainly one of the great things about mailchimp is that if you've never done any sort of emailing, it's fantastic to cut your feet, to kind of like get your feet wet and just have a play. Even though they've changed some of the things recently, they've made it so that it, you know, you can still get pretty much what you need to at the free level. And it is robust. It has been around for a long time. The system does work. It, you know, kind of like it's not going to break down. And also it. Because it's been around for a long time, it plays well with lots of those systems. It integrates really nicely. But the one thing you need to remember about mailchimp is that it's not perfect. All right? I'm not sitting here. I've used it, like I said, for 10 years. I'm not going to sit here and say that mailchimp is the best thing ever. It's good for certain things, it's not good for others. So you may find that some of the things that you may want to do because of where you are in your using of email marketing, you want to go to the next level. I'm not going to sit here and say, don't bother, or stick with mailchimp. It's what's right for your business and what right for what you want to do. So focus on that. Focus on what it is. Most of the time, it does the job well. But if you do have problems with mailchimp, it's a lot of the time it's not actually mailchimp's problem, it's yours. And this is kind of like I always say, mailchimp essentially is a computer system. So if you're struggling with mailchimp or mailchimp's not doing what you want well, mailchimp's not just doing it for the purpose of getting on your nerves and really winding you up. That's just mailchimp. And like any other system, once you get to know it, once you get to know the way it works, it will work for you. So if you're shouting the computer say, I think mailchimp's useless, then my usual response is, well, have you actually given it a chance to really get into it? Okay, so nine Mistakes that I've identified from regular conversations that I see when I go into people's accounts and assess them, I couldn't. There's no particular order to these. These are just basically the most common ones. But to be quite frank, I could sit here and do this for three hours and talk about 29 different mistakes. There are lots of things that I see that people could do better, but these are the main ones that if you're playing around, you should do. Right. Just before we go into it, I'll give you a little bit of background about who I am. I know I mentioned to at the start of where I am, there's some of the things I am. If you're based over in America, and I know a few of you are, any excuse I've got to come and visit you, I will take. I'm a massive American sports fan, a big American football fan, and I'm also big into scuba diving as well, to the point where I've been an instructor and a published photographer. And one of the great things about being an underwater photo scuba instructor is when someone turns around to you and says, robin or I can't do this. Can you teach me? Usually my response is, yeah, I can do. Because trust me, trying to teach someone how to use mailchimp is a lot easier than to try to convince someone who doesn't like water to put their head under the water and trust that they'll still be able to breathe. So kind of like it's not difficult. Been using me marketing my entire life, focusing small businesses. Started muting Mailchimp about 10 years ago and really drilled down into Mailchimp kind of like four years ago, developing chimp answers, which now, as far as I'm concerned, is the second biggest resource of mailchimp related information and training and support outside of the mailchimp website itself. So that's kind of like if you've got two minutes and you want to go there, there's lots of really useful information. Also, I launched the Facebook group over four years ago, which is kind of like my main way of keeping in contact with people. And a lot of the questions and things that I come up today with will have come from that mailchimp group and what people actually posted. I'm sure one of the things Mark values a lot is the community, because you get great feedback from the community and it allows you to basically improve. If you do want to join the group, go and Visit Chimp Tips FVGroup or just go into Facebook and search Mailchimp Answers free to access, free to entry. Gray there. So pretty much I've been there, done that, got the T shirt when it comes to mailchimp. And pretty much if you've got a mailchimp question, I've probably got a pretty good answer to what's actually going on. And as I said at the start, I'm a certified mailchimp partner and expert. So let's get into those mistakes. So the first mistake is that you end up, or you build your mailchimp account with more than one audience. All right, this is kind of like my, for better word, my number one key thing that I always bang on about with people because it's so important. Okay, now, we all understand the importance of segmenting in marketing. Hopefully, the more specific you are in communication, the more opportunities you've got to persuade someone to actually take an action. All right, so segmentation is good. No problems there. No questions there at all. But. But obviously, if you're going to segment your database, you need to find a way of doing it in mailchimp. So what is the best way? Well, if you do it by having lots of different audiences, then you're going to have lots of problems. So I say a lot of the time, mo audiences, mo problems, because audiences are not the best way to segment your database. But unfortunately, that's where most people start. Now, I'll be honest. This is less of an issue now if you're on the free account, because it used to be that you could have lots of different audiences on the free account in mailchimp. Now you can only have one. So this problem is less of an issue. But if you've been using mailchimp for a while, you've got legacy account or whatever, you basically want to make sure that you're not causing too many issues from a, you know, kind of like mailchimp account. The audience is essentially is the core building block of mailchimp. So people will subscribe or unsubscribe from a list in your audience. So if you've got two audiences and people are appearing on both audiences and they unsubscribe from one, well, technically, according to gdpr, you need to go and delete them from the other. But you can't do that automatically, so you've got to manually do it. Which is why we try and aim to have just one audience. You obviously send emails to a specific list or audience. That's the way that mailsim structured it. But unless you've got a very good reason, you should only have one audience. All right, so. All right, well, if you've got one audience, what does that mean from a segmentation point of view? Just waiting for my presentation to catch up. Come on. This is the point where I press it three times and then I kind of like realize it'll go through about four different bullet points. It's always the way from a technology point of view.

Nice. It's going great, buddy.

Keep.

Keep it up.

Okay. Right. So most people, like I said, will segment with multiple audiences, which causes problems if you want to send to everyone. And like I said, also from an unsubscribe point of view, there's problems there. The solution is to actually have one single audience or list and then use groups or tags to segment. Now, I'm not going to get into tags and groups and which is the best one and which is the worst one, as it were. Not going to kind of like, that's not the format for this isn't the format for that. But if you're using either tags or groups to segment your audience and be able to identify so you know, the type of businesses you're in, trying to segment between a business traveler or a leisure traveler or a holiday traveler, they'll want different messages. So being able to identify those two people in a database and send a different message to each of them, they're going to be much more interested if that's what you kind of like do. Whereas if you just basically send all in the same email, you're going to struggle in terms of actually getting something across. Basically, tags and groups allow you to segment everyone, and as long as you've got the right information in there, obviously we can make sure that you can actually communicate with the various different people there and segment effectively. Because segmentation, as far as I'm concerned, is the key to success with marketing, because segmentation leads to relevance and relevance leads to results. So you want to basically have one audience and a number of tags or groups to succeed with any sort of email marketing. Especially with mailchimp, that's just the way it's structured. All right, so that's the first one question. Mistake number two, I've christened WantOn chimp abuse. All right, so this is basically where people trying to get mailchimp to do something it's not designed to do. So you basically, you don't want to mess with the chimp. Mailchimp does one thing really, really well. It sends emails. That's what its heritage is. That's what it's always done. So realistically, if that's what you want to do. Great. But don't mess with mailchimp anything that you do which is going to impact mailchimp's ability to send emails. Mailchimp won't like. All right. You've got to make sure that you're on the good side of the chimp, as it were. So, for example, if you've got a load of people that haven't consented to receiving emails and you load them into mailchimp, mailchimp will get very grumpy because you're trying to send a load of emails to people who haven't bought in. Yeah. So you've got to be very careful from that side of things. If you send a lot of spam, and I'm sure no one in this group has ever considered spending spam, but if you do, mailchimp will know, mailchimp will slap you on the wrist and mailchimp will shut down your account. All right? So you've got to make sure that when you're doing it, you're doing it in an ethical way, because mailchimp will find out if you've done something wrong. And when they do find out, they will shut your account down. So don't mess with the chimp. It's very easy for people to kind of like go, oh, I've got this database that someone's provided for me and you know, they are bad, or the people haven't opted in. Don't load emails like that into mailchimp. They will find out. And you basically, you just want to be what I call an ethical email marketer. Don't spend spammy emails because again, mailchimp will know. They'll look at the content. They've, you know, they've got this system called Omnivore, which is a technological system which basically looks at stuff. And because they've got that many users, they understand where things going. So you don't even want, if you go networking to people and you, you want to add them to your database, you don't really want to do that unless you've got some form of approval that says they're happy to be added. Yeah. So basically, hopefully that you get the message here. Don't try and mess with the chimp. Don't try and do things that aren't good for it. Make sure that people have consent. And I know that a number of people, when I was looking at the questions before we started, one or two people were talking about gdpr. And this basically aligns with gdpr, GDPR at its Root is about ethical marketing. It's about making sure that when someone communicates, they're communicating above board. And this is what this is all about. You've got to make sure that when you send an email to someone, they're not going to turn around and say, who the hell are you? I've never given you my email address. Okay? So on to mistake number three. No welcome mat, right? The most important email that you ever send to someone is the first one. All right, so we're talking here about welcome messages, all right? If someone has signed up to your email list, however, whether they've registered on your website, whether they have inquired about something, whether they've given you their details and said, yes, send me them. Kind of like they are telling you at that specific moment that they are into you. So why do you wait for a month or a couple of months to actually go, oh, I better send them email and send them welcome. All right. I always use the analogy. It's like making the girl of your dreams and she gives you a phone number and says, I'm so into you, please, please, please give me a ring. And then you leave it three weeks to give her a call. Now, you know, kind of like there's always the, hey, I'm cool, I'm going to give it a couple of days. But you wouldn't leave it three weeks. You know, you'd probably turn around and go, right, next day, I need to arrange something. I only have a date. And that's what you're doing. If you're not sending a welcome email, you really need to have that in place so that the first time someone's inquire, that's an automated email, you reply to them straight away. It's immediate, and as a consequence, they are already engaged with you. Too many people leave it. They don't have a way of getting people to the database straight away, and as a consequence, they struggle. So I know someone was talking about, can you connect? I was doing some research. I think hostfully is one of the tools that you guys use quite a lot. How can you actually connect hostfully into mailchimp to do this straight away? Well, that's something that you really, if you're using that and people are registering your site, you want to make that connection straight away. Because if someone goes through and registers on your website or unhostfully or whatever they're saying at that specific moment, they're into you. If you don't get back to them with an automated message straight away, then you are Missing out on a huge opportunity to make the most of that relationship and to actually build on it. Okay, so welcome emails are really, really important. Welcome emails need to be immediate and that's reason why they need to be automated. Okay. And yes, Elaine, I'm just seeing that. Is there an automated way to do this? Yes. Mailchimp will automatically do that if you set it that way. They obviously also need to be directly linked when someone joins up. So some of you have probably come across things like lead magnets or things that you can offer to people in in exchange for their email address. So you want to be able to actually make sure that whatever you're offering gets sent straight away. It's not delayed. Remember, I've gone to your website. I filmed the form in. If you don't get back to me straight away, then I'm probably going to forget because I'm going to look at someone else's website and suddenly if they get back straight away, that gives you an opportunity them an opportunity to gazump that customer, as it were. Obviously you want to make sure that you are explaining who you are and what makes you different. Why should they be booking with you as opposed to any other locations that there are around there? And you also want to make it interactive. You want people to click on them. You want people to go and visit your Facebook page or your Twitter feed or whatever. The reason being is that the first email is an indication of basically your future emails. And if you want to make sure your emails don't go into spam or it certainly reduce the chances of going into spam. You want people to actually interact with that first email you because that's giving those email controllers who kind of like decide whether an email goes to spam. If you've opened an email and interacting it, that's a signal that says, hey, guys, this email is something that is worthwhile. And future emails are more likely to get into the inbox. So that's another great reason why you want to make sure that your emails are automated. The bottom line is, is that welcome email is the most important email you will ever send. So if you do nothing else from today, you want to make sure that you are tying up and getting those welcome emails sorted. They do have a big impact. Right? Mistake number four. A clean chimp is a happy chimp. Okay. Your data cleanliness. All right, now, probably you'd never heard that phrase before. Certainly until I got into email marketing, I never really realized what it was before. But the fact is that your data is really Valuable. You might want to make sure that people who are in your email list are opening your emails. But if they're not opening your emails, that's not a good thing. All right, so you actually want to stop hoping that they're going to open and you actually want to start looking at how you can pretty much get rid of those people or try and re engage them. So think about it. If you've got an email list of a thousand and five hundred people on that list are not opening your emails regularly, those 500 people are costing you money if you're on a paid mailchimp account. And also because they're not opening, they are basically sending a signal to the Internet controllers that 50% of the emails that you send are not interesting. And that's a solid signal to say your emails aren't interesting. So you really want to make sure that your database is clean. And a clean happy chimp is what we're looking for. And this was the subject of the five day challenge, which I think a number of you participated in a month or two ago, which is all about cleaning your mailchimp database and getting rid of all those people who don't open emails and actually kind of like giving them a chance to either say, yeah, I'm interested or actually, you know what, I'm not interested anymore. So in mailchimp you can identify people who haven't opened emails and you can then send re engagement emails to these people, giving them a chance to either say, yes, I'm still in, I'm still interested or no, I'm not. I actually did a campaign. One of my clients is a hotel chain, six, there's a six hotels, high end. And they basically did this. They had a load of people in their database who hadn't opened and they offered a, I think it was a 10% off voucher for anyone to re incentivise them to keep engagement, you know, to continue to be on their list. Obviously what that did was it helped people stay on the list and make sure they're opening engaged, but it also helped them drive a bit of traffic through their property as well. So that's great. So those people who don't engage, those people who don't get involved, I call these people zombies. Then realistically, you might want to consider getting them off your list because to be quite frank, they haven't opened any of your emails now. They're probably not going to open in the future. Just get rid of them. They're just sitting there collecting dust. You want to keep Your list nice and clean. It really does have a big impact in terms of where you're going. And I did mention I was going to do a little bit on GDPR. I don't want to get bogged down in GDPR. I've spent when GDPR was launched, I did 22 hour long webinars talking about GDPR and Mailchimp. So I'd like to believe I've kind of like done my GDPR chops, I've got my GDPR badge, as it were, and I can move on. But the fact is, GDPR here, it wasn't a one off thing. It's something you need to be aware of. You need to be clear why someone is on your email list. You need to know where they signed up. And ideally you need to make sure that they've got a chance to view your privacy policy at the point of signing up. And if you don't have a privacy policy on your website, that's something that I would consider is worthwhile adding. They need to be able to opt out easily. Obviously, with mailchimp, that's relatively easy because the fact of the matter is that mailchimp gives you the unsubscribe link. And fundamentally, and this is just good practice, this is just good common marketing sense as far as I'm concerned. You need to be responsible and ethical in your data collection and your email marketing as a whole. If you're a nice, good, positive emailer, you're sending valuable stuff, you know what, that's going to benefit you down the future, right? Mistake number five, what happens next. This is kind of like my, my overall view of marketing. All right? My mantra for marketing. In fact, I've already joked, if I ever write a book, it will be called what Happens Next. Because every email you send should either be an email that develops a customer relationship, so add value to it telling you that, or something that's going to be purely about branding. Okay? But you want to make sure that when you're sending an email, you know why you are sending it and you know what you're expected to result is going to be, you know, what's the point of sending this email? Is it that you want them to book? Is it the fact that you want to offer them, you know, a voucher or a discount? Is it the fact that you're promoting a specific type of event? Is it something, you know, kind of like, is it something going on in your area that you want to talk about and get people to actually come? Okay, so basically, if you're in business, your email is either going to be talking about brand, in which case you're not really trying to measure something, you're just trying to position yourself or, or you're trying to get someone to take an action. And one of the biggest problems I see with mailchimp and emails is that there's too many emails that are soft, too many emails that are brand focused, and not enough for actually promoting a what happens next or a specific action. Every response email you send should have a clear next step and the next step after that and the next step after that. And obviously using things like buttons and links and using videos in video links in your emails are great ways of promoting someone actually taking an action when that email has actually gone through. Okay, so don't worry about it. Right, this is a quick one. Don't press send. All right, now hang on a minute, I'm talking here about email marketing. Surely I've got to press send at some point. All right, if you are on a paid account with mailchimp, you get the option to, whenever you've created an email, either to send it now or to schedule it at some point in the future. Okay? Now when you're creating the email, it's very easy to go written that email. That's great. That's a brilliant email. I'm going to press send right now. Okay. And if you're on a free account, then unfortunately that's the only option you've got. All right. But once you've planned, designed and tested your email, you really want to try and avoid sending it straight away. And the reason being is that the majority of emails out there are not actually time sensitive. And when I say not time sensitive, I mean if you send it at 4 o' clock today or 5 o' clock today, it's not going to have a big impact in terms of open rates and other bits and pieces like that. So what I would advise you do is, is instead of pressing send, just schedule it for 15 minutes in the future and go make yourself a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. Because I guarantee what will happen is that you'll be there stirring your teacup and actually thinking, oh crap, I forgot to put that into the email. And when you say that if your email's already gone, then there's a problem. Whereas if you schedule it for five minutes in the 15 minutes into the future, it gives you that space to go, oh, actually, you know what, I am going to change that. I am going to do something about that. So please don't just send an email straight away. Right. This one is going to be a. How shall we say, a little controversial. All right? There is a mistake that everyone seems to think that their emails need to be pretty. All right? They don't. Emails do not need to be pretty. That doesn't mean to say that you can't add images. And certainly when you're in the business that you're in, having physical, having images and information about the area and using some of that is worthwhile. But I guarantee the more time you're spending on making an email look good, the less time you're spending on the content and you know what content is, what it's about. So you want to make sure that you're concentrating on the content and you're getting people to engage with the content. I always jokingly say, think about the best email that you've received in the last year. Well, actually, no. So that in the last month. All right, Best email I received in the last month was one from my best mate telling me that, you know, kind of like he was going to, we're going to go and play golf for the first time after shutdown. That had got nothing to do with graphics, that had got nothing to do with anything of that the message was what mattered. So you want to make sure that your message that you're putting to your emails is effective and good and the words that you're using are actually driving some form of action and not sitting there worrying about the fact that this border on the left hand side is not aligned perfectly with the border on the right hand side. Yeah, that is where you're spending a lot of time and effort and it is not adding value. Now, again, if you're a visual business, I'm not saying, and you guys generally are a visual business, I'm saying don't try and add images and make them look pretty, but don't go overboard, don't kill yourself trying to make the email look perfect when in actual fact you don't need to. All right? Right, getting to the ends now, the last two. First of all, mistake number eight, forgetting mobile. This is a great thing. When I do these presentations, I can still see Mark and I can still see his screen. I can see what he's doing. So I can see that he's doing. Actually, I'm not going to tell you what he's doing. In fact, one or two of his habits I'm actually quite curious about, but he's just checked, he's just picked up his mobile phone to check which is quite good because I'm talking about. He's grinning away now. The fact of the matter is that most emails are read on a phone. Strangely enough, though, mailchimp doesn't make it easy to look what an email looks like on a phone. You design it in their desktop view. So I know over 50% of emails are opened on a phone for the first time. So simply put, if you're not taking that into account, a lot of people who are opening your emails may look at them and go, that doesn't look very good because you've not tested it and checked to make sure that it looks good in email. All right, you want to make sure that you are using the preview function within mailchimp and are able to actually look at what your email looks like when you send it to a mo. Send it to a mobile phone. All right? Because we don't. It's going to fail. It's not going to work. Okay, so just wait for this. Yeah. Okay, so make sure that you test and preview in mobile, send it to yourself and look at it on your own phone. That's a good way of doing it. Just to check if you run the paid function, you can have a little look at Inbox. Also, what you want to do is make sure that you use mailchimp to tell you how people are opening your campaign. And of course, now that my slides have gone too quickly, I've gone through that bit. But basically what you need to know is that mailchimp will actually show you how your emails are being opened. And I had two specific campaigns for two of my customers. One which was being opened, I think, at 80% on mobile, and another one which was being opened at 20% on mobile. All right, so you need to use the information that mailchimp provides you, and you can go into your account and look at that to see how people are actually engaging with your email. And if they are using mobile, then you want to definitely make sure it's done right. Last one, which is more of a marketing one. And I'm sure it's something that Mark bangs on about regularly. Okay. And that's, who are you sending your email to? Do you really know who your audience is and what they're going to respond to? Because an email fundamentally needs three things. It needs a message, it needs a sender, and it needs a recipient. And bad emails, forget about the recipient. Bad emails do not take account of who you're sending it to. This is where going through exercises like customer avatars are really, really powerful. Because they allow you to get under the skin of who you're speaking to. And it makes sure that the content you're doing in your emails is not about you, it's about the benefits that you're delivering to them. If you don't understand your audience. And like I said, I'm sitting here saying, this is a mistake with mailchimp. It's just a general marketing mistake. People spend too much time focusing on their own business and what they're great at and not translating that into a benefit for your customers. So you need to identify your avatars and make sure that you're speaking them in your marketing. I can see Mark nodding away in the background at this one. If you're not taking that into account, if you don't know your avatar, you're going to struggle. If you do know your avatar, then you're going to be able to tailor the content specifically to those avatars and making sure that the information there, you know what's going on. You know their hopes and fears. You know the fact that they've been in shutdown for lockdown for the last three months and they're just desperate to get away and go somewhere and just suddenly have a holiday, which, you know, they're probably not going to be able to go overseas as much. They know why they're coming to you. They may have family in the area or they may have other reasons. You'll know the problems that they've got and the objections they're going to groove. And you also know the questions they're going to ask before they even come to you. You know, do you take care? You know, can I bring my dog along? Or can I, you know, kind of like, have you got something else there? The fact is that if you know all that stuff, you can focus the content of the email on them and talk in terms that resonate with them. The fact is, we can sit here and we can look at mailchimp and go, oh, mailchimp's great, or mailchimp's useless or whatever. It doesn't do this or whatever. But the fact of the matter, the number one reason your emails don't work is because what's in them? It's got nothing to do with technology. If you understand your audience not just in emails, but in every aspect, your websites, your brochures, in postfully or whatever, everything that you do, your Facebook ads, if you take account of your audience first and foremost and bear them in mind at every point, you will succeed at your marketing. That is fundamental as far as I'm concerned. So hopefully you got the message. I'll get off my site box now and let Mark rattle something at you guys in the future. But I'm really passionate about this. If you don't know who you're speaking to, you're going to struggle, right? So briefly, let's just go through those nine mailchimp mistakes again. You should know only now have one audience or one list. Don't add people to your database that haven't given you permission or that you don't even know is a valid email address. Make sure that you're doing welcome messages because they are so important. Hanging on to people who you just hope and pray are going to open emails in the future, even though they haven't opened an email for the last two weeks years. Making sure that you know what happens next. You want to make sure that you know what that is. You're pressing the send button when actually you should give yourself some space. You're spending too much time making your emails pretty and not enough on the content. You're ignoring mobile, where most people are opening their emails on mobile. And finally, and most fundamentally, you're forgetting the who. If you take that into account, if you do those things and you will actually benefit and have a much more successful email marketing plan. And if you want to get a copy of that presentation, being the email marketer I am, you can go to a nice landing page I've created. So the link there is Chimp Tips ninemistakes. Complete the details there, you'll get a copy of the PDF and you'll also be added to my delightful email marketing newsletter. You'll get some nice welcome emails which will give you a good indication. I'll sit here guys. If you don't have a welcome automation, just sign up. Look at the first three emails that I send to give you an idea of what should be in a welcome automation and unsubscribe. You know, if you're not interested in my content, if you're reading my stuff and you go, oh Robin's talking a load of balls here, that's fine, but use that as an inspiration for what you can do. I kind of like use it as a way of explaining it. Yes, I know that's a cop out because some of you will then sign it to my list and I'll go woohoo, you signed to my list. But fact of the matter is that you can actually really sign up to some other people's list, sign up to your competitors and see what they're putting in their emails and use that as inspiration for yourself. And with that, I will now stop my screen share. Oh, there we go. Stop sharing. There we go. And hopefully I'm now back on screen.

You're back, you're back, you're back, you're back. Thank you very much, everybody. Everybody, please can you just say thank you again in the comments for that. Stick the thumbs up, use the emojis, do everything that you need to do. That was, that was amazing. We went through nine really quality tips there and I think that the number nine was definitely the most important. Who you are sending this to, who you are appealing to. Now the good news is, and I saw Susan put this as well, I don't really know who my avatar is. Finding the avatar. There's training in the vault on that. You can go and find it. It's finding your avatar. We've got a guest training with Paul and we've got guest training with Monique. It's in there. You can go and find it. If you're struggling to find it, put up in the post in the group and I'll direct you to it. Simple and as well, and I didn't tell you this before, Robin, but we also have email templates. It's one of the big things about the Boostly Academy is that I've worked with copywriters to create email templates for email automations. So many different kinds, how to get in front of corporate businesses. The. Do you know anyone? There's so many email templates that is right in the Boostly vault. So again, if nobody has seen these yet, if nobody's used these yet and again we've got an expert here saying do this, then this is the perfect time to go and drop the link in. Go and use it. It's the vault. It's part of the package of what you sign up for. Go and. And, and definitely use it. So yeah, thank you so, so much for that. Now we, we did promise Q and a couple of questions that came up and I was watching this during the live and I've written them down. Number one, I believe this was Nikki, but I didn't write down who sent it. But how can you merge your different audiences into one audience? Do mailchimp make it easy or is this a bit of wizard play to do that?

It's it. They don't make it easy. But it's not hard. It's not kind of like hard either, to be honest. It's one of those things that if you know what you're Doing, you know, kind of like I said, I do this regularly. The key thing you got to remember is that when you're combining audiences, you want to make sure that you've got the same data fields. So, for example, say in one field, you've got telephone number, or, sorry, in one audience, you've got telephone number. In another audience, you haven't got telephone number. You want to make sure that they're kind of, like, matched up. Because if you're trying to move from one field, one audience to another, it makes it, you know, kind of like you want to make sure the data is robust, as it were. If you've got more than one or two audiences, what I would suggest is you actually export them all into and combine them in an Excel spreadsheet. Sometimes mailchimp is a little bit clunky when it comes to doing stuff like that. So I actually recommend. Don't worry about that. Just basically go and chuck them into a mailchimp database. But the one tip that I would say is that whenever you create merge two audiences or a number of audiences, use either a tag or a group to identify the people who are in the old audience, as it were. All right? So you can still identify those. So if you. If you've got an audience of people who, you know, booked on, you know, kind of like booked on host fleet, people who booked via Airbnb or whatever, again, I don't know your market as well as you guys do, so you might turn around and say they can't do that. But if you've got these two audiences, mailchimp, when you combine them, you want to make sure that you're remembering where the information came from when you combine. So if you've got like an Airbnb list, a Hostfully list, and, I don't know, an Expedia list, as it were, when you combine them, make sure that in there, you've got a tag that says, this is where they come from. They're Airbnb or a Hostfully or whatever.

Yeah, yep, yep. And just when Robin's saying hostfully again, hostfully is a. Is. Is a. Is a. Is a guidebook, is a guest book. It's like a pms. So it's not like a booking channel, but, yeah, basically tag them. You utilize the tags. Now, obviously, you're going to go to Robin's Facebook group after this, and Shirley has kindly put the links in the comments. And I assume, and I know that there's going to be lots of topics like this in that group that you know, people can ask and find out more about. And obviously you've got the website as well, where you can go and ask these sort of questions on the website, and there'll be little guides on doing that. Now, a good question that came in is, how can you tell on mailchimp who is opening the email? So this is a reporting question, and this is one of my favorite things about using software like Mailchimp and Sendfox and Mailerlite etc. Is that the reporting tool is fantastic. You just break down a little bit and talk about that.

Yeah, the great thing about the reporting tool at mailchimp is that it does track that information. It does give you. So you can actually go into reports and you can click on a particular email and it will show you how many people have opened and how many people clicked and which ones they've actually. Which. Which actual links they've got in the email. So, you know, one of the things I found really useful with some clients is I send an email out to people on their behalf, and there's three links. They're the same link, but there's a link in kind of like the first line, and then there's link in the middle, and then, then there's little IPS saying, oh, if you've forgotten, click on here. And it's little things that you can use that to learn, because a lot of people clicked on the PS link. Now, that's not to say that they wouldn't have clicked on the other links, but you know what, by putting a PS into the email, they will certainly, you know, kind of like click on it. So if you're not using that information now, the one thing that I would suggest is don't get too bogged down into the weeds. Don't get too much into the detail. Email marketing is a numbers game, all right? It's not about. I'll give you a good example. The first time someone unsubscribes to your list, it's kind of like, they don't like me. What have I done wrong? And then suddenly you realize that unsubscribes are a part of email marketing and you don't worry about them anymore. So don't worry about individual people. Don't go through and go, oh, so and so didn't open this email, and so and so didn't click on this link. Look at the overall open rates. And what you want to do is make sure that when you're looking at your performance over time, you want to try and make sure that you're getting a larger number of opens than you were on previous emails. All right? Open rate is a vanity metric. Open rate doesn't actually give you a lot of information because open rate is a function of how much dead weight, how many zombies you've got in your audience. Whereas if you look at the number of people who are opening an email and the number of people who open the next email, and that second number is bigger, you're moving in the right direction because that shows that your database is growing and the people are actually engaging with what you're doing. If, however, over time the number of people are opening your emails is decreasing, that's a sign that something's not working quite right, okay? And you want to basically move things in the right basis on the right direction. So don't worry too much about open rates, because I guarantee that my open rates and Mark's open rates for his emails are completely different. And the reason they're completely different is because we've got completely different audiences, completely different avatars who are going to engage differently. We've got a gun. So, you know, if you've got a BNB in Harrogate or you've got a chain of Airbnbs in, I don't know, Texas somewhere, you can't compare open rates for your emails. But what you can do is look individually and go, am I getting more people opening my emails?

Yeah, we talk about a lot, the comparison game. The only people you can come against is yourself. Don't, don't worry about what others are doing. Now, I did send you some of the questions pre training. You've obviously had a look through them. Any questions that you can answer and anyone's.

Yeah, right. A couple of things. One, the key thing that seems to be coming up a loss, and it's the same with, you know, whatever industry and I'm focused on is the whole issue of what can I add to mailchimp and what can't I? So the whole area of permission, as it were. All right, Now, I don't want to, again, get too far into the weeds and stuff and actually, you know, kind of like that, but the fact of the matter is that if you can get people's permission to communicate when they've come and stayed with you, if you can get them even just to verbally say that they're actually happy to be added to your email list, then as far as I'm concerned, you're covering yourself. The fact of the matter is that GDPR and people out there, they are focused on the people who have got millions of emails and who are completely nutterly basically flicking the V's as it were, at the whole regulations. They don't care. All right, if you are being ethical and above board with what you're doing, if you are clear when someone gives you their email address what you're going to do with it and if you give them the opportunity to view your privacy policy at any time, then most of the time, and I say most of the time, pretty much all of the time, you're going to be safe. So don't worry too much about setting up about permission in terms of the detail. If you feel on hand, on heart, that you've got these 4, 500 people who've been added to your, that you've got and you're confident and comfortable that you're being ethical in communicating them out into your database, then go for it. All right, so first of all, be above board. A number of the other ones have actually talked about the technology of how to integrate systems. So the only reason I mentioned hostfully is because I saw someone comment about it in the group and I believe even someone's talked about it. Now I don't use hostfully obviously, so I can't comment on it. It's integration with mailchimp. But one would hope that there is a direct connection between hostfully or whatever tool that you use and mailchimp. And if that tool is live and when someone completes a form it automatically goes pushes things to mailchimp then great, we're on double bonus time there from that point of view. So kind of want to make sure that someone mentioned mailchimp pop ups. I always joke when I did, when I do live training sessions like this, I always say hands up if you love pop ups. And no one puts their hand up. And then I go, right, pop ups make you more money. Hands up if you like pop ups. And obviously everyone's hand goes up. Pop ups are really effective if they're done in the right way. All right, now we were talking previously about AppSumo as a particular tool that's quite good for pop ups. There's lots of pop up makers out there. The one thing that I would advise you against using is mailchimp's built in pop up tool because to be I actually did a post in my group earlier today, I said here's what you need to know about the mailchimp pop up tool and they kind of like click the read more and it goes, don't use it. It's not a great tool. It hasn't been looked at for the last three to four years and obviously technology has moved along. So if you're going to use pop ups and I recommend you use them, but use them tactfully and not just kind of like spamming them with lots of different messages, pop ups can really work. But get a good pop up tool. You may have to pay for it, but in a lot of instances paying for it will actually work because you'll get more people onto your database and as a consequence you'll have better kind of like relationships.

Jump in very, very quickly here. Obviously before, before the live we're chatting about pop ups, Sumo AppSumo came up. Sumo.com is there.

Yeah.

Is there any others that you can recommend to people that from your research that you've been doing.

Right, simple question. Simple here. If You've got a WordPress website and you want to embed forms into the WordPress website, and I know it's something that a lot of people do, you need to be either using Yikes Easy Forms, which is a free plugin and we all like free, or you need to be using something like Gravity Forms, which is a paid plugin tool. Both of those are really, really good and they allow you to tag people when they complete a form, which is the good thing. All right. In terms of pop ups, I've used AppSumo. Great. Nothing wrong with it. It just didn't fit me perfectly. And I've recently moved over to to Opt In Monster. Again, it's a paid level of pop up, but it works so well. And this is the key thing, probably number one question that I get asked in my Facebook group is how do I connect up my form on my website to mailchimp to do what I actually want to do? Yeah. And I always advocate that whenever someone completes a form, wherever it is, you want to tag the person so that you know that that's the form they've completed. All right. Now not many ink tools do this automatically and that's the reason why I recommend things like. So OptiMonster does the two plugins that I've mentioned, Easy Forms from Yikes and the Gravity Forms. They do that. There are a number of other tools out there that do do it, but don't be beholden to the tool that comes with the package that you've bought. So if you bought a theme and there's a plugin that does forms, there don't automatically think that's the right one to use because some of them don't work the way that you want to with mailchimp.

Yeah, great answer, great answer. Now, is there any more in that little notepad?

The only other thing that someone's talked about, is it easy to move from Mailer Light to mailchimp? I'll be blunt. I've no idea because I've never used Mailer Light. But the fact of the matter is, and this is something that is probably a good way of wrapping up the Q and A apart from anything else that's come through. It's not about the technology. It's never about the technology. When I do my regular calls with people, when they phone me up and we have a chat about me helping them, I always will use this phrase, do not let the tail wag the dog. Do not let technology dictate your marketing strategy. If the technology is not doing what it needs to do to give you the marketing that you need to put in place, change the technology. There are a million and one tools out there. There are how many different platforms for websites, so many plugins and other bits and pieces like that, like email marketing tools? There are hundreds out there. Mailchimp is the biggest. Doesn't mean to say it's right for you. So when you're looking at using tools, make sure that you've got your strategy and you've got your plan right, and then find the tool that allows you to do it. Don't sit there and moan about a tool that's not allowing you to do something from a marketing point of view, because I guarantee that if you prepare to spend a little bit of money, you can probably find one that does exactly what you need to. And I think, you know, so I'm not sitting here saying, saying mailchimp is the best of the worst. It works for me and it works for most of my clients. But if it doesn't work for you, don't beholden to it. Get your marketing right and make sure the technology supports it.

Here's my question then. Bearing all that in mind. Now, you've obviously used mailchimp for many years. I've used mailchimp for many years. It used to have so many fantastic free functions. Now they've slightly amended it and obviously there's a lot of things now behind the 999 paywall. Bearing all that in mind and bearing in mind that, you know the pros and cons of everything, would you recommend the 999?

I would recommend the 999 when you need to use it, which is a cop out Now, I say that the fact of the matter is that there are a number of things that mailchimp have moved behind the paywall, but fundamentally none of them will impact someone who's never done email remarketing. And probably in a lot of instances, the people that you're working with, all the people on this call, I pretty much guarantee that unless they've got a database of more than 2,000 people, they can do pretty much everything they want to within the free version of mailchimp. I'm working with a number of clients at the moment. I'm working with a reading retailer in Norwich and they're basically one of the top reading retailers. They've got a fantastic CRM system that does all the admin and reminder appointments and other bits and pieces, but they use mailchimp and they're using the free account and I set it up to actually do everything they want to do. Yes, you've got to be a little bit clever and kind of like, know how to do it. But I would suggest that if you've never done it before and you're only looking at database, then 2000, there's no need to pay until you reach the point you need to pay, which should actually be the size of your database. So I would certainly suggest that everything I've talked about today, or nearly everything, as it were, you can still do at the free level.

There's one thing I want to say, and one question I've had, is automations that email automation, is that allowed on the free plan?

Yes, yes, but. There is a but in here. You can do automations on the free plan. All right? You can't do what I call sequenced automations. So, for example, say you wanted to send a chart.