How to setup and get started on Mailchimp with Chimp Answers

Hello, everybody. I hope you're doing well. Let me just make sure that everything is sounding all correctly, which it looks like it is doing. So welcome, welcome, welcome. As you are coming into the room, if you could just do me a massive favor. As always, just say hi in the chat box. I know that you're there and that you can hear me. Turn those lovely cameras on and just mute those microphones if you can, sort of. So tonight we are going to be talking all about mailchimp. We have got. Hi, Ralph, how are we doing? We've got the fantastic Robin, who is joining us. I can see him down there in the chat, which is lovely and fantastic. What I would love everybody to do, just like I said, just as you're coming in, just turn those cameras on. If you could do that would be lovely. And also as well, if you could just mute those microphones if they are on. Let us know how you are getting on. Um, I've obviously posted a little message up in the.

In.

In our WhatsApp chat just to see how everybody's getting on with the videos. What I do want to stress is that it's okay if at this point you haven't watched all of the videos. We've got plenty of time to get them done. The reason why we've got Robin in this evening is because it's. This will just go along nicely with everything that you're tuning in. So let me just make sure that I can make Robin co host and we will get him in and we will get started. So just as you're coming in, like I say, I can see Helen in there, which is lovely. Hi, Helen, Susan, Paul Plaxi. Hello, everybody. Great to have you in here, Robin. I've unmuted you, so I'm gonna bring you up on camera. So thank you very much for. For doing this, Robin. I really do appreciate you coming back and chatting to everybody. So there'll be a lot of new faces this time when. When you were in here last time. So if you could just do me a massive favor, just make sure that your microphone is unmuted, I should be clear.

Can you hear me?

You're good.

Good to go. Fantastic. And also as well, just confirm, did you get the questions that I sent?

Okay, I got some of them. I'm trying to dig out. I got some that you sent over on WhatsApp. Yeah, I think you sent some other stuff and I'm just trying to find those where you sent them to me or how you sent me to.

Well, it's okay. Because what I can do there has been one or two of a little questions asked as well. So I'll be able to read them out to you. But what we'll do is we'll start with the ones that you have. I think we've got a nice little tidy number. I think it was about six or seven questions in the group that we can dig into with Melcham. And I guarantee, I guarantee it that what will happen is as we go through this tonight and you know, we'll try and keep it around about the 30, 45 minute mark, if any two questions come up we'll ask. But also as well at some point, if you have any additional resources or anywhere you want people to go, please do mention that at the end because we. The reason why I, I reached out to Robin is that we had a couple of the Boostly Academy members actually do one of Robin's mailchimp training. I think it was around about September time. Yeah, it was 2020. And they came back and just raved about it and you know, and since speaking to Robin and we've had him in the group a couple of times now, it's, it's always been fantastic to get up to date information on mailchimp and as I said last week and we said in the introduction video to all of this, email marketing is always has been, is right now and will always be the most cost effective form of marketing that there is. I personally don't see any other better way than getting a message out in a very short space of time to very select group of people whether it's an offer or information on news. And what Robin is showing you in the videos is he's showing you how to, if done correctly, pretty much automate this process. So as you have got a 24,7 sales person working behind the scenes which again is one of the beautiful parts of email marketing. So Robin, how would you best like to tackle this evening and these evening questions? Have you got some that you've got.

In front of you would like to.

Start with and then we'll just sort of go from there.

I've got a couple but I think it's probably best if you kind of like if you run the show and I'll do it and, and I have taken advice on board. I will try and be slightly more succinct today.

No, that is absolutely fine. Please, please, please.

Yeah, but just building on what you've actually said, one of the things that's clear and I'm seeing it a lot, you know I'm busier than I've ever been. The last couple months have gone crazy because obviously everything's going live. But one of the things that's coming through from quite a few people is that there are changes in the world from a privacy point of view. Facebook, the new iOS updates and other bits and pieces like that. And all this is doing, is it making it even more important that your email database, people who have opted in and are interested and confirmed they want to hear from you, is leveraging that as much as you possibly can. It's becoming even more important now than ever was before. So this is always a. And I will always happily come back into this group. The questions are always good. They get me thinking. So, yeah, so this is certainly timely to. If you've got emails and you've stopped or you're starting again, then hopefully you'll be able to give you some good advice and tips.

Well, where everybody's at, everybody has got a mailchimp account because we focused on it as part of the Facebook giveaway training that we did a couple of weeks ago. So we've got to that level and you may recognize some familiar faces from September or December when we last did it. And we're doing a bit of a recap and we've got a lot of new people that are coming in. So we've got people at different levels of mailchimpness. We've got people that maybe have the email templates loaded in.

Yep.

Maybe you've got people that have literally just going through one video. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So it's a real nice mix. But what I want to stress to everybody is that even if you haven't finished all the videos just yet, please watch because a lot of these will. Will help answer any questions you may have. But when you come to the actual videos, it'll explain a lot as well.

Yeah.

Which is cool. Okay, so what I thought that we would do is we would start with a question about domains and authentication. I think that's one of the ones I sent over.

Yeah, it was. Yeah.

So I'll read the question out and then I'll just let you tackle it.

So.

It's from Paul. Hi, Paul, I know that you're here. So two partner. So domains and their orphan communication. Easy for me to say. My settings dropdown does not have a domains option. How might we do this? Where can I get the code? And my sort of follow up on. Is this one of the new changes that mailchimp have made? Because they do like to make a lot of changes.

Yeah. So the reason you can't see domains is they've moved it from the account settings, which when they did it, they didn't actually tell it anyone, including us mailchimp partners who kind of like working with them. So you can now find domains under the websites section. So if you basically go to your mailchimp account on the left hand side, you've got the yellow bar, you should be able to see websites there. If you click on that, it will show up your website, but it also has domains. Interestingly, mailchimp have also just announced today that they're going to be going into the E Commerce Shop marketplace and into the Appointments Tool marketplace. So literally I've only found out that. They've only found out about that today. So don't ask me anything about it because I haven't even looked at it myself. But in terms of domain authentication, that's where you find it. And if you go there, you should be able to see whether your email and domain has been authenticated. And if it hasn't, then you should get, you need to get it authenticated and there are instructions there. The reason being is, and this is something I've spent a lot looked at a lot over the last kind of like few months in terms of getting your emails into someone's inbox. Okay. One of the key things that you can do is authenticate your sending domain in mailchimp. And what that means is that mailchimp then is an authorized sender of your email. It's basically it means mailchimp's got a little certificate saying it's not just mailchimp sending this email. We do actually have authority to use this email address to send emails out. And what that means is that you can get that email into someone's inbox or it's more likely to go into someone's inbox. Okay. That's something that spammers can't do. They can't get that authentication. So it's kind of like one of those base rules that if you're using mailchimp, go to your website set, don't go to Settings, which is where it probably mentions in the videos that we've done previously because mailchimp have moved it around. Go to websites, look at domains and you will see that your sending domain is either verified or authenticated. Verified means mailchimp can use it, but authenticated is what it needs to be. When you click on the authentication button or authenticate button, it will give you a number of two Pieces of code that you need to put into your back office settings. Now, unfortunately, everyone's email systems are all different. All the other bits and pieces like that makes, kind of like, makes it that I can't say this is what you need to do. But if you're not sure about setting with your setting, messing around with your DNS settings, which is your email host and other bits and pieces, find the geeky IT person on Fiverr or find someone who's a family friend or a teenager who basically wants to earn a little bit of spare cash, get them to do it and basically set that up. And that will mean that your emails are much more likely to hit the inbox. It really is important.

Which is two or the other questions is how do we stop emails going into spam?

As Mark knows, I could probably sit here for the next 20 minutes and talk on this subject. I'm not going to. The key thing you need to remember with email is the fact that you're playing the long game with email. Email is not about necessarily getting smashed results from sending one email and never doing it again. It's about building relationship with people time. And what that means is that in terms of getting to someone's inbox, you've got to earn the right. And the way that you earn the right is you get people to engage and interact with your emails. Okay, so that's from the first email that you send, your welcome email or your introduction email, or your thanks to being a guest email. You want people to open, engage with that because that sends a positive signal and it means that future emails are more likely to get into the inbox. Sending emails is like gambling. There is no guarantee that you'll get into the inbox. And the reason being is that 85% of all email traffic is spam. So you're competing against 85% of the entire emails that are sent every day, which means that you need to be a good emailer. If you are a good emailer, you are increasing your odds of getting into the inbox. If you get people who are opening your emails, if they're engaging with them, clicking them, forwarding, replying to them. One of the tips that we gave last time, which is a great thing that you should do, and I think Mark might even kind of like, is get someone to reply. So the first email you send, if it's an automated welcome email in the PS at the bottom, say, it'd be really great if you could just reply to this email and could be, tell me what you like about the area or whatever. I think there's probably one or two bits and pieces in the templates, Mark, isn't there?

Yeah.

Well, this is a very big hack that copywriters have and you'll notice in the templates, which was written by a copywriter, is they really do utilize the PS and they do ask someone to reply because again, a reply and Robin will vouch for this is a lot of good karma, a lot of good juice for like things like Gmail and Outlook and whatnot. And you'll notice that I do it a lot in my emails as well, is I think the official line is just so I can scratch this off the list or take this off the list.

Can you just reply back to email?

So I know that you've got it and it's, it's, it's, it's part. So I know that you've got it, but part as well, because then as soon as you interact with it, it's telling your email provider that markly.co.uk is a good email domain.

Yeah. It's all about building that positive reputation for, through your relationship with people. And there isn't a magic pill for getting into the inbox. Okay. The fact of the matter is, and just for reference as well, everyone is different. So it used to be that you send an email to Gmail and Gmail would go, right, we've got 500 people who've received an email for you. So we decided the 500 go into spam or 500 go into the inbox. Nowadays every inbox is learning based on that person's the way it interacts with emails. So just because it's going into one person's spam folder or promotional folder does not mean that it's going in someone else's spam or promotional folder. Okay, so don't kind of like take one bad signal, bad experience that everyone's experiencing the same, they're not, and look at building good, positive relationships through the email, through the content you're sending. And also one of the other things that you can do as well is start looking at who's not opening your emails after a time and stop sending them so many emails. Okay, so one of the things that I've been on a number of webinars recently that have talked about this. So you can go into mailchimp and you can go to your audience tab in mailchimp and you can click on something called segments and you can basically ask mailchimp, show me all the people who have not opened an email in the last three or six months. Okay, now you can pull that up. Now mailchimp is telling you that those people are not opening engaging emails. Now I could get into the gray area of open rates, sorry, of how open is tracked and whatever. That's conversation for another time. But the fact of the matter is that if you've got lots of people who are not opening emails, stop sending them so many emails because what they're doing is they're muddying the water for everyone else. Okay, so that's one of the other things you. But the best thing that you can do is, number one, have a welcome automation as per the templates, all the things that they're in the course, as it were. Because what that does is it creates a positive virtuous circle. It means that when people are signing up, they're getting some form of email response and they're more likely to open it because they can link it to where they actually signed up and make sure that your emails are authenticated. And if you do those, along with a little reply hack, those are all things that are going to increase your odds and make it better. More likely you'll get in the inbox.

Fantastic. We've got some really good questions from Helen and Helen's actually on the call with us. So Helen, I'll ask you in a couple of minutes if you could just unmute your microphone and ask them directly because I think there's a bit of more context of the question than what you put in the post. But before we go on to that, I just want to read out Charlotte's question. It's a, it's a nice one. It sort of moves away from what we just talked about. So just moving on. But Charlotte, Charlotte's put. I would like to send out a last minute availability to my mailing list, but not to those that have already booked holidays in the near future. Those with a holiday booked are tagged. But how do you send an email to the rest of that group? And then it puts in brackets, those tagged are much shorter list than those not tagged. Which I think just by the end of it, Charlotte just got fed up a typing and just put random words down in a comment. But it's all right. I can't really understand, but I think we gather what the question is is that we've got a list, we've hyped everybody up. How do you do the next steps?

Right, okay, so what we're talking here about is segmenting your database. And this is very important because obviously you don't really want to be sending the same email to everyone. The more specific you are to people, the more they would like to respond. So in this instance, you don't want to be sending an offer to people who've already booked in. So the way that you do this is when you create your campaign, one of the things that you can do is you can choose who actually gets the email. And when you do that, it gives you the option, do you send it to everyone in this list, this audience, or do you send it to just a group or segment of people? And in this instance, what you do is you basically click group or segment and it will basically say, start saying, well, who do you want to send it to? So in this instance, Charlotte, what you want to do is you want to send it to those people who do not have the tag customer booked, all right? Because then it will go to everyone who has booked. Now, the one caveat I'll throw in is that in this instance, don't try and combine negative tags. So don't say that I don't want it to go to people who are either not booked or, or not from France. Just as an example. All right? Because then what you're doing is you're having two negatives and you're saying either A, it's not A or it's not B. Well, if it's not A, it's B and if it's not B, it's A, so it falls down. So if you're using tags in this instance, you can just, in this, in this one, it's just simply saying, send an email to all of the people who are not tagged as booked. And then they, the people who receive it are all those people. And you can, obviously the whole thing about email marketing is having the right information in your database. So having, booking, having the people who are booked in your database is brilliant because you can now segment that between people who booked and people who aren't booked.

Fantastic. Now and again, once you start doing this, it'll just become more clearer, more easier. So Helen's just unmuted herself, which is great because you've got a couple of questions. So. Hi, Helen, first and foremost.

Hi, guys.

Hi, Helen. You're still stalking me then?

Oh, yes. You haven't got rid of me.

Not yet.

Helen's a long time fan, apparently.

Fantastic. Well, thanks for coming on. So you've got a couple of questions. I don't know, I don't know if any of the ones that you put in the group originally have been answered, but if not, feel free, ask away, because I know it'll help other people as well.

Yeah. What my main question is, I've tried to connect, authenticate my domain and it failed. And it actually brought my website down at the time. Now I was wondering, could that have been because I was already authenticated? I've got two emails and I've had a new one now because you told me to, because you said I shouldn't have a Gmail. So I've got Helen at Villa Andalusia now.

Fantastic.

So I was wondering, could it have something to do if the first one had already been authenticated?

No.

The reason your website went. When it comes down to it, there shouldn't be any reason at all why what your. What you did has affected your website, because it's actually got nothing to do with the website. It's actually a completely separate, standalone, you know, separate. It actually works with email. And the whole thing is, if it doesn't work, all that happens is you don't get that little certificate from on your mailchimp account saying that you're, you know, you're good to go. It shouldn't impact anything else. So why it's affected your website is possibly down to, you know, something in terms of the way that it was done. It was, you know, kind of like potentially done in the wrong way because there's no reason it should impact your website.

It may have just been put in wrong.

Yeah. It may have just been coincidence that at that time of happening, could be.

A number of things. Yeah.

Yeah. I tried to look at the reason that drink gave, and for some reason landing pages came into my mind, but I don't know. So I'll get. Get Dre to try it again for me.

Right. Yeah. One thing that possibly might have happened is that there are two things that you can do when it comes to domains. You can authenticate domain. So I'm just looking at my mailchimp again to make sure that I'm safe. So you've got email domains, which you can verify and authenticate, and then you've got connected domains, which is talking about landing pages and being able to set up landing pages onto a separate domain. If you've done the second one, that will potentially have screwed up your web, could potentially have screwed up your website. Okay. Whereas you want to. It's the email domains section that you want to essentially make sure that you're authenticating with.

Right. So if I. Obviously, I think that's the problem, then because I've connected domain, has that got to Be disconnected then probably, yes, because.

The fact is that that's the reason why it's probably screwed up. So essentially what mailchimp is doing here is obviously you, and this is appropriate for everyone. You own your own your domain. So you've got your own domain that you host that you've got your website, you've got your email that's set up in your system. You want mailchimp to use that domain and have authority either from an email point of view, or even if you want mailchimp to be able to create landing pages for you, you need to set up a connection between them. But the connection for emails is different to those if you're doing landing pages, landing pages is a separate one. I don't want to disappear down the route there because there's probably other more priority questions that we want to cover off. But basically, when you go to the domains, you'll see email domains and you'll hopefully see your email that you're currently using is being verified and it should have a blue background. And then you click the authenticator on the right, hopefully get the coding set up and it will turn to a green background word authenticated.

Okay, Was there a second question?

I think yes, there was, wasn't there?

So I'll read it out if you like, and then you can expand on it if you wish. So I know several in the group besides me would like to know the answer to this question, but could you briefly explain what post send action is?

Right. Okay, when mailchimp, when you set up an automation in mailchimp, all right, there are specific number of steps to set up an alteration. Okay, so let's say, for example, you want to send an email to anyone who is tagged as being booked. So you manually add someone to the system who's recently booked with you and you give them a tag booked. Okay, so for any email, the first thing is there needs to be a trigger. Okay? The trigger is the reason that the email gets sent. Now, for normal emails where you just type in and press send, you are the trigger. But for automated emails, something needs to change in the database for that email to be sent. So in this instance, the trigger is send this email. When a person is added to the database with the tag booked, that anyone that you add to the database who's got the tag booked, they will automatically, that email will just go straight away. You won't need to do anything. All right, but in terms of the way old classic automations, as they're called, because mailchimp's brought in customer journeys about six, nine months ago to add a new way of doing it. But the classic automations, which is what they're called, which you can find if you just go into your Automations tab and click on Create and it will say, do you want to create a classic automation? When you create it, one of the options that you've got is what you want to happen after that email is sent. And that is what a post send action is. Mailchimp gives you the option of basically saying, actually, you know what, when this email is sent, you could add another tag to it, saying followed up, for example. Now, not suggesting that you should do that, but what it does is it allows you to, after someone's been sent an email, an automated email, you can almost give them a tag to say that they've actually completed that sequence. So a good way of doing that would be say if you've got a welcome sequence where you have an email that goes straight away, one that goes another couple of days later, and then one that goes a couple of days later after that, after the third email in that sequence, you could do a post send action that basically says completed welcome sequence, then that means that going down then if you wanted to, so then you could send your normal emails. You may decide that a normal email only goes to those people who've been through the welcome automation. And the way you know those is because you use the post send action to tag all those people who've gone through those first few emails. So it's basically Post send action is a way of updating the database with something, whatever you want after an automated email has been sent.

Alan, I think I've got it, but there's so many other people who want to ask questions. I'll probably send you a message.

Not a problem. You're in my other phone Facebook group anyway, aren't you? So yeah, answer the question there. Me or one of my team will actually go in and point me in the right direction and just kind of like we'll do a couple of screenshots to say how it works.

Amazing. Thank you very much. So we do have another question and thank you, Helen. That was amazing. Ralph, what I'll do is I'll ask you in a couple of minutes to unmute your microphone. So I know you had a question, but we've got Joe as has got one who's up as a 90 day in the Zoom. So it says, once you have populated all the information and links that sit in the footer of the email, how do you ensure that it will always be there going forward.

All of that. Basically there are. When you create your set up your account in mailchimp, mailchimp stores all that information and basically brings that information into the email when you send it. Assuming that you don't change the footer. Okay. Because you can if you want to, from a design point of view, go in and play around with that footer as much as you like.

Okay.

All that mailchimp says is that you must have a mailchimp unsubscribe link in that footer and you must have a physical address in that footer. If you don't have either of those and the physical dress even, they're not really kind of like they say you should have it. But to be quite frank, I've seen loads of people who don't. But you have to have the mailchimp unsubscribing in the footer of your email. Apart from that, you can play around with it as much as you like, but the idea of what you actually do with your footer is it should be you set and forget. You should create a. The way I create most of my campaigns is I go in and I create what I call a core template. The core template has got my logo at the top, has got a kind of like my signature and my sign off block at the bottom, and then it's got a footer and then it's got just a blank block in the middle. Whenever I create a new campaign, what I do is I use that template, which means that the footer, my signature and my logo at the top are always there and set up the way they should do. And all I need to do is drop the actual text in the middle. That's all I need to do. So that's how you can maintain that. If you want to change some of that content, then what you need to do is you need to go into your account settings. So if you click on your little logo of your face or wherever in the bottom left in the screen, if you then click on account and I'm doing this live to make sure that mailchimp haven't moved it around. And if you click on Settings and then contact information, that is where all of the contact information for your account, for your audience, everything is set and you should be able to look through that and if there's something that's changed or you want to update something, you can go into there and do that and then that should be reflected in the standard mailchimp footer.

Perfect. Thank you. Very much so, yeah. It's a set and forget. So once you've done it, once you are, you're good to go. Ralph, I believe we have you, have you unmuted yourself yet?

Hi, Robin.

Hey, Ralph. How you doing, sir?

Oh, hanging in there.

You know.

I sent you a direct email, but maybe we can just do this now. My internal booking form on the campaign to deal with new guests. I got, I got a booking, which is wonderful, but when I filled in the form I got a message that says something went wrong. Fix the errors to subscribe.

Okay.

I don't see any errors.

Right. Okay. This is, this is just for everyone. Basically one of Ralph. Ralph contracted me a few months ago to basically move his system from one system over into mailchimp. So this is a very personal thing for Ralph as opposed to everything. So what I suggest, Ralph is I've actually just pulled up your account in the background. What I'll do is I'll have a quick look and play around with it and then get back to you directly on that. Because that's not really something that's going to help everyone else unfortunately. But I've got the details so obviously I can still, I'm still access, so I'll be able to look at it for you. Right.

A nice little segue as Ralph has done, as many people have done. If at any point you're thinking, yeah, email is the one for me and you want to reach out to Robin. He does work on a one on one basis. And you've got a course as well and a Facebook group.

Yeah, we basically got basically now expanded. I've got a number of people who are working me. I've got another very well qualified mailchimp expert supporting me and a number of other people. We're actually now going through the process of building a structure. But one of the things that we specialize in which we did for RALPH is basically built almost a complete system. So ralph's kind of got about seven or eight different automations which handle pre arrival, post arrival. What happens in you there. All those are the bits and pieces. So it's quite comprehensive system because he's obviously got four different. He's got four locations or whatever. And this I suppose without going too much into the weeds on this because I'm always wary about doing that. The thing I want to emphasize, and it gets question asked a lot is, is mailchimp scalable? I know I'm using mailchimp today, but as my business goes and I want. As my business grows and I Want to do more? Can mailchimp handle it? The fact of the matter is that what we've set up for RALPH is pretty complicated and matches what you can do on a lot of the other systems out there that have got, you know, more bells and whistles, as it were. So don't sit there and go, oh, mailchimp's just the basic stuff and when I get bigger I can move to another system. Mailchimp actually has got quite a lot of stuff going for it that if you know how to use it, it can really, you know, support your business.

I'm really impressed how you're limiting yourself and going down on these rabbit holes. I actually brought in a soundboard just in case. I was going to preview it, but I haven't had to use it yet.

I know I'm improving. I'm trying to be focused and clear my countdown. I love you, Mark. Love you, Mark.

Which is good. Which is good. So, okay, Ralph, thank you very much. So I think.

Thank you.

I'll be able to chat privately on that one, but that's good question actually, which is coming from Louise and Louise is in, is in the zoom chat and it's basically saying that she is a multifaceted venue, pub, restaurant, hotel, BNB and wedding venue. I feel your pain. That's exactly what I used to do. It's all on the same website with one mailchimp signup form. How can I find out whether they are interested in, for example, local people for the restaurant, accommodation for people out of town or weddings, et cetera? Is there any, is there any easy way of doing that? Would you recommend several different signup forms? Tags like, what are we basically saying here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The solution is to have more than one signup form on different pages. Mailchimp does not limit the sign up forms you can have. And if you've got a, a WordPress website, then there are lots of plugins out there that will allow you to create lots of different forms and put them on different pages of the website. And when you think about it, that actually makes an awful lot of sense because if you've got a. And I think this is very similar to a question we had last time we did this, Mark, someone had a pub part of the business and a hotel part of the business or B and B part of the business. And what we're saying is that realistically, if someone's going to the pub page of your website, then the form that should be on the pub page should be. Are you interested in learning more about the pub. Okay, so then put the details. And obviously, because that form is different to the others, you can track people who've come through that, come through that form. The same with the wedding, same with the hotel, all the various bits of race. So the whole idea is that instead of saying to someone on your homepage, do you like A, B or C, it's much better to actually drive them to the specific page and when they're on that page, have a form. Because if they're interested in weddings and you're offering them the chance to put their details in and get a wedding pack from you, that's actually quite a strong incentive for them to actually put their email address in. If they're on your restaurant page and there's a chance for them to signing up to your list and getting. Getting their starter or their dessert free, that's a specific offer that's tailored to the restaurant that they will want to do again with the hotel. If you sign up Today, you'll get 10% off your next booking or you'll get a free gift pack in your room. All those bits and pieces, their specific offers for people who are interested in just that. And because that's on a page, talking about that part of your business, people who fill out that form, you know they're going to be interested. And it's a great way of hooking them in. Because remember, you can't just put a form on your website that says, sign up to my newsletter. That does not work anymore. People do not sign up for newsletters unless they're people like me who are testing systems. All right? No one goes to your website and goes, oh, great, they've got a newsletter. They're going to your website because they want to either learn about your business or they want to potentially buy from you. And what you need to do is when you're putting your form on the website to try and get people, encourage them to give you their email address. You can't just go sign up to my newsletter. You need to give them a hook. You need to give them a reason. And the more specific the reason is to what they're looking for, the more likely that they are going to put their details in. So a free dessert on your restaurant page is going to have much more impact than signing up to my newsletter on your homepage because it's specific. Let's face it, they're looking at the restaurant page. They're interested in the restaurant.

Yeah.

And also as well, this ties in really nicely with the training that we did in the previous phase, which was the customer avatar nailed. The customer avatar. We know exactly who it is, so you should be able to know what wording to put in that would intrigue their interest to get them to give them the email, which is exactly what we want. If we can't get the booking when they're on our website, the least we should be getting is their email address so we can keep in contact. And that's what the. The email template automation that we have as part of Robin's training will go from showing people how to go from a looker to a booker, which is great. So.

There is a question, there is a question directly on the website as well.

Yeah, well, there's a question that's coming from Annie, which is a.

Is a.

Could be a potential complex one, but let's see if we can crack it and then we'll. Then what I want to do is I want to open up to everybody that's on here and if you can literally unmute yourselves and ask any final questions before we let you go for this evening. But Annie's question is in the Zoom chat about open. So do you want to crack that head on?

Yeah. So any question, Annie's questions, basically, how does the mailchimp know when someone's opened an email? All right. And it's the same for any system out there. How does any system know when you send an email that it's actually been opened?

All right.

And what she's actually said. And you can read it. Basically, almost all of those systems out there track email opens based on a pixel being in that email that then when it's pulled up, it's pulled up an image from this, from the. From the sender server, as it were, and then the sender knows that email has been open. All right. The problem is that obviously, if you don't have images, Optim images automatically loaded. So I think in Outlook and one or two other programs, I can. I've actually turned them off on my Mac, on my Mac mail at the moment, you can actually load an email in without that actual image showing. So therefore there is no way of tracking that. And unfortunately, that's just to be one of those things. So the way that I tend to work, way I look at tracking email success, is that open rates is a suggestion, an indication of how well you're doing. It is not a hard and fast statistic that you can use. All right, so what does that mean in practical terms? Well, number one, it means that if you're resending to People who have not opened a previous email, there is a possibility that they might have opened it. So the way that I tend to do that and I think is something on the lines of we're resending this email because we think you've not opened it, but if you have, don't worry about it, as it were. So something there that kind of like buys a little bit of gray area. It also means that if you're looking at open rates over time and going back to what I said previously about not communicating as much to people who've not open rated, well, one of the things that you can do is instead of tracking people for opens, track clicks. Because even though an open can't be reliably tracked, a click can be reliably tracked. So what that means is that you want to make sure that when you're sending emails, there is some form of call to action in that email, something that you want them to do, some web page you want them to visit or something, whatever it could be, because you can't argue with a click because clicks always track. So what I'd suggest there is use clicks as a way of tracking how engaged people are with your content and use opens as an indication of how things are going. But don't sit there and say, oh, I've got 27 opens this week and I've got 28 opens the next week, because the statistics are not that reliable from that point of view. But that's across the board.

Fantastic. Talking about emails, just to let you know, we do have some really good templates that are there ready for you to use and I've just signed off with the copywriter and they are going to be putting together free new emails regarding staycations, which is it, which is cool, which you will get full access to. So do get used to how mailchimp works and the automation works because I'm going to keep supplying to you and plus after these 90 days, I'm going to keep supplying to you at no extra cost, other templates that you can literally copy, paste, personalize and send. So the more that you can get used to using mailchimp now, the better it will be in the short, short, medium and long term because very, very soon you'll have an email from me ready to use, which is going to appeal to the staycation potential market. Which is, which is, which is going to be awesome to be able to test out. So is there anybody who would like to just unmute your microphone and just ask any final questions to Robin? We'll Go for the four more minutes and then we'll call it an evening. And then what I'll do at the end, I'll let Robin obviously tell it, tell you where you can find out more about his services. So if anybody has a question, just. You don't have to put in the zoom chat, Just literally unmute Tori. I think you put your hand up, you can literally unmute Tori and off you go.

Hello.

Oh, can't hear a thing.

Where are we? Where are we? Tari, I can't see you.

I can see it. I can see the mouth moving, but I can't hear any noise.

All right, ask your question in the chat box and I promise you we'll get it answered. There'll be some shenanigans with the computer systems going on there. And he's put. Good answer. Thanks, Robin. Poor Mark. Must think I never open his boostly emails tracking it otherwise. I see when you unsubscribe, though. Annie. I'm joking. All right, so Helen wants to ask one more. Absolutely. Go for it. Sorry, I think my question is a bit too long to type. Just go for it. Just type away because Helen. Helen's gonna ask a question and Robin likes to talk, so don't go for it. Just type that question away. Helen, it's all yours.

Get this abuse everywhere.

I did put it in the Facebook page if I want to be a good girl and have just one audience. Is there a quick way of merging my two audiences?

Yes. When you go to mailchimp, mailchimp does give you the option of merging an audience across. It's some. It's all a question of how much information you've got and how much you pull over. There are lots of things to consider potentially, but fundamentally what I always say is that if you. If and when you do merge an audience, just make sure that the audience that you're merging, you export a copy of it just in case something goes wrong, so that, you know you've always got a fallback of doing it. So, you know, that's one of the things that I always try and recommend. There's a few other bits and pieces in there that. But generally speaking, if your database isn't that complicated, you should be able to go to your audiences tab. In mailchimp, you should be able to click on the drop down button on the right hand side and it will allow you to view audiences. And then when you see all the audiences, click. The audience that you want to almost get rid of, click the drop down on the right hand side. And it will basically say combine audiences and then you can go through that route to actually combine those two audiences together.

I don't know if I will, though.

But that is a really good point about make sure you export it before you do merge. I've had that happen to me before in the past and it's not the best.

So.

Good, good, good little tip there. I can see Tari typing away. So while Tori is typing, Louise asked a question. The answer is yes. Just simple answer is yes. Antonella asks, and this is a real good question and I know we cover it, but it's always good to have this in this question answered. Can I just import a list of my guests directly into mailchimp?

Technically, yes, but what I always say to people is that you've got to remember that email marketing is all about permission and consent, and certainly successful email marketing is about that. So what I would suggest that you do is, yes, you can load that into mailchimp, but I would make sure that you are all those people, you've kind of like, you've got some form of consent, some form of, you know that they're happy for you to do that because what that means is when you send the emails to them, they're expecting it. It's not something that's coming out of the blue technically, from a GDPR point of view, because they are guests, you're allowed to communicate to those people again afterwards. But again, think, you know, I was speaking to someone earlier today. I said, just if you met that, think of email as like you having a personal conversation. All right, so if you met a person who visited and stayed with you six months ago in the street, what would you say to them? Because you need to think about that's what you're going to potentially, that's what you're going to have to put into the email. And if you're going to go on the street and go, oh, it's great. How are you doing? Did you really enjoy a visit? And it was six months since they visited. They'll be looking at you and go, well, that was six months ago. I can't remember what that. You know, there's a lot happened in the last six months. So you need to understand, you know, kind of like when you're communicating to. Yes, you want to group them all together, but you need to understand what you would say to them and how you can build that positive relationship with them.

We've got Tori's question and it is a good question. So basically there's something in the signup form that shouldn't be there, that's appearing on the homepage. How is the best way to remove this? So just a very quick overview way of like getting into the signup form to, to remove it.

Right. Okay. So there are a couple of ways that you can put a sign up form on a website. So you can, you can basically create, get what's called the embedded form in mailchimp, where mailchimp gives you the code and then you paste that into it. That I can see you nodding. So that's what you've done. All right. What you need to do, because that is basically what you're doing, is you're taking code and copying it into your website. Which means that code doesn't, isn't a live link to mailchimp. So when you change the form again in mailchimp, it doesn't update your form because you've copied and pasted it in as it were. You haven't created a link, say, show what's in mailchimp, you've just copied in. So what you unfortunately need to do is you need to go back to mailchimp, go to the signup form section and then click on the embedded form forms. Right. Let's actually tell a lie what you do. This is where it gets complicated. So I'll try and do this in a very clear and simple process for you. I'll do it step by step. Okay. So you basically. And I'm going to do it as we speak. So you go to audiences, you open up the audience that you want to connect people to. You then click on Sign up forms. And when you click on Sign Up Forms, you then need to go to your general forms. Okay. And this is the easiest way of doing it. You go to go to Form Builder and click select. And then that allows you to edit the general form. What you can then do is you can go into that general form, find the, the dates field, hide it. You should be able to kind of like click on the box, as it were, and it'll allow you to decide whether that is visible or hidden. Then you go from there back to signup forms. You go to the embedded form section and you copy the code there. And that code will reflect to the most recent version of your main form. And since we just hidden the field on the main form, it will no longer appear in your embedded form. And then you paste that into your website.

That's a great one.

Sorry, a few steps, but if you, if obviously Mark's recording this, I think so you can basically watch this bit again and just watch it, do it, pause it, then go to the next step, watch it, pause it, do it and just go through. If you do that, it'll probably only take you about 15 minutes to do. But that's the way that you kind of like get rid of that field appearing on the form on your website. The better way of doing it, depending on what your website platform is, is to actually go and get what we recommend is getting a plugin that will actually work on your website. And what that allows you to do is to actually. That has the live link and allows you to change the form on the website. And that gives you more flexibility but not perfect, but it gives you an option and that's kind of like the next level. So when you're ready, use a plugin for your website, depending on what platform it's in to actually do the forms for you.

It's a bit.

Bit slicker than using mailchimp's forms.

Nice. No, I like that. Thank you. So I just want to say thank you so much for doing this. Really good question for the group, but I want to move that over to the WhatsApp chat because it's a. It's a. It's a really good question. So Jody's question was what are you offering on your websites to get people to sign up? So I'll move out to the WhatsApp chat. I will copy and paste that in. It's a real good one to like brainstorm. I just want to say thank you for doing this. Really do appreciate as. As always. So where is the best place to go and find out more about yourself and chimpanzers and. And all the services?

Okay, so two places. Obviously the chimpanzers.com website that covers all the bits and pieces do we're currently doing a bit of a rebuild in there. So the training side's a little bit messy, but messy. But we're working on improving that over the next few months. But the best and simplest place is go and look for chimp answers on the Facebook page. If you go and visit. Actually I'll put it into the chat window. I know a number of you are already there if you visit. Facebook. Let me just double check because I've got a couple one I might have given you the wrong one as it were. So let's just double check that that's the right one. But basically go there or you search for chimp answers in. Let's just check if you search for chimpanzers on Facebook. Basically there is a free sign up there when you sign up to there. Actually, I just realized it's. It's not that code. Oh yes, actually it does go through, so there is a redirect that goes there. So basically just go to Facebook, either search for mailchimp, search for mailchimp answers or visit this link Chimp Tips Facebook. That will take you through to the page, answer the questions, we'll basically accept you and then it is a fantastic place for answering all of your mailchimp questions. And that's both technical and marketing because hopefully, as you see, even though I am a chimp at heart, I am also a marketer. So if there's questions that you've got about how to make best use of your email marketing team, then put them into that group just as you would in the boostly group. And I'll do my best or one of my team will do my best to point in the right direction. It's a fantastic group. We've got about 10,000, 11,011 half thousand people now in is the biggest mailchimp community and it's the best way to keep up to date with everything that's going on. Mailchimp.

Fantastic. Fantastic. And yeah, and you'll be a good place as well if you have any mailchimp questions after this phase because we're going to move on to the next phase as of the 10th of May, if you've got any further melchin questions, best place to go into. So. Which is great. All right, so let's finish this off as we always like to do, with a little cheesy wave. And also as well, I think some of you may now have your Bruce Lee mug, which is. I've seen Scotty drinking from it tonight, which is lovely.

Good to see.

So some people still haven't. This is the one that I have. The Spanish postal system didn't manage to break over here, but we're good. All right, everybody, so on the count of three, let's do a little cheesy wave for me and Robin again, as always, thank you. Really, really appreciate it. All right, give me a little cheesy way. One, two, three. Bye bye, everybody.

All the best.

All the best. All the best. All right, I'll speak to you all very, very soon. Have a great week. And obviously, please do keep in the WhatsApp group chat. Any questions? All right, I'll speak to you all soon.

Welcome to the video. This is a updated tutorial session to show you how to get started on mailchimp. Now the reason why this is updated is that over the past few months, mailchimp has been rehashing everything. A lot of the core principles are still the same, but the wording and how they change, how they basically work has changed a little bit. So I wanted to walk you through that. So if you've set up mailchimp before, it's still a good idea to re watch this video so you can just understand the new jargon that mailchimp is giving you. And it's also a good way to understand the new pricing structure that they have set up. If you have never had a mailchimp campaign before, then all you need to do is go to mailchimp.com so m a I l chimp.com and you will click on sign up free. And then through here, all you literally need to do is just edit in your details. Because I'm already logged in, they weren't going to let me do so. So what I'm basically going to show you is what's happened once you've set up your free account. Now, mailchimp is free. This is why it's my recommended email platform of choice. And I've already explained why mailchimp and why email marketing is so powerful. In this video, I'm going to show you how to get set up as in the basics. There are lots of YouTube videos out there showing you how to do so. But what I have found is that these are the old styles and the old methods. This is the most updated version you'll find, especially for the hospitality world. Now, before we get started, I just wanted to very quickly show you the price instruction. So this is the free level. So basically you get up to 2,000 contacts. You get up to 2,000 contacts in your Mailchimp account, which is a lot. I'd be very surprised if you're watching this now and you've never had an email marketing software before, but you've got more than 2,000 right now. So this is why it's always good to get started on there. You can have one audience, which for people who have had a mailchimp account in the past, audience is list. And I'll walk you through that in a little bit. You get audience dashboard tags and segments and contact profiles. Pretty much all of these is standard and irrelevant for if you want to upgrade. Obviously you get a bit more. You can use basic templates, which is, which is great. And then you've got little bits and bobs down here. So the free version is the one that I recommend that Everybody Get Started is. It's really nice and simple and it basically just restricts it to 10,000 email sends a month. Which, to be honest with what I'm going to show you, if you've never done it before, you are never going to go over it. The first question I always get here is, is how do I get my old email list into here? Plain and simple terms with gdpr. The short and sweet answer is, you can. So what this week and what I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you how to grow your email list and how to get started. Now, bearing in mind what I'm going to show you is the is the core basics. This is the beginner version of this. There are going to be more videos in the Boostly Academy to show you the next levels, but for this I wanted to just show you how to get started. Now, the example I'm going to use is Mondyke Shepherd's Hut, a client of mine. Now, when you first come in to mailchimp, you will see this screen. Okay? Now you will not have created a audience list yet. So where this says nine, this is going to be zero. So the first thing that we need to do is to come into Audience and if you don't see anything here where you can can create an audience, click on Manage. You're going to go to View Audiences and you'll be able to click on Create Audience here. Now, with the free plan, you only get one list. Okay? So in the past, for mailchimp users that are out there, you'll know that you could have quite a few different lists. One for past guests, one's for upcoming guests. One is for people that have entered a competition on your page and whatnot. But with mailchimp and the free version, you only get to have one. Now if you want to have more, you upgrade to the $10 a month, which means you can have free lists. So, for example, again, you could have past guests, potential guests, and upcoming guests as an example. But with the free one, like I said, you only get one. So you click on Create Audience. When you click on Create Audience, you've got to give it a name. So just call it whatever you want. You could just call it VIP list, you can call it whatever you like. Now, for the purposes of this, and we're going to go into settings next and we're going to go into audience name. What we want to do is we don't want to call it a newsletter, we don't want to call it any old Thing we want to make people feel special. So this is why I'm going to encourage everybody for the further training that I'm going to show you to call this your VIP list. So right here have business name and then put VIP list now. Why VIP list Now if you were to call it a newsletter, people would think that it's just a bog standard sales. They're going to get sales emails all the time into the inbox. If you call it email list again people get a bit weird about email list but VIP list makes them feel special. Now what you're going to send is going to be no different to what you would send if you'd called it newsletter or email list. But by calling it a VIP again it makes the user feel special. So I would call audience name, business name, VIP list. Now when you come into it you'll notice a few things. So form settings to keep it simple. Untick, double opt in and untick Enable capture. You're going to tick enable GDPR fields. This section right here is important so make sure that box is ticked and I'll show you what that means in a second. As far as the campaign, defaults are pretty simple. Default name. Put your name if you want to put you and your partner's name put there or if you want to put the family name, put it in there. Basically in here. Make sure that it is easy for the person who's receiving the email to recognize who it is from default from email address. Now mailchimp are changing very quickly on this Hotmail Gmail accounts, they're pretty much frowned upon. What they are going to be looking to encourage is domain usernames. So for example, infoondackshepherdhutz or Trisha can still create an account with a Hotmail and a Gmail. But my advice to you in the upcoming future is to get a proper domain for your website. So if you haven't yet got one, you can go to your hosting company. They are free to add on. If your website designer looks after this, just message them and saying hey can you please set me an email part of my domain? Or if you're yet to get a website, you know you just got to go down the routes and get yourself one. But for the time being, for what I want to show you, just put in the best email address for you Default email subject line. Keep that empty. Send a final welcome email. You can have that box ticked or unticked out, it doesn't really matter. I'll show you what it looks like in the next section. Let users pick plain text or HTML Again, all about public your personal opinion have it ticked. It's just again, nice little thing to keep. Plain text is just real simplistic text. HTML is anything that has got pictures in, for example. So it's up to you. It's always good to let the user choose though. If you want to be notified when you get new email subscribers, put your email address in here. If you don't want to get an email every, every time somebody subscribes, just put it in here instead to the Daily Digest. So they send you one email a day just to say, hey, just let you know you've had five email subscribers today. Once you've done that, you will just hit save audience. All we're going to do is we're going to come down to audience field and merge tags. So you're going to click on there. Now what you will see is you'll see a couple of other fields and forms in here. So you may see telephone number, date of birth, postal address, surname, delete all of them. All that you need is email address and first name. Again, we want to keep this as simplistic as possible for the signup form and that is really all you need. So if you want to get rid of them, you click on the little bin button and it will say just to confirm that you wish to delete it and that will happen. So these are the two that you need, first name and email address. All right, moving swiftly on for the rest of the settings, you can pretty much ignore what all of these means. If you want to go look at them in your own time, you marvel. Welcome to but it's not important. The really important thing that I want for you to do now is click on sign up form. You've got lots of different types, embed, subscriber, pop up form integrations. The simplistic one that I want for you to use is this one, form builder. Now when you first come into this and you scroll down, this will look a little bit different. So what you've got to do is you got to tidy up. So where it says build it, click design it. And in here you can choose the color. So when you first look at it it will be more of a beige color. But instead what you can do is you can just drag it right to the top, get the white and it just makes it look a bit more cleaner. There are different colors and tactics you can use, but my advice for a basic setup, have plain white. From there you can come back into build it and you can create and change the name. So if you click on the edit button in here you can put your VIP list and what you're seeing now is we're going to build up the sign up form. So this will be the lead page or the opt in page page that your potential email list subscriber will see before they put in their details. So it's important that we put like a little bit of effort in here, make it as really understandable for them. Where it says click to edit to add a message, you can just put in some simplistic again information. So subscribe VIP list Please enter your information below. Again you're more than welcome to expand on this but again you want to make it really easy for the guests to subscribe. The more complicated you make this page, the less likely you're going to get the email. Email sign up so if you wanted to expand on what they get in the VIP list, be my guest. If you want to keep it as simplistic as VIP list, then you can. I'm going to go for as easy as possible because that's what I want to show you for this example. Obviously that's where they put the email in. That's where they put the first name. That's where they check what they want to type or receive. So if you don't want to have that, click that. That will change. If you tick that, it will stay again. It's totally up to you what you get. Marketing preferences is the GDPR part of this. And again people are so scared of GDPR now and how to send email. But mailchimp make it really really simple. So please select all the ways you would like to hear from Options Email. Now when you first see this, you may see other options like direct mail which is post or you may see personalized marketing information. Delete those because they're not important for this and just have email and make sure that you tick this button. So what this means is that they're not able to subscribe unless they tick that box to get your emails. Because at the end of the day if they don't want to get marketing emails from you, then why or why do you want them to subscribe to your list? So make sure in options here there'll be a little box here that says require at least one option. Tick that, click Save fields and again we are done. That's as simplistic as all I want for you to do for this step. If you want to go and see what your signup form looks like, then all you need to do is to highlight this, go into another page, paste it into there. There you go. Now, if you want to. If this URL link didn't look very appealing, you could always go into a website such as Bitly, which will just turn that link into a more shortened link, a prettier link. So you put it into there, click Create and it'll do that. So, for example, do this, or you can just keep it as is. And that is all that you need to know for this part of the training. This is as simplistic as it possibly gets. The next video that's in the Boostly academy that you will see will be about what to do. Now you've got a audience and you've got a sign up form created to grow your list.