The Ultimate Guide To MailChimp and Email Marketing With Chimp Answers

Hi there and welcome to this video series which is going to focus on email marketing, mailchimp and how you can use it to grow the revenue for your hospitality business. My name's Rowan Adams and I've been asked by Mark to put together this video series to give you a real good handle on all the things that you can do with mailchimp. And not just the theory, the actual practice video walkthrough so you can see exactly how you can set up your email account in effectively and use mailchimp to actually grow your business and send automated emails, create landing pages, all the good stuff that you know you're able to do, but may not have actually got around to doing yet. So just to give you a bit of background, I basically have been working with Mailchimp for the last 11 years. My business, which is called Chimp Answers, is focused specifically on helping people do mailchimp the right way, really get into mailchimp and actually get some results from it. I've also been a marketer pretty much my entire life. So that means that we're not just talking about being a geek here and being technical and understanding stuff. Everything that I do is focused on real world situations and helping people grow their businesses. So this isn't going to be a geek out, this isn't going to be a tech fest. This is going to be good advice that you can use to actually translate email marketing into extra revenue for what you're doing. So basically, the video series, this video is just a quick introduction. The next video in the series is going to basically be a beginner's guide to email marketing. So it's going to be a little bit of theory, a little bit about mailchimp, and then a little bit about actually setting up a mailchimp account from scratch. So if you've got a mailchimp account, watch the first bit. Certainly the second bit may not be as relevant for you, but I'd certainly recommend you still watch it because it's going to have some useful tips and hints that you may not have picked up that would be worthwhile. Paying attention to. The video after that is going to focus on automation and segmentation. So what we're going to be talking about there is how we actually can split our database down into our specific marketplaces, the various avatars that we use to communicate, and then how we can actually use automation to send emails automatically without us having to do anything, which obviously is what we all would love to do. So we're going to cover that. The video after that is going to focus on data capture and forms landing pages. So basically things that are outside of mailchimp in a lot of instances that we still need to get the information from those systems into mailchimp so that we can use them for our email marketing. And then the video after that is going to be some just general hints and tips and ideas of how you can use mailchimp for your business. There'll also be a Q and A video. You'll be able to ask questions, which you're going to be doing live within the Boostly Facebook group. But the whole idea is that this is a nice video course over a number of days that you can basically follow through. There'll be actual tutorials within mailchimp. So you'll see me within the mailchimp account playing around, setting things up so you can follow on those. And then obviously you can use the Q and A at the end to ask questions and get the most out of it. So hope you find this really useful. I've enjoyed pulling it all together. This is the type of stuff I love to do. You know, I've been doing this for the last 10 years, really helping people make the most of their mailchimp. So it's great to have the opportunity to people like yourself who are running hospitality venues and it could really leverage email marketing very highly if you know what you're doing. And that's what we're going to cover. We're going to show you how you can actually do all this. So I can sit here rambling, as you can tell probably could do, but realistically, let's get on with the video. So look out for the next video, which will be your beginner's guide to mailchimp and email marketing and an initial walkthrough of how you're setting your account up. See you there. Hi there and welcome to the Boostly and Chimpanzer's Email Marketing guide to getting more business through email marketing for your hospitality business. Might need to work on a better title than that, but it works. So thanks for watching. Now, this is the first video in the series that we're going to be producing and this video is going to focus on some of the key fundamentals that you need to think about when it comes to email marketing. We're not going to go deep into mailchimp here. It's more about you understanding how email marketing works and where mailchimp fits into the grand scheme of things. Of all the email that you're potentially going to send clients, just so that you can understand and see how it all fits together. And then once this veneer is finished, we're then going to go in and do a quick demo in mailchimp of how mailchimp actually works. So if you've never used mailchimp before, never used email marketing before, it's basically like a whistle stop tour around the key things that you need to know when it comes to mailchimp. So hope you enjoy it and I'll see you in the next video once this one's done. Okay, so let's go through some of the kind of like principles of email marketing and things that you need to be aware of when it comes to making basically going into email marketing with the right mindset. Okay. So one of the things I want to point out straight away is that when people fail at email marketing, it's not probably because of the reasons that you think it's not actually got anything to do with their lack of, about the lack of knowledge they've got of a specific tool. So, such as in our case, mailchimp. And it's not really the fact that they actually lack technical ability. Certainly a lot of the tools nowadays are very, very intuitive and it's very easy for people to get to grips with them. So that's not why people fail with mailchimp. The reason they actually fail is because they actually don't have a clear plan of what they're trying to do and they don't understand some of the fundamentals that you need to think about when it comes to email marketing. That's what we're going to talk about. You need to have a plan. As is always the case. If you don't know where you're going and don't know what you're trying to do, you're not going to succeed. You're going to fail. And that's what this is. The same kind of like, same instance when it comes to mailchimp. If you've got a clear objective of what you're trying to do with your email marketing, then suddenly the whole thing falls into place and it's a lot easier for you to actually succeed. Okay. And therefore, this comes down to one thing. With email marketing, very simply, what emails do you want to send? Now, I know that sounds like a really simple thing to say, but it actually is really fundamental to email marketing. And so many people jump onto a tool like mailchimp, start playing around with it without having clear understanding of the emails they want to send. So the first thing that you should do is always Make a list and have a good understanding of the emails that you want to send. All right? And these are basically, that's the first of four fundamental steps that I see, and I use this every single day with every client I work with. The four steps that are going to make your email marketing work. So first of all, know the emails that you want to send. Fundamental, because that's what you're using mailchimp for. Then you need to understand the information that you're going to need to be able to send them. It sounds complicated, possibly, but what we're talking about here is if. If you want to send an email to all your friends, you need to know two things. You need to know the email address, and you need to know that these people are your friends. Okay? That way, if you're sending an email to everybody, you can make sure that it doesn't go to all the other people, it just goes to your friends. So there's two pieces of information in this instance that you need, and I'll give you a couple more examples to illustrate this. Once you know the information you need, you. You then need to understand how the tool like mailchimp works so you can store that information in the right place. Because when it comes down to it, sending emails to specific groups of people under specific circumstances, it could be a welcome email for the first time someone's actually booked at your property. It could be a thank you email. Ultimately, you need to have the information in your system, whether it's the dates that they've booked, whether it's that, well, obviously their email address, because let's face it, you can't send an email without an email address. But you need to have that information stored in the system so that you can send the right information to the right person. Okay. And then finally, you need to actually have a process of getting that information and putting it into mailchimp in the right place. Now, usually this is the bit where people trip up, especially when they're trying to automate it by using forms and websites and stuff. Doesn't mean to say that you can't do that, but that's something that, you know, if you're not careful, you can basically fall apart on. And basically the whole system revolves around that information. So certainly what you may start off with is just actually overcoming that by manually adding the information direct to mailchimp yourself. That certainly works. But then you have the information, you'll have it in the right place, and you'll basically be able to send the emails you want to send. Because you've got that information and it all revolves around that. And these four steps, like I said, are core to any email marketing system. Whether it's a hospitality business, whether it's a venue, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, doesn't matter. These are fundamental to everyone. They apply to everything. All right, so let's give an example. Now, let's say, for example, that you wanted to speak to people who gave you permission to speak to them via email at an event. All right, so we're talking here maybe a kind of like a local exhibition or something along those lines where you're meeting prospective customers and they're going, yeah, I'm interested. You can send me some information through email. All right, so if you look at that, well, first of all, you need to be able to want to send them an email. And the email you want to send is, thanks very much for your interest. Welcome them to your business. So that's the specific email you want to send to them. Okay, well, what information do you need to know? Well, you need to know their email address, and you need to know that that was where you particularly met them. A good example of this is, say, for example, that you're offering up your venue as a location to have people stay for a local. At a local wedding. Okay? So you want to know that they signed up at this wedding event that you were exhibiting at. Then you need to put that information into mailchimp. You need to put their email address into mailchimp, but you need a way of identifying or categorizing or essentially tagging those people that this is the event that you met them at. And then how do you get the information into the system? Well, you can use a standard manual form, or you can just keep track of it. And then when you get back to the office, you can start typing the information manually. Or if you're a bit clever, there are tablet forms that you can use, so you can put them onto an iPad and capture information directly. But ultimately, those are the four steps. You get the information, you put it into mailchimp. Therefore, mailchimp's got the right stuff. And. And you can send the email that you want to send. Let's give another example, okay. Because this is quite fundamental. I just want to make sure that you understand this. All right, so let's say someone arrives on your website and actually is interested in booking, but they're not quite ready to put the money up. Okay. So what they do want to, though, is get onto your mailing list, potentially get some special offers. Maybe you've got a introductory guide that you can send to people about the area that your venue is in so that they can get to know the local area. And obviously that's going to be another incentive for them to potentially come and stay with you, because certainly if they're, you know, if they're a tourist, that gives them some great information that they can go and visit. And another reason why you kind of like you're caring about them by giving them this information. So they want to fill a form out on your website and you want to be able to send them a little PDF or a little guide that will make their potential attendance more likely, shall we say. So it's fairly common, standard thing. All right, so what information do we need? Well, obviously you want to send the email, and the email is a delivery email that's going to send this PDF to them and, okay, this guide that they've got this document. All right, so what information do you need? Well, you need to know their email address. Again, that's almost a given in all of these. But you also need to know that the form that they filled in the way they got your information or the way you got their information was specific about this guide. If you used the previous example, you don't want to necessarily send this guide to the people that you met at the event because you didn't talk about the guide at the event. Whereas if they filled this form out on your website, then you can send this information to them. All right, how do we store it? Well, again, you want to store the email address in mailchimp, and you also need some form of tag or wherever identifying those people who complete the form, which therefore means that you've got to get the information into mailchimp. So a form that automatically tags email addresses when it pushes the data into mailchimp, that'd be the type of thing. Now, don't get bogged down in the technicalities at the moment of how tags and forms and other bits and pieces work. That's a separate video in this one. I just want you to understand that these are the four fundamental steps, all right? You want to send an email to someone because that's what you're using mailchimp for. What information do you need? Where are you going to put it in your tool in mailchimp, and how are you going to get it there? All right, and once you've answered those four questions, you can send that email. That's that, you know, you're technically able to do that, but you've got to ask those four questions. All right? And this is the same for every email that you send. It could be a welcome email that you send to anyone who books. Like I said, it could be a. After they've attended, you know, after they've visited you and stayed with you. It could be someone who visited a year ago and you want to send them an email. Ask yourself, what email do you want to send? But just as importantly, what information do I need to be able to send that email? And that all basically fits everything together. So just remember the emails that you want to send, the data that you need to send those emails, how you're going to store it, specifically in the tool that you're using, in our case, mailchimp. And how are you going to capture that information and push the information into mailchimp in the appropriate way? If you remember this, your email marketing is going to work much more effectively than playing around with it and not really having a clear understanding of what you're trying to do. So some of you may be asking, why are we using mailchimp? And I just want to do a quick, basically guide to mailchimp. If you've never used mailchimp before, just to give you some context for why we're using mailchimp and why we're not using other tools to do this. All right, well, email is a fantastic tool and there are lots of tools out there that will allow you to do email marketing. Now, when we're talking about email marketing here, you need to be very clear what you mean by, or what email marketing actually means. All right, so we're not talking here about the standard emails that you send from Outlook or from Mac Mail or from Gmail or whatever that you're sending to people on a direct one to one basis. That's not email marketing, that's direct communication. And we're not necessarily talking about what I'd say, the transactional emails that you send. So for example, when someone requests an invoice or receipt, those type of emails that are sent from your booking system, those are completely different. And kind of like if you're using any of the OTAs, it's very similar to kind of like when you buy something on Amazon. So whenever I buy something on Amazon, I get an email confirming that my booking has been taped, my order has been taken, I get another email which has got the invoice on, and I may even get an email saying, we've basically got your stuff out for delivery and it's exactly the same. Those are called transactional emails because they're tied to a specific transaction. Right? Email marketing is not necessarily tied to a specific transaction. The clue's in the name, it's marketing. So we're talking here about building relationship, we're talking about conveying marketing information. It's not tied to something, it's a specific, much broader view. And that's where you need a tool like mailchimp to be able to do that, to be able to handle that communication. Now, the fact is that there are an awful lot of tools out there. I'm not going to say that mailchimp is the best, it's as good as any, to be quite frank. But the fact is it's the biggest and it's the most robust that's out there. 33% of small businesses worldwide use Mailchimp. So don't be sitting there thinking, is Mailchimp right for me? Because it's being used by over 10 million people. It's been around since 2001, which, to be quite frank, is an age in the Internet world. And pretty much everything that you want to do on the system is actually available for free. So in most instances you won't even actually have to pay for it. Now, if you want to go for the paid thing, we'll cover it, as it were, we'll just come to that. But if you're under 2,000 people on your database, you get some automations, you get all your campaign management totally free. But if you do decide to pay, and it's not prohibitive in terms of a cost, we're talking 20, 30 pounds potentially for the size of databases that you're going to be working with with. You do get access to their support line, support team online via chat, which is really, really handy. You can remove mailchimp branding. Not really bothered that, to be honest. Having a little mailchimp logo at the bottom isn't a good or a bad thing. Okay. But you can have a larger list of over 2,000 and you do get access to some more tools. So we're talking, as opposed to single step automations, we're talking multi step. So emails that daisy chain after each other, you, you can set those up on a paid account and you can also schedule campaigns for the future. So what that means is if you say, want to do a New Year's party campaign, you can set that up in September, you can write the emails of September and you can schedule it so that it goes out, I don't know, in October or November or whenever you actually want to try and get people to actually kind of like take advantage and book up for that. So that's one of the benefits of putting purchasing mailchimp and actually paying for it. But the fact is you get a huge amount for free. And it is set up to help businesses like you do email marketing. It's technically called an ems, which is an email marketing system. And that's what it does. It's got lots of things like it's got landing pages in there and Facebook ads, and it's trying to expand. It's not 100% brilliant at handling those other things. So it's not a customer relationship management system yet or a CRM. It's not perfect. But the fact of the matter is that it's great at sending emails. That's what it's doing for you. And it will basically handle pretty much all of your email marketing needs, certainly in the next few years. And even to be cranked further than that. I've worked with businesses who've been using Mailchimp for like, 10, 15 years. They've got over 100,000 people in their database, and they're a relatively large business. They're still using mailchimp. So don't think mailchimp can't do what you need. But the key thing you've got to remember is that mailchimp's only as good as you, the user. So you need to make sure that you understand it, because it's pretty much most of the time, never wrong. If something goes wrong, it's usually because you've done something wrong, not because mailchimp has does it. So you need to bear that in mind. Right. So how does it work? Well, guess what? It follows the process that we've just talked about. What type of campaign do you want? Do you want to send an email, a landing page or Facebook ads, for example? It then asks what type of email do you want to send? Is this a broadcast? So one that you want to send today or at some point in the future? Or is this an automation? Is it something that's triggered by someone joining your audience or someone signing up for your website for more information for a particular form? Then it'll ask who the email is going to. Is it going to everybody, or is it just going to go to a specific group of people? And then you go design the email and then you send the email? It all fits together. Okay, so those are the key things that you need to. Mailchimp also makes it very easy to manage your audience. Okay, so it Basically gives you forms and landing pages so you can capture people's information. We'll cover that in a future video. It gives you the ability to update that information that you've got on people, which means that as they book new visits, as they go through the process again, you know, and become loyal customers, as it were, as long as you've got the information in the system, you can update. Well, you can update that information to make sure it's the most relevant and the great thing as well as mailchimp handles all things like unsubscribes automatically. It unsubscribes people from the system straight away so that if they click on an email they don't receive any more from you, then you don't have to do anything. Mailchimp takes care of it. Really clever from that point of view and obviously it allows you to segment people into different categories depending on where they are and everything is stored in your audience. Within mailchimp. It also makes it easy to design emails. Now, I know that's something that Mark is quite keen on when it comes to the emails that the templates that he's given. And I agree completely. The more that time you spend worrying about what your email is going to look like, the less time that you're actually spending on what's in the email. And what's in the email is what actually matters. All right, so yes, mailchimp makes it very easy to design email. It uses what's called a wysiwyg, which stands for what you see is what you get, allows you to create that kind of like a WYSIWYG system. So you can basically type something in and you'll see what the email looks like, which makes it really, really good. It gives you loads of templates to play around with it. But to be quite frank, even you want to upload new ones or repeat ones you've done before. Don't worry too much about what the email looks like. I always say that if you spend half as much time on the design of it compared to the content you're putting in your email is going to be successful. Because let's face it, a great looking email that's got no content, people are going to get bored of that pretty quickly. An email that looks fine but has got lots of really good content, well, that's a completely different matter. People are going to read that. So you need to make sure that you're focusing on what you're putting into the emails. And mailchimp also gives you lots of information on the reporting side, it allows you to understand what really happening in your email. So who's opened it, who's clicked on a link where they clicked on the email, what they viewed the email on? Did they view it on a mobile phone or a tablet or a computer? And this allows you to improve your understanding and make better emails, which obviously is what it's all about. The fact of the matter is that Mailchimp does what it does very well, okay? For 99% of small businesses, businesses like yours, Mailchimp does the job. And to be quite frank, once you've commit to a system, go this is the system going to use. You will make it work for you. I've seen too many people spend too much time and effort considering other systems and then kind of like bouncing around and always thinking the grass is greener. Trust me, I've been in this game for a while. The grass is not greener. The grass actually is exactly the same as it is on this side of the fence as it is on the other. So there's no real benefit for moving. And the only kind of like thing that's going to cause is a lot of hassle and stress as you move from one system to another. So pick one system, focus on something like mailchimp. If you're watching this, then obviously you've hopefully done that and just commit yourself to mailchimp. It's not perfect, but it does what you want. All EMS tools out there have similar functionality, so stop worrying about if you pick the right one, because chances are you did, and focus on making the one that you've picked, mailchimp, work for your business. Okay, so now you understand some information about the principles of email marketing, the three things you need to be aware of, and also a little bit about mailchimp. Let's actually dive into mailchimp and I'm going to give you a quick guided tour of basically how mailchimp looks on a computer. All right? So I'm going to use a complete virgin account. I created this account this morning to play around with. So it basically will allow you to hopefully if you're using mailchimp for the first time, it will look something like this. All right? Now, mailchimp changes its format occasionally, actually changed it a couple of months ago and actually moved these tools that you see on the left hand side, they were all at the top. All right? But basically mailchimp doesn't ever change that much. So even though it may look slightly different to what you're familiar with, it May be in a year or two's time. If you're watching this video, you it's changed slightly, it's not going to have changed that much. And the principles are still the same. So if you understand the principles, that's what matters. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to do a quick guided tour of all of the aspects of things that you can do with mailchimp and just focus on some of the key things that you need to be aware of when it comes to your audience and basically creating emails and campaigns and stuff like that. So this is kind of like your beginner's guide whistle stop tour around mailchimp. Right. So on your main homepage you'll basically see everything that you've got on this screen you'll have this menu down the left hand side and then the bottom you'll basically have your account settings. So if you click the little logo in the bottom left, which just happens to be with me because I've got my image uploaded, it may not have yours if you haven't done. But basically if you load it up and you click on account, account is where all of your account settings are. So this is where you can change the name of the account. You can. So if you go to settings, you go to details, you can change the actual name of the account, you can change the default. So at the moment I've got the American time frame of month, day, year, so I'm just going to change that to day, month, year. I can basically change the time zone so that it's actually. Let's go to SGMT -SGMT for London. There it is, There we go. So I've got that and I can change the currency format if I wanted to, to get rid of the comma and however the format there. So literally this is where you can pretty much set up your account to make sure that it works. And I recommend you do that. Also in here you can play around with the number of users you've got. Now you can only have one user if you're on a free account, but you can have more than one if you're unpaid. It allows you to adjust the contact information if you put it incorrectly right at the start. Also allows you to pause and delete your account. And also it basically allows you to set up the domains that you're going to use. So if I just click on domains, basically this will basically say the emails that you're going to send or mailchimp is going to send on your behalf, they obviously need to come from a domain that you own. So when mailchimp asks you to verify an email domain, the first one that you set up will automatically be verified. But if you want to verify another email domain that you're going to use, you can use this tool. So if you click Verify Email Domain, it'll ask you to put the email in. It will send you an email, and because you own that email and you'll be able to click on a link in that and verify that it's correct. One note, if you are serious about email marketing, want to succeed, then really I would suggest that you look at authenticating your domain. Now, this may be something that's a little bit technical for you to do if you're not used to playing around with things like domain settings and other bits and pieces like that. So it might be that you need to get an IT person to actually do it for. But basically what you'll need to do is you need to add some code into the back office of your basically your hosting account. And what this does, it basically means that the emails that mailchimp sends have got basically a little bit more authority, which means they're more likely to go into the inbox. And since we all want to get our emails into the inbox, I would certainly recommend that this is something to you look at. But if you click on this authenticate button and you start reading this text and you're glazing over because you're not an IT geek or whatever, then I would suggest that you basically copy this page, copy this information and send it to the person who sorted out your email, sorted out your website, sorted out your domain, and see if they can help you actually get this set up. Because by doing this, you've got a better chance of getting your emails into the inbox. Okay, you can obviously play around with billings in this and we're not going to talk about extras integrations. I really just want to focus on the key things that you need to know. Some of these things you might need to know further down the track, but certainly what we're going to be talking about now, there's no need to go into it. Okay, so what I'm going to do is going to click on the big Freddy in the top left, just reference if you didn't know, that is Freddy mailchimp Freddy, as it were. And now we're going to go and look at the various bits and pieces and I'm going to go basically from bottom to top because I'm going to cover off things that basically mailchimp gives you, but we're not going to talk about today. So first of all, we've got the search function, which allows you to search databases for campaigns or for individuals. There are better ways of doing that within the audience function integrations. We're not going to talk about that, but that's basically where you can connect up other tools to mailchimp Content Studio is where all your images are stored. So obviously when you're going to be sending campaigns, potentially your images are going to be stored in there. Website is where mailchimp allows you to build a very basic website. Now, I'm not going to say to you that you should do this. The chances are you've probably got your own website, which you may have built on WordPress or elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's the right thing to do. Mailchimp's websites are very, very basic, shall we say. They're not really built and designed for use by proper businesses. They're more offering people who haven't got a website at the moment a step on the ladder. So they're quite basic and fundamental and probably something you don't need to worry about. So we're not going to cover those today. Now, Automations is something, again, we won't cover in this video, but we'll come to at some point in the future and, and there's something that will definitely help your business and something that will work. But again, talk about this, then we've got campaigns. This is basically your archive of all of the campaigns that you sent. So whether it's an email campaign, whether it's a social media campaign, whether it's a landing page you've created, all of them are stored there. And then finally you've got audience. This is where all your data is stored. And then finally you've got the Create button, which is where you go in and create your campaigns. All right, so just to give you the two things that we're going to focus on in this video are an audience and then to basically create a campaign. So if you click on audience, if you've got a mailchimp free account, you're only allowed one audience. All right, if you have got a paid account, you can have more than one audience, but I would really recommend that you stick to one audience. Now's not the time and the place for me to go through all the reasons why you should have one audience. But if you've got more than one audience, then you're probably creating yourself a little bit more stress, a little bit hassle, and certainly making it a lot harder to manage your data. So really, one audience is what you should be looking to have in terms of the audience itself. If you look at this sheet, if you just click on the number, what that will do will open up what I call the spreadsheet view. This is where your basically data is actually stored. All right? So just wait for it to load in. So you can see when I created my account, it automatically added a one email address that basically I registered with. And as you add other people, they will appear in this particular space as a spreadsheet. Okay, Little things that you want to play around with. I'm not going to again, spend too much time here because the whole purpose of this video is to essentially get rid of all the stuff that you don't need to worry about today. You might need it certainly down the track. But for today, we're going to concentrate on just the core things that you need to play around with. All right? And the key things you need to know when it comes to your audience are basically the structure of the audience. So what we're going to do is we're going to click on settings and we're going to go down to audience fields and merge tags. And this basically is how the audience is set up in mailchimp. All right, so these are all the fields that you're going to use to store information about a person. Now, mailchimp gives you a load of default stuff and you can add new fields. So you can click add a field and you can add text or numbers or radio buttons, drop down menus, birthday, all these various bits and pieces. So you can decide what information you actually want to store in the database. Okay? You can also delete information. All right, so one of the things that I try and make sure that I do as a principle with regards to the data that I have on people is that I don't store too much data. Think of kind of like your database system, like, like a car, all right? And every extra piece of data that you're adding is another piece of luggage that you're putting into the car. If you've got too many pieces of luggage, that car is really going to struggle considering it's also got to have other people in there or whatever. So you don't want to be adding information into mailchimp that you're not using for email marketing. All right? So for my book, I'm never going to use a phone number in email Marketing. Now, don't get me wrong, if you want to use mailchimp as like a database to keep all of the pieces of information you've got about your company customers, I'm not saying don't do that, but I would suggest that if you're using another system to do that, a customer relationship management system, your booking system or whatever, that information can be stored there. You don't need to have that information within mailchimp. Okay, so all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to delete a couple of pieces of information that I don't want to store. I don't want to store their phone number, so I'm just going to delete the button there, click delete, type in the word delete and get rid of it. I'm going to do the same for physical address. I don't need to have their physical address in my email marketing database. Again, like I said, if you're using mailchimp as your customer system, as well as being your email database, you might want to. But for my purpose, I'm just going to delete that. I don't need that in there. Click delete and it's then gone. Okay? So that basically means that now the only pieces of information I've got are email, first name, last name, and birthday. Now, if you want to add additional information in, then you can certainly add it in. But the key thing you need to remember about fields is that the fields are like the vertical columns in a spreadsheet. And fields are used to have information about a specific individual. So maybe they're all the information. First name, last name, birthday, maybe the city that they've come from or even the country they've come from. Are they local or are they overseas? It's information that's specific about them. All right? This is not information that you use to categorize them, as it were. That's held differently. And I'll come to that basically straight away. So just going to save the changes here. So what we've got now is if we go back to the spreadsheet screen. So just click on the number again, you'll see the spreadsheet screen appearance. Come on, come on, mailchimp. And there we go. And you see, now that I've got rid of the other information. Okay, now the other information that you potentially want to think about is categorizing information. So tagging information. I talked about kind of like the way of categorizing people who filled in a certain page on your website. Or people that you met a specific event. Now, mailchimp's got two ways of doing this, okay? Now the way that I prefer is, is to use tags, all right? And you'll see tags over here on the left hand side. But mailchimp also has something called groups. All right? Now again, I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about, talking about the difference between tags and groups, because to be quite frank, they're very similar. But there's kind of like very. There's a couple of reasons why you won't want to use tags or groups. But for the purposes of today, we're not going to talk about groups. We're just going to focus on tags. Because tags allow you to tag people and you can have unlimited tags for these people. So you can tag people. All the people who have filled out a specific form on your website, all the people that you met a specific event, all of the people who came to your Christmas event, you know, came like work, had a Christmas booking, as it were. So you can basically group these people together and use tags to be able to identify them. And that's the difference between tags and fields. Tags are to categorize people and put group them together with others, whereas a field is specific about them. All right, so that's basically how you would structure your mailchimp account, using tags and using fields. Because remember, what is email marketing about? The emails that you want to send, the data that you need to send those emails, how are you going to store that information in mailchimp? So what we're talking about here is the storing of the information. And obviously the final step of all of that was to actually get the information into mailchimp in the first place. Now, there are a number of different ways that you can do this. In a subsequent video, I'm going to focus on things like forms that you can actually use. All right, but here I'm going to talk about the two more basic ways that you can add information to mailchimp, and those are to add individual subscribers and to import contacts. All right, so if you want to add individual subscribers to your database, all you got to do is click Add Contacts, click Add a subscriber, wait for melchim to catch up, and then just put the information directly in. So I'm going to put in data test oneipmancers.com first name Peter, second name Smith. Put their birthday in, their month is 06 and the date is the 27th. And it allows me to actually tag these people. Now, one of the principles I've got is that whenever I add someone to the database, I always like to apply a tag so that I know that I added them directly. All right, so I'm going to click here, I'm going to basically just type in direct addition. So that way I know that this is the way that I've added this information to the system. So basically they're going to be tagged as direct additional. You only want to add people who've given you permission to email them or customers. Those are the only people from a GDPR point of view that you can add to your database. So yes, this person has given a permission. And I always tick the update button because that basically means if this person already on the system, it's just going to update their record. So again, just click the update. Trust me, it's the simplest and easiest thing to do. Click subscribe. They've now been added to your system and it gives you an option to add another person, as it were. But if I go back to the spreadsheet view, wait for it to load up, the spreadsheet view will show that this person has been added. It's got their information, the birthday, and it's got the tag of Direct edition, just something that you also know. Mailchimp also gives you an indication of whether someone's actually are subscribed to your database. If they're unsubscribed, it will show here as unsubscribed, it will show the source information. So what was the first way that they got onto your system? So in here says they're on admin ad contact rating is how engaged people are with your emails. And obviously we've just created this account. So basically people are starting at the flat 2 level. But as they start opening engaging with your emails, they'll go up to three, four and five stars. Those are the people who love your emails. If they've got two stars, they're basically not someone who is reading your emails at all. And then finally you've got diet added and last change, which is a great way of just sorting your database to try and find people who have basically most recently added to your database or most recently been updated. All right, so that gives you the option of understanding what actually gives you the understanding of what's in your database and how you can add people individually. Now what you may also want to do is instead of adding them individually one by one, you may have them in a spreadsheet and actually want to import them that way. So how do you do that, well, basically you use Add Contacts and you click on Import Contacts. Okay. What you do is you then basically can upload a CSV or a tax limited file or literally just copy and paste from a spreadsheet. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to open up a spreadsheet in the background and I'm going to copy and paste the information into here it. So I've just copied from my spreadsheet and I've just pasted in. If you want to see what my spreadsheet looks like, that's what the spreadsheet looks like. Okay, so I've just copied that in. I'm going to click Continue to organize. Obviously I want to tick the subscribed button and I also want to make sure that they're all updated. I want to add a tag. So remember I added in direct addition. Well, this is going to be a direct import, all right, Because I'm importing the information. Okay. Then I can click to continue to match. Now this is where you can decide where the column in the spreadsheet goes in mailchimp. So I had a column called firstname and mailchimp's recognized, it's called firstname and is adding it to the first name field in mailchimp. Last name does exactly the same. Now you'll see Company is orange and the reason being is that I didn't create a field in mailchimp that actually corresponded to company. So it's now saying, well, I've got nowhere to put this data. So what I'm going to do is going to click on the arrow or the little writing button and I'm going to go create a new field so I can create a new field on the fly. I'm going to call it Company. It's a text field and now that get information will get put into that field and obviously finally we've got email address. Click Finalize Import gives me one last check and I can then click Complete import. Go and have a look at the view Contacts and all of the people that I've just added from that spreadsheet are now within the system. All right? And they're all being added to the system as you can see here, all the details there and you'll see that they've all been given the direct import tag so that I know that that's how they were actually added to the system. Alright, so now that we've got the data in, we can start using mailchimp to send emails. How do we do that, well, we go to create, we go to email. We're going to do a regular campaign. So this is just an on demand campaign that you want to send. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to call IT regular. Today's date 070121 Introduction scheme Alright, now the reason I've done this is because you're going to send lots of mails in mailchimp. I always like to have a structure to how I describe them in mailchimp. So it means that I can find it. So this is, if this was an automated campaign, it would have auto from that point I'd have the date that it was set up as it were. So I can always keep track of the dates and then a description of what actually is in the email. And once I've done that, I click begin and it basically then takes me through to the email creation page. All right, now I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through design and stuff, but I want you to focus on the key things here. All right, first of all, who's it going to? Now you can send it to everybody or if you click Edit Recipients and then go over here onto the right hand side and click this drop down menu, you can send it to specific tags or you can send it to a new segment. And basically what that means is you can pretty much choose people who meet certain criteria. Now in this instance I'm just going to add it to the people who I've imported. So I click that, click Save and now you'll see that it's going to 10 people. And if I click on that because it shows it's a hyperlink, it'll open up and it will show all the people who are actually getting that email. Once I've done that, I need to check who it's from. Now usually this will be defaulted in. All right, but what I would suggest is that you, if you are doing this, do it so that it comes from a person at a business. And the reason being is that this is the first email ever sent from you and you just send it from your full name. So Robin, or Robin Adams in my case, people may not know who that is because they haven't got a relationship with your business at the moment. So you want to make sure that you've got your business name in the emails, kind of like from name, but you also want to make it personal because people react to people, people work with people. So you don't want to be sitting there and sending an email out to people who. And they don't know that it's coming from a specific person. So I always want to make sure that it's coming from a person at a business. The email address is the email address that you've obviously got stored in the system. So I'm just going to click save there. Then you can set your subject line and your preview text. Subject line is really important because if you put a good subject line in, people are going to open the email. If you put a bad subject line in, they're not going to open the email. And let's face it, you want them to open the email. So you want to make sure you've got a good subject line. Now, certainly, if you're creating templates and using the templates that Boostly has actually provided, then a lot of those have got subject lines set up and they're great subject lines. So make sure that if you're using those templates, use those subject lines. If not, try and make sure that the subject line is something that's going to. People are going to want to learn more because the objective of the subject line is to get them to open the email. So you want to have some curiosity, you want to kind of like tease them about what's in the email and they'll want to actually open the email. Now, the preview text is the text that appears underneath the subject line. So if you're looking at your mobile phone and looking at emails on the mobile phone, there's two lines of text underneath the subject line. That's what the preview text is. And again, you want something that is going to entice people, it can interest people into what's actually going on in the email. All right, so we can actually have a look at subject lines so close, so you won't believe what we've got to tell you. And in preview text, our latest special offer is something you won't want to miss. So I'll just put those in. Not suggesting you use those. Obviously it's down to the email that you want to send, but you've got that alright. And then finally you've got content. Now, mailchimp has recently bought out the new builder, which as you can see, is in beta. Now, it may be at some point in the future they start doing that all the time, but at the moment I'm not comfortable and confident with it. And also because it's in beta, there's always one or two things that you're not sure are going to work. So I'm Just going to use the classic builder. I'm going to click select, I'm going to wait for mountain to kick in. I can then use a template. Now if you've created a template before, brilliant. If you haven't, then here's a quick way to actually get things rolling. All right, click on this feature, top left template. All the others, a lot of the others are actually got to upgrade to pay level to use, but just click on this one and then what we're going to do is we're going to use this to create a simple template for your business. All right? Now don't use the classic builder. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this template and I'm going to basically take it down to its brass tags. So if you're watching this, if you're kind of like watching this and you haven't got your own template, all I'm going to do is delete all of the various text blocks and image blocks that are in this. I'm going to just add in my own. So I'm going to click on the butt. Rubbish bin. Click on rubbish bin. Click on the rubbish bin. And again I'm just going to delete everything that's part of this particular email. However, I'm not going to play around with the footer. The footer is something that you best kind of like apart from playing around design and obviously for these social media icons, making sure that the social media links are the ones that you're going to actually have. So make sure this actually is, you know, your business accounts on Facebook. So make sure you've got those set up. But apart from playing around the design. So for example, if you want to send change the color. So I'm going to change the color to a particular color code which is my blue there. Alright, so I've got that. I'm not going to play around with anything else here. This is all automatically populated from the information that you supplied mailchimp. So you don't need to worry about it. Okay. But up here all I want is I want to have a simple logo at the top and text. Now I know one of the things that Mark does is he talks about having no images in your email at all. Now bottom line is this is down to personal preference but for me having a little logo at the top is something that I think actually helps people recognize that it's coming from an official business as opposed to, you know, kind of like something they're not going to pay attention to. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click over here on the right hand side, take an image block and drag that over here to the header. All right. And what I'm going to do as well is I'm now going to upload an image. Let's go and see if I can find an image. So I'm going to click on upload and find an image in my database. This is an image that I use for most of my test systems. It's actually my wife's business. So if I go to where am I? Chimpanzers courses, Foundations, resources, copy. Let's see. Let's see if I've got the right one. No, not that one. That's the one. So I'm now basically going to import this image into mailchimp. They're pretty big, as it were, so I just want to reduce the size. So when someone receives this email, all they'll have at the top is a little logo to do that. Okay. Then put a text blocks into the body and then you add your text and your signature. So, hi there. Thanks for being interested or the best, Robin. Now you can get creative here. You can add images, you can add a little image of your headshot next to it. I certainly recommend in your business because you're potentially going to be the ones who are going to be visited in a meeting and greeting the people who come in. Actually having a little headshot of the staff or the team or certainly you is probably something that you can add in here. And the way you can add that in is you can basically put the cursor where you want the image to be and click on this one, which is the image button, and it'll insert it. So that gives you a bit of flexibility if you want to play around with the overall fonts that are being used. If you click on style, you can basically create the font. So if you go down here, scroll down in body, you can choose the font that you're going to use. You can choose the link color if you've got people to click on links or whatever. So basically what I would suggest is that it kind of like it's not right. I could spend a long time showing you how to use this design function, but I'll be honest, you don't need to spend too much time on it. You need to concentrate certainly on the text that you're going to use. And you need to just have a basic template that you can use again and again and again, which has got your color Scheme your fonts. So I would very much recommend is that if you're in this page for the first time, have a play, create a nice template that's going to work for your business, and then literally go up to this template button here at the top. Just close this down. Template. You can save this design as your core template. So I'm going to call this core 2021. And now when I want to use this template again, it's automatically stored and I can upload it. So to use in a particular campaign. Alright, but once you've got your template, you can then add the specific text that you want in the email. Click Continue. It will take you back to the main email page, wait for it to load in. There we go. There's your email already. And now if you want to send it, all you need to do once you've checked it, and what I would suggest is that you click on Preview, have a look at it, you're ready to send. Okay, now there are lots of things that I haven't talked about. One of the things that I've not talked about, which I'm just going to bounce in and show, is the ability to use merge tags in your emails. All right, so what's a merge tag? Well, a merge tag is a way of personalizing your emails to the people who are on your list. And it allows you to make sure that say, for example, the email, instead of saying hi there, as it does here, it actually goes Dear Robin or Dear Phil, and it basically will substitute their first name in to basically replace the hi there. All right, so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to show you how to actually do that. There's two ways I'm going to do that. First of all, I'm going to basically go over here to merge tags and I'm going to use first name. And as you can see now, it's automatically substituted in the merge tag code for first name. What I can actually do is I can check to see if that works by going save, going over to the preview and going on to Preview mode and then clicking Enable Live Merge Tag Info. If I click that, you'll see the first name hopefully changes to Robin. And now I can click on the arrow to see the next version of the email which is going to Peter, and then the next version of the email which is going to David. So I then know that that merge tag information is working so I can close it and I'll know that that works when I send this email. Okay. So I'm just going to click continue and that email is now ready to send. All I need to do is, once it's loaded in, is to check I'm happy with it, have a quick look at the preview to make sure that it looks the way that I want it to and then I can go to send. Mailchimp asks do I really want to send it? I'm going to click send now and that email will be sent. Okay, so what you've done there is actually fairly standard, as it were, in terms of creating an email. So we sent it to just the people we wanted to send it to, the direct imports. We made sure that we've got a basic format and styling. And again, what I'd suggest is you play around with that because remember, this is kind of like a test environment. You want to test it first before you've got it standard. But once you've got it standard, don't play around with it. Concentrate on the content, the actual format and the way the email looks. Shouldn't change that much. Then obviously you can send it. Now, obviously one of the things that we're going to do moving forward is we're going to have a look at things like data capture, we're going to have a look at things like forms and landing pages, so we're going to talk about those from a top line point of view. So, but if all you've got is you want to just add people manually to mailchimp and get them to receive your emails, this is the way to do it. Use this process, go through those steps and hopefully you'll now have a pretty good understanding of how mailchimp actually fits together. Hope you found that useful. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Hi guys and welcome back to the next video on how to use email marketing and mailchimp to improve your bookings, improving your revenue, and basically to grow your hospitality business. In this video we're going to talk about segmentation and automation. So segmentation, how you can split your database up so you can speak to the right types of people, but also send them specific messages. Because at the core of everything marketing, the more specific you are, the more likely you're going to get a result. And that's what this is all about. So we're going to talk about segmentation, how we actually do it in email marketing and how we're going to translate that into mailchimp, and then we're going to focus on automation. How are we actually going to send some of the emails that we know are great emails and but we want to send to every single customer. How do we automate them? So the first half of the video is going to be a little bit more prep and a little more planning. And then the second half of the video, we're going to dive into mailchimp and actually do it. So you'll be able to follow along on my screen as I build these automations, which therefore means that when you finish, you can go back, watch the video again, pause it, and follow along yourself. Okay, Right. So segment automation. Where do we start? Well, guess what? We're going to start with our plan. We're going to start with our favorite four steps. If you ever get lost with email marketing, always come back to these four steps. Because if you cover these four steps, you'll be able to send the emails that you want to send. So first of all, what emails do you actually want to send? Secondly, what information do you need to be able to send them? Because when it comes down to email marketing, we need data to be able to send emails. Thirdly, where are we storing that information in our system of choice? In other words, mailchimp. And then finally, how do we actually get the information into mailchimp? Always come back to these four statements. If you're not sure where you're going, they really will set you on the right path. So with all that in mind, what emails do we actually want to send? Well, we've got a number of emails and I've just happened to pick a number of them that happen to have got templates available for you as part of the boost of the academy. So you'll be able to use this content yourself. So one email you want to send is to, to people who have expressed an interest. So not necessarily guests, but prospects who are interested in the property, some form of welcome email. How can you send that to them? You may want to send an email to guests who've recently visited, asking them to refer other people. You might want to send an email to guests who visited a while ago to actually remind them that, hey, you're still around and you'd love for them to come and visit you. And then finally, in the examples that we're focusing on, you want to be able to send an email to people who, say, filled out a competition form on a website or a landing page, and you want to be able to respond, to identify them and respond to them specifically. Okay, so with all that in mind, what data do we actually need to send those emails? Right. Well, first of all, let's break it down. The first email to people who are interested in potentially staying with you. Well, we need their email address. We need to know that they've just signed up. And we also potentially can use their type. And when I say type, I mean what type of customer are they? Are they a recreational customer or are they a business customer? We can obviously capture that and use that to make sure that the emails we send are more specific. The second email, we want to send an email to guests who have recently visited, asking them for referrals. The information we need for that. We need the email address. Obviously we need to know they're a guest because that's just a good thing to track. Because if you want to in the future be able to communicate with people who've actually visited and just send some blanket emails to them, you need to be able to identify people who've been guests and therefore have actually stayed to know what your property is like compared to people who've just inquired but haven't actually got around to booking. Okay, so for guests who've recently visited, you want to be able to track the fact they're a guest, but you also need to put a date in. Now, I've put date of departure. It depends on how you structure your system, how you've got it. But I would suggest the date of departure is a good date to track because that's the point. Afterwards they're going to be kind of like potentially wanting to receive your stuff. If you do it on date of arrival, it's the date of arrival is going to be the same for someone who stays for one day or somebody stays for 14 days. So probably dated departure, a good thing to track and certainly something that we can use for that email. The next thing you've got is email to older guests who have basically been in the past but haven't been around for a while, asking them to rebook. And again, you actually just need the same information as the previous one. You need to know their email address, you need to ideally know that they've been a guest, but really you need to know what their date of departure is. And then finally you've got an email that you want to send to those people who responded to a specific promotion that you've done, competition or whatever. Well, the key things that you need for that are email address, obviously where they're signed up. So did they sign up on a specific page for a competition? Because if they did so then you can obviously communicate with all those people who've completed that specific page. And you may also want to track something like type. So we're talking here again about recreational or business, because if they've signed up for a competition where you're offering a mini break, I think it's pretty safe to say that they're going to be recreational customers, in which case you can automatically assign them as a recreational customer in your database. So that's the information we need to send our emails. So we've just actually ticked off the second of our steps that counted for. So how does that work? Well, typically, you now need to understand where you're going to store that data. Are you, you know, where in the database is actually going to. So step three, you basically need to store that data somewhere in mailchimp. And typically. And if you remember going back to the first video that explained a little bit about mailchimp and broke down some of the key things, there are a couple of key ways of structuring and looking at data. First of all, you've got information that's specific about an individual. All right? And that information could be an email address, a name, a date of birth, a date, date of state. It's specific about them. Now, that information is known as a field. Okay. Fields basically allow you to store specific information about person. Now, the other type of information that you want to capture is information where you're going to categorize people. Okay, so type of customer, are they business or recreational? How did they sign up? Were they a guest? Now, these are the types of things that you can use tags to track. Now, I know there are lots of other tools in mailchimp, such as groups and segments that you can use for this purpose. We're going to just use tags to track these people and identify them. Okay? Now all of this needs to be set up in mailchimp prior to everything going live, so it's ready to actually hold the information. And then you can trigger the emails that go off that. So let's go back and look at our information that we actually need again, but actually work out whether that's a tag or a field. Okay? So initial email, which are going to guests, to prospects who are interested. So the welcome email. Well, we've got the email address, which is a field, but we've then got a couple of tags, the fact they recently signed up, and potentially the type of customer they are for the emails asking guests for referrals. We've got the field for address, We've got a field for the date of departure because it's specific to them. But we can Tag them as a guest. Exactly the same with people who've been in the past and you want to re energize. We've got their email address and the date of departure as a field and we've got past guest as a tag. And then finally, for emails that are going to people who've responded to a specific promotion that you set up, we obviously got their field, but the way they signed up and the type, we're going to use tags to track them. So what this means is that when we go into mailchimp, the first, the first thing we need to do is to set all of these up so that when we do get the information, the information is going to be stored where we want it to be stored, in other words, like this. All right, so when we've done all that, we actually need to think about the emails that we want to send. Because there are certain different types of emails. There are emails that you send automatically and there are emails that you just sent. And what you need to think about is what the trigger is for each of the emails that you, that you're going to send. So to be quite frank, something happens needs to happen for that email to be sent. All right, so broadcast emails. Well, you're the trigger, you're the one who wants to send it. You decide to send it now or it's point in the future. Automated emails, however, are slightly different. This is where something changes in the database so a new person is added, or a tag is added, or a field date, field changes, and all this. What this basically does is it causes an email to be sent. So the email just gets sent automatically without you having to do anything. All right? Now, as far as I'm concerned, any successful business out there uses email automation as a key part of their process. It saves them time, it saves them energy, and it will generate more sales. Because remember those emails that you think you need to send or you try to remember to send, you probably may forget them occasionally. Whereas if it's automated, it just happens, you don't even have to think about it. And the fact of the matter is that for the majority of businesses, most of the emails that you will send should and could be automated. So please remember that, you know, kind of like we're not just. You don't want to be sitting there on mailchimp every week actually going in and sending emails. A lot of the emails that you should be sending from mailchimp should be automated. One other thing you need to bear in mind, when it comes to the emails you want to send is that it may be that you only want certain automated emails to go to certain people. And that's where you need to use a condition to actually separate out whether it goes to everybody. A good example of that is, say, sending an email to someone who's new to your business, someone who's making an initial inquiry, who wants to learn a little bit more about you. The welcome secret, as it were. Now, obviously you can do a generic welcome sequence that goes to everybody, but you may decide that you want to send a welcome sequence just to recreational people and a separate welcome sequence to business customers. Well, if that's the case, then you can create a condition that says, please send this email to anyone who's new to my list, but only send it to people who are also tagged as being a recreational customer, or only to people who is tagged as being a business customer. It gives you a chance to actually put a little bit of a filter so that it really does go to the right people at the right time. So let's look at the emails that we've got and the triggers we're going to use to fire them off. Okay, so let's take our welcome email. So we've got the field and we've got the tags, as it were. And the trigger we actually want to use is when they sign up or even when they actually sign up on a specific form condition where you could, like I've just gave in the previous example, we could actually send it to business customs or recreational customers for our guests who are asking for referrals. What's the data we want? We obviously want the email address, potentially guest, and certainly the date of departure. But the trigger is actually the time after departure. So the trigger is send this email May, 7 or 14 days after the departure date. And we don't really need to put a condition on that unless we really want to. Then you can send an email to people who've been around and used you for a little bit further of time ago. Awful English. I know people who've been with you six months and haven't visited you since. How do you get them back? Well, you obviously want to know when they last visited their date of departure, but you then set up a trigger that's actually sent, say six months after that last date and sends them an email at that point. And then finally, for those people who responded to a specific event, competition or whatever that you've done, they're obviously signed up a specific point. So we're going to capture where they've signed up, potentially a type, but obviously their email address. And then finally the trigger was signing up through a specific location or in our instance when a tag is applied. So if they fill out a form, the form automatically tags them and we use the tag being assigned to them as the trigger. And we might want to actually have kind of like a slightly different condition in terms of whether they're recreational or business if we're tracking that or some other way. So we can actually do kind of like a number of different bits and pieces to actually put conditions in there. But realistically, probably the only thing we need to worry about is that they've signed up at a specific point and they're going to use tags to trigger that from an automation point of view. So now we can actually answer the first three questions. In our four questions. We can answer the question what emails do we want to send? Because we've listed them out. We can actually answer what information do we need to send them? Because again, we've listed them out. We can also indicate and look into the system as to how we're going to store that data. That's all now going to be set up. Once we set it up, we know that we've got somewhere to put that data. And then the final question, how do we actually get the data there? Well, that's not something we're going to cover in this video. That's going to be the next video. We're going to focus on things like data capture and really drill into things like forms, landing pages and how you test them, which is obviously just as important. Okay, so let's dive into mailchimp, set these up, and we're going to use the boosted templates that are already available to actually populate the email. So you'll see me using that as we go through the process. So let's go and have a look at mailchimp. Okay, so here we are back in mailchimp. Now what we're going to do in mailchimp for this segmentation and automation video is we're going to take all the information that we did previously in this slides and actually put it into mailchimp. So you'll be able to follow along and actually see how to set up these automations and to how to set set up the segmentation. Okay, so the first thing we want to do is we actually want to create the pots or the areas that we're going to store this information, which basically means we need to go into the audience and basically set up some tags and set up Some data capture information for the fields. Okay, so let's go over to audience and we're in my main audience dashboard. So what I want to do first of all is create a couple of extra fields that we're going to store information in. So I'm going to go over to here, I'm going to click on Settings and then within Settings I'm going to set up Click on Settings and go to Audience Fields and Merge Tag. And if you remember, this is how to set up the structure of your email account. Basically it will allow you to create some of those vertical columns like you would do in a spreadsheet. Okay, so what information do we want? All right, well, I'm happy to keep that as it is. We can use that if you want to add or take away other fields that you think are relevant that you're going to put information in. Fantastic. All right, but the first thing I want to do is I want to add a new date field and this is going to be something that I'm going to call Departure Date. Okay. The reason I'm doing Departure Date is because all the emails I want to send are actually going to be after they've gone, as it were. So it could be that if their arrival date is in here, but they're there for two weeks and you've got a trigger of sending it two weeks after the arrival date, well, they'll still be there. So that's why I'm setting this up as Departure Date. So what I'm going to do is put departure dates into here. I'm going to change this to the UK formats just because I am. And I'm going to put D date in here. All right. Oops, didn't mean to do that. D A T. All right, that basically will that. That's the merge tag mentioned previously in the previous video. If I want to use in. Embed this in the email somewhere, I can do. I'm not going to really probably do that, but it's a good practice to have that set up. And actually I'll do the same for Company while I'm here. Click Save Changes and that will now save the information that we actually need for them. All right, so is there any other information that we need? If you look at the four emails that we're doing, we're doing a welcome email. Well, to be honest, that's going to be down to lots of tagging there. The dates fields which we require for the lapsed customer and the recent customer referral, that's in there. And Then the only other one that we've got is the sign up form process. And again, there's no fields that we actually need, so that's the only field that we actually need to create. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is go over here to tags and you'll see that I've got the two tags that I created in the previous video. What I'm going to do now is create a couple of new tags. Okay. Now what I'm going to do as well is I'm going to not just create them as standard, I'm going to basically start creating a little system for tags so I can understand what they're for. Okay. So the first track I'm going to create is going to create for whether they're a business customer or a normal customer, as it were. So I'm not even sure what the terms are. I can't think of it as it were recreational, business and recreational. Okay, so I'm going to type in core because this is the core description. Actually, no, I'm not going to do core. I'm going to do type because these are the types of businesses, as it were, or types of people who are visiting. So I'm going to have type recreational and I'm going to create another type which is going to be type business. Now the reason I'm using the word type in front is basically just actually to help me structurally understand it. Because if I'm not too careful, I can have lots and lots of tags not actually know what they refer to. Because if I just had the tag business, well that could refer to lots of things. And exactly the same for recreational. So if I put type in front, it allows me to actually identify where they've actually done. All right, so first of all we've got that. Next we have got core guest. Okay, so this is just a core tag. All right? So when I say use the word core, I mean it's kind of fundamental to the business and I'm just using that to describe the guest. So anyone who's a guest gets tagged as core guest. All right. Again, it just allows me, having used the word core in front or the word type in front of allows me to actually identify the specifics of where that actual description comes from. What does this tag actually refer to? Okay. And then finally, the only other tags that I want to actually create is going to be the place that they've signed up for. So this could be a form, a competition or a landing page. Now the terminology I use for those is called entry points. Any way that someone can get onto my database or be updated, I want to track that. I want them to know which entry point they've actually gone through to appear on my database and to be updated. So what I'm going to do is do AEP and I'm going to have a landing page because I'm going to create a landing page in a while in the next video, and I'm going to call this landing page competition. All right? So I know that anyone who's got this tag has actually gone through the process of signing up through the landing page, and it's the competition landing page that I set up. All right, I'm also going to set up an EP which is going to be form and then just bracket homepage. So I'm going to have a form on my home page and basically anyone who completes that will go through this. Now, obviously people can do the competition and they may have forgotten the fact that they actually also have gone through the homepage. So that's the reason why I make sure I tag both of them, because I want to send emails to each of these people. Okay? Now, the only other tag that I would consider adding to this is to actually, I'm trying to remember what I'm going to say here because you run through these things. You're not trying to remember. Oh, that was what I wanted to do is to change these two. So these are the tags I used yesterday or in the previous video to actually create and track people I added directly. So what I'm going to do is actually just change these from direct import and direct addition. So I'm just going to rename them and actually put EP in front because technically they are entry points. All right, so just do that and wait for it to load up and then I'm going to do the same for the direct import, rename EP Direct import. So what got now is I've now got a structure for the tags in my mailchimp account, okay. So I can identify guests, I can identify each of the ways that they could get into my database. A direct edition, direct input, a homepage form, or a landing page competition. And obviously, if you create other landing pages, I would suggest you create separate tags for those. And I'll also be able to identify whether they're recreational or a business type, custom. So I've created these tags and I've created the date fields. All right, so what I've actually done now is I've completed that third step because if you remember the four Steps of email. The emails you want to send, the data that you need, where are you going to store it? Well, I've now created the places that I'm going to store it. So what I can actually do now is actually since I've got those set up, I can go in and actually create the emails and that's what I'm actually going to do now. So creating emails. So we need to go over to campaigns. I'm going to click on, this is where all the campaigns are stored. So obviously I sent a test campaign in the previous video just to check that it all worked like that. Right, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click create. I'm going to create a new email. So click on email. This is going to be an automated email. Okay now remember this is where you can actually say what is the trigger? Remember we talked about triggers in a standard broadcast email that you want to send to anyone, you are the trigger. However, if you want to set up a automated email, something needs to change in the database. All right, so let's start off with the two simple, kind of like the two simple ones and those are the date based ones because ultimately as soon as the date is in there that's the trigger and then we can send afterwards. So what I need to do here is I need to go to date based and it says send a one time message based on an individual date field like an appointment. That's basically what we need to do. So if you want to do any date based automations you can send it when they're added to the audience. You can obviously got annual recurring dates and happy birthdays. Technically these two things are exactly the same but then you've got your specific date. So this is the what we want to use. So I'm going to click specific date. I need to give the campaign a name. All right, now before I do that, you'll see up here I've got single email and email series. Okay now single email basically is a one time email sent. An email series is a sequence of emails. Now because of the way that mailchimp set up, those of you who are on a paid accounts will be able to do series but those of you who are on a free account will only be able to do single emails. Now don't worry because if you do want to do a sequence there's a way around it and I'll show you how to do that. But for the purposes of this, we're obviously just going to create this one Email then we need to create a campaign name. Now like I said yesterday, I like to make sure that all of my campaigns have a structure in the way that they're named. That way that if I've got lots of different campaigns I can find and understand what's going on. One of the things that you realize is over time when you start off, because you've not got much data and you've not got many kind of emails going out, you get a bit free in terms of I'll just name this, this and that, whatever. After a while, after basically after you set up a number of them and you've got a number of different tags, suddenly you're thinking, oh crap, I should have actually set a structure up to them. So I really recommend that if you've not done so already, put a structure in the way that you name your emails, they'll be so much easier to find. So in this case I'm going to call it auto and I'm going to call it the tracking. Thing I'm going to do is I'm going to basically it's going to be a date based automation and this is going to be a referral request email. Okay, but you got one audience, so tick that and then click begin, Wait for this to load up. And now I get to actually create the email itself. Alright, so this is pretty, pretty standard. If you're creating a one step automation, these are the fields that you've got. So just to give you a quick navigation around, you can obviously set the overall set, change the overall settings. So you can change the fundamental, you can change this within each individual email if you wanted to to, but you can set the default names. Obviously we've got the name, all the other bits and pieces that you're familiar with, all the standard campaigns. I'm not going to change anything. Obviously if you set this up as a date. So it gives you the option of basically choosing the date field. Now the only date field that we've got is the departure date, so we don't have to worry about it. But if you wanted to, if you had an other date in there, you'd be able to change that. Then we get down to the email. All right, hey trigger, remember we talked about triggers. So we need to circ out when are we going to send this to particular email? And I want to actually send this email seven days after their visit. The reason I'm saying seven days is because the visit is still going to be relatively recent in their mind, which means that they'll Remember all the good things and the experience that they had. But it means that it basically it's not going to be too long that they've forgotten you. So I think seven days is good. Now you may find, and you want to test this and actually find that seven days is too short. You might want to move it to 14 days or you might even want to move it to three days. But I'm just going to do seven days schedule. The email is going to be sent at 9am every time, every day. So you can obviously change the date if you wanted to. Again, not going to worry about that. Now do I want to filter this? Now remember we've got the ability to filter by segment or tag. So these are the conditions. This is where if we don't want this email to go to everybody. So for example, if you only wanted this email to go to business customers, you'd add a condition. You choose a his member is tagged and I can now choose a particular tag. So if I only wanted to go to business people, I could do that. Click Save segment. And now this would go to anyone who seven days after they left but was actually going to be talked to. It was going to be just going to the people who are business. And then if I wanted to, I could replicate this campaign and do another version, but it would only go to recreational people. Okay, but for the purpose of this, I'm not actually worried about setting a filter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cancel that filter. So unclick that, click Save segment and now it's going to go to everyone. Now I've also got the option of adding a post send action. Now again, this is kind of like stuff that if you want to have a play around with it, look at it, I'm not going to worry about it. And I'd suggest that if you're just following this and going through the steps, don't worry about it. You don't need to. As you can see here, I've got to upgrade if I want to add email. So not going to worry too much about that. But now I can actually go in and design the email. Now this is where you've got the advantage of actually using the templates that you've created previously. So you don't have to be creating this email from scratch. You've already got it sorted out. So I'm going to wait for this to load up. So name the email. Well, actually it's not two weeks before the event, it's actually going to and again I'm tracking this. This is going to be a auto date based referral request and if I'm going to do it maybe that I do a number of these emails. So I always like to kind of like put if it's the first one, referral request number one and you put your email subject the preview all the bits and pieces. Now in this instance if I'm not mistaken, let's go back to the boostly academy. I'm going to get the go to get people reinterested. I've done the wrong one actually. Here we go. Template you can send to past guests. Okay, so this basically is the template that you're going to use to ask for a referral. So all you need to do now is to start copying and pasting this in. So the subject line, it goes, it says do you know anyone? So I'm going to copy that, I'm going to paste that into the subject line. Now the preview text. Now because Mark set these up before previews actually were available in mailchimp, it hasn't kind of like got any, you know, kind of like specific information that you can pop in, but you can obviously come up with and populate something there. I'm not going to worry about it. Name as we said, you want to have name and then you want to have the business as it were. Click Next. Click Save templates and there's the template that we created in the previous video. So again we saved ourselves a little bit of time waiting for this to load up. So let's go back to the template and what we can do now is we can do highlight all of the text, copy that text, go into here and just paste it. Okay, so all of the text there is set up. So all you've got to do now is go create the merge tags. So first of all you want to do hi, let's go to merge tag first name comma so that will automatically personalize it. Okay. Now the second thing that you've got here is you've got an insert a personal message. Now if you're sending this on a kind of like demand basis, so you're doing this just from who you, what you're doing, then obviously you can put something in there. The problem is that this is an automated email which means that you can't actually be that personal. So again you might want to test it. You want to set up some automated emails, but you obviously can also send individual personal emails to people. And certainly if you've got the time to do it that's definitely going to be better and the reason being it's more specific. The more specific you are, the better success you're going to have with your email. So I'm actually going to just delete that for the purposes of this email. So let's go through. I'm writing to ask you a quick question. Do you anyone who'd be interested blah blah blah blah blah. If you have a few dates coming back in our calendar at and then obviously you put your business same. So I'm going to put Chimp answers as the name of my store. Either forward this email to our booking calendar and obviously what you can do is you've got a booking calendar link so you can put that in. The way you do that is to highlight the text. You go up here and you click on this little link icon, this kind of like chain link as it were. Click on there and you can type in your robe address and get rid of that or they can reply and you basically set this up so this will come from your email. So it'll go from then obviously you scroll down, there's a couple of bits and pieces. You put your telephone number in there. So it's my email telephone number. Or we could chuck availability and see if your your favorites obviously depending on what they were living at with their room cottage apartments. I'm going to put room bully bat. Thanks for signing off, Robin. Chimp answers. So put the name in. P.S. don't forget if anything's a referral or family friend I will be sure to look after you. So let's just change the wheel before to look after you. Okay, so you've got that now obviously you can do a little bit of thing around. Oh, I've missed one, haven't I? I've got your incentive and if they come to stay with us on the back of your recommendation a bottle of wine will be winging its way to you for your trouble. Okay, so you got that? Obviously this now is a fairly flat email. So what I might want to do is I might want to do a little bit of formatting. So I'm going to put a little line and I do that by clicking on this box here to separate the PS underneath the actual name. So it's a little bit separated out. Everything else is fine. So if you wanted to I would certainly recommend thinking about. I've just seen another thing I need to change change this from ide to weed. So what I'd actually do is I would suggest that you use bold strategically through the Email to highlight things that you want people to rent. So send you a little gift that's something you want to highlight because that's going to go. People are going to go drawn to that go, oh, I get send a little gift for referring someone. Is it okay? So you can turn down there like say a bottle of wine is ringing your way to your will be winging its way. So don't go mad with your highlights and your underlines and your bolds. But it's good to have a little bit there. Also what you might want to do is you might want to add a little image in. So previously we've got the name there. If I upload, if I do a quick search for a little headshot that I've got, let me go for signature. I've actually created a number of little signatures that I can use. So as my computer loads up, I just created this on a graphics package. One of the things that I would suggest is when you see it, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's actually all I've done. When I put my signature, people go, how do I get a nice signature into my email? Well, what you do is you get a white piece of paper, you write your signature on the white piece of paper then you take a photo of it. And if your email background is white and I would certainly recommend that having a white background works. It gives you the ability to basically use and have a nice thing. So I'm just going to use a nice signature. So let me just go and see if I can find my. Where am I going? So we're going to get media chimpanzers email signatures. Ra signature. That's not the one I want. Signature block one. Is that it? There we go. That's the one I want to use. So all I did with this was I created little, had a little headshot which I created and put in. And I've also put a signature of a handwritten Robin and like I said, all I did for that Robin is wrote that on a piece of paper and took a phone number and basically took a photo of it and then basically edited it. So I can now bring that in. Thanks for reading Robin Adams Chimp answers. And there we go. We've got a nice little email that's ready to send. It's got a brand logo at the top. Actually it's a bit too much space there. So I'm going to use this to actually reduce the padding at the top so it works a little bit better. So we've got that logo so people, when they open up it, they know it's coming from you as opposed to anyone else. They've got all the information in there. Everything's set up. So I can now click save and close. Obviously if I wanted to I could click test to, I could go to preview mode and I could click here to make sure that it looked good for the individual named people that I've got. That looks all fine. Click save and continue. And now that email is ready to send. So all I need to do now, everything's set up. It's going to say seven days after departure date. It's date based referral request. Click next. One last check. Everything's set up. Click start sending. So what will happen is that this email will be sent seven days after someone's departure date. So all you've got to do now is to go in and put their information in and we'll cover that in the data and uploading information section. But it literally as simple as that. Okay, so I'm not going to go through the process of creating the lapsed customer. Okay. Because basically it's the same thing. You go for exactly the same process. So basically that would be say for example, the delay. We put a delay on that one for six, seven days. Well in the last one we put a delay on for you know, kind of like six months or however, 200 days as it were, however long you feel is appropriate. Now again, if we go to templates and we go to templates to get people reinterested in your business, they have got a number of emails already set up for you. Say hi, we're sorry, surely you've forgotten. Sorry about this here. It's been a long time since we've spoken to you and obviously build this so you can obviously bring this in. All right. Now the one thing that you'll notice here is that they've actually got a number of emails. So it's not just day one. Yeah. You've also got day two and day three and day four. So this is opposed to being just one email, is a sequence of emails. Now you know we were talking previously about the fact on a free account you can't actually sequence those emails. Well, you can. What you do is you just create four individual automations and the trigger date is just set slightly differently. Okay, so what do I mean there? Right. Well in this instance, say for example, you want to send the first email 200 days after they've been visited. So what you do is you obviously go into mailchimp you create your automation just like I've done and you set the trigger to be departure date and to be sent 200 days after the departure date. Brilliant. All right, well then what about the next email where you create a completely new email just as we've done, but you send the trigger to be departure date but the lapse is now 201 days, so it's actually going to be sent one day after the previous email. Now from the customer's point of view it looks like there is a repetition, there is a sequence of emails, but from mailchimp's point of view they're just individual automations and with that being the case then you don't actually have to worry about it being one after one after one after one. You can just set them up as an individual automation, which is great because that way you can actually do email sequences even if you're on a free account. So hopefully you followed that. So like I said, set the first date, the first email goes and if you've got a sequence all you do is to set that up using the date field as it were, to go one or two days after the previous email has actually been sent. Simple, easy, and for those types of emails that's the best way to actually do it. All right, so if you remember now we've got two other automations that we want to create. So we want to create a welcome sequence and we want to create a sign up email for those people say who have entered a competition. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our automations or the create button and we're going to create the email that's going to be sent to people who have signed up through the competition. Okay so again, campaign name, we want to call it Auto. This is going to be a sign up tracker and it's going to be competition. Thanks for entering. It's regular. Oops. So I forgot I should have done that. Should have got ahead of myself there. I need to make sure it's an automated email. So made a bit of a boob there, but fortunately it's easy recoverable, so automated. So what's the trigger going to be? Well the trigger is going to be a tag being applied. So basically when they complete the form to enter the competition, when they're going to do this on a landing page which we're going to create in the next video, we're going to assign a tag which is entry point, landing page competition. Remember that was one that we created when we were creating the tags. What we need to do now is whenever that tag is applied, we know someone has filled that form out, therefore we can send this email. So I'm going to click here. Email subscribers when they're tagged, I'm actually going to be, it's going to be auto sign up competition. I can't type competition. And then it's thanks for registry click begin. And now we go back and it will create our standard automation, one single automation page. And all we'll need to do is just to change the trigger to meet our criteria. So the trigger here says trigger is one day after a tag is added to the contact, please select a tag. All right, so if we click edit, the first thing we want to do is actually change this from one day. And the reason being is that why would you want to wait? Someone has just completed the form, you need to go back to them straight away. So I want this email to go immediately when someone fills out that form, the tag, we've actually got the tag already set up. So when someone completes the competition page, landing page, they'll get this tag and that will trigger this particular email to be sent. So I can now click update Trigger. And now that is going to be sent every day to all the people who complete this particular competition. And all we then need to do is just go in and design the email. So this isn't one that Mark's actually given us a template for. If you try and persuade him, he might add it into what you've got, but simply email subject, they've done something. So say thanks for entering our mini break competition. Again, you put something into there. Change this to chimp answers. Click next. It'll ask me to create a template or select a template. And again, because we've set up our little branded template already set up, double click on that to load that up. There we go. And now we can obviously put all the information that we want to put in here. So thanks for your interests. We'll be doing the draw soon. Look out for more emails from us about this, so on and so forth. So you can basically put your own information in, setup, save and continue. And now that's ready, all you've got to do is basically have that set up because that email will be sent every time someone completes the competition page. All right. Now obviously what I'd also suggest is that you do something like this as a, you know, kind of for any of these types of landing pages or first point responses, as it were. So the first time that Gets in. So I'm going to click start sending. And that's now ready to go. Just wait for it to click through. Yep, great. Automation's off. All right, so what we're going to do now is we're going to create one more automation and this is going to be your welcome sequence. Now, the welcome sequence goes to basically people who have, who are guests who have not actually kind of like visited yet. They're actually signing up outside. So there are actually two types of welcome sequence, the sequence that Mark's got. So if I go back to templates and you go down here templates to turn lookers into bookers. Right, so what we're doing here is we're going to go for people who have potentially joined in and basically joined the venue VIP club, as it were, for your property. All right, so obviously what I would suggest is you have a form on your website which is set up just like the competition landing page I've just talked about here that actually basically uses this. So I'm going to go back to campaigns. What we're going to do is we want to basically use this to send via a tag. And the reason we want to use a tag is because we've got our entry point homepage form tag. So this automation is going to specifically for people who sign up in that way. Remember the whole idea of automation, it's specific to the way that what you actually want in our instance, it's a specific to this basically specific way they've signed up, which is the homepage. So if we click this. Email subscribers when they're tagged obviously want to change the name to auto sign up home page, click Begin and again the tag we want to assign to them, wait for it to load up trigger one day after the tag is counted. No, we want to send it straight away. So what we're going to do is go over here, change this to immediately and we want to select the tag which is going to be the home page tag. So click update trigger. So that's all done. So literally what we can do now is we can click on Design email, Wait for it to load in. This is going to be auto sign up Home BI P Club email subject will go back over to here. Welcome to the venue viclear Club. Click this Email subject Preview text don't need to worry about that. Well, we can do. If you want to chimp answers, click next. We've got our templates, we can put our templates. So let's select our saved template again and all we need to do in the design section is go back in here, copy and paste the information. And paste the information in and then obviously you can change various bits and pieces. So let's get rid of that and obviously you can start going through changing all of this information so that it's relevant to what you've actually done. And again I won't go through the process too much but you can just go through, read it and as you go through you'll obviously edit it as you see fit. Click Save and close, Click Save and continue, wait for this to load up and it's all done. So now what we can do is we can click next and that email will now be ready to be sent. Okay, so click start sending. Alright, so that's the first email but if you see Mark's actually giving you a sequence, you've got an email 2, you've got an email 3. An email 4. An email 5. Yep, that's five hits. There's five emails there that you can use. So again, because we're on the free level of mailchimp, what we actually need to do is instead of create one automation with lots of emails, we just create five individual automations. So I'll actually create another automation and show you how to set that up. So again they're going to be people who are tagged. This is going to be automation sign up homepage number two because this is the second email in sequence because the first email was sent immediately when they signed when the tag was applied. So what we're going to do now is actually going to send this one day after the tag was applied. So it basically as if it's being sent one day after the first email. So change one day, select a tag form homepage update trigger Happy with everything. The name is fine. So I can now go to design email. I can go into the templates to get the name of email to subject hidden gems not to be bisd. So go over here Email subject hidden gems not to be missed. I'm going to give it the name same name as I've used already. Home page number two Robin Jim answers. Click next select the template, Double click that just in case. Thought I had double clicked it. Obviously I hadn't. It now close in and all we need to do now is go into the boostly templates highlights so there's three different potential subjects line there. Hello. All the bits and pieces all the way down to the PS and the pps. There we go, do that, copy that, paste that in. Do all the various changes that you need to do all the various bits and pieces that you've got there. Click save and close save and continue. And the email is now ready to be set up and sent and it will go one day after the tag's applied whereas the previous one went the time the tag was applied. So this is like a one day and obviously if you want to send an email a day after this you basically set up the whole automation. You'd actually put the trigger two days after the contact is tagged and if you got the next one you want three days after the tag is added. Alright so that's basically how you daisy chain each of these individual emails but turn them into a sequence of emails that actually go out. So click start sending and there we go. Everything is now set up for each of those automations to basically work. So if we now go over here to campaigns and click on campaigns, got all campaigns up here. So I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go down here to ongoing campaigns and that just highlights all of the automations and as you can see I got four automations that I set up. I've got my date based referral request, got my competition, thanks for registering email, I've got my sign up homepage and I've got my sign up second email for the homepage. So they're all set up. So that's basically going through the whole process of segmenting and also the creation of the email automations. In the next video we're going to focus on data capture. We're going to talk about forms, we're going to talk about landing pages, we're going to talk about the process of adding things, information manually to existing records such as the date that they actually visited and we're going to talk a little bit about using the information in the database to create broadcast based emails and obviously we're also going to do some testing, we're going to actually put the information, put some test emails in and I'll show you how to create lots and lots and lots of test emails that won't mess up your existing email account to test the system and make sure that it works. So look out for that video data capture and testing. We're going to be covering that extensively but for now thanks for watching and I hope you found this useful. Hey guys and welcome back to this video. In this series of how to actually set up some emails and automations for your hospitality venue. This video is going to focus all about capturing data and if you've seen all the previous Videos. And if you haven't, then I really suggest you go and have a look at them. Then obviously this is the natural next step in what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how we actually get the information. So again, without sounding like a stuck record, I am going to bring you back to the specific plan that we've talked about. So we always talk about the emails that you want to send, the information that you need to be able to send, those emails where the information is going to be stored in mailchimp. And then obviously how are we actually going to get the data there? And that's what this section is all about. We've covered the previous three parts. We're now focusing on actually the data flow, the capturing of the data and getting it where you need in mailchimp. So there are a number of different ways that you can capture information and put it into mailchimp. Okay. You can see do it manually. You can get people to fill out a form. You can kind of like get that information and just use the, I always called it do the 10 digit interface. What are the 10 digits? These 10 digits? Yeah, if you use your type, basically, if you're just typing them in, that's certainly a valid way of getting information into mailchimp. And in many instances it may be what you actually do. Obviously, however, there are some better ways of doing it, which means you're not involved. And obviously forms on a website is a great example of this. This allows you to not be involved. And it just means that there is a direct flow from the form which is filled out by the customer or prospect, which pushed into mailchimp, pushes the right information into mailchimp to send the emails you want to send. It's exactly the same with landing pages. We're going to be building those in a little bit. But mailchimp allows you to create landing pages. This allows your customer prospect to complete that landing page. And then the information that's on that gets pushed into the particular part of mailchimp which allows the emails to be sent. And then finally, something we're not really going to cover at all today because everyone's got different systems, but you can actually integrate various other systems that you may have in your business directly with mailchimp so that they push information into mailchimp. Okay, again, can't get into the level of detail on those too much because I know that you're all using different ones, but it is something that you can do. You can connect the two up so the data gets into mailchimp. So let's go back to our emails and obviously a lot of information here that we've already covered. But just as a refresher, we're going to be focusing on four different types of emails. We've got our welcome email, which is going to be triggered when someone signs up and potentially could be varied depending on whether they are a business or a customer consumer from a capture process. Well, this is going to be forms or landing pages. So someone fills out a landing page, someone fills out a form. You need to kind of like have that connected up. What about emails to recent guests who are asking for referrals? Well, we know the data that we need. We know the trigger that we've got to actually get to send those email. So how are we going to get the information? Well, in most instances, we're actually probably just going to key it in. If you're a relatively small business, it's probably just as easy for you to go into mailchimp and add a departure date. It might be that you want to integrate this with one of your, you know, your, your management system, as it were. But this is, you know, I'm going to be covering this, just adding the information directly. Then you've got emails to older guests. And again, this is a very similar email to that, kind of like recent guests asking for emails. We know the data we need, we know the trigger that's going to send those emails. So all we need to do is make sure that we're putting that information directly into mailchimp. And then finally we want to send an email to those people who've responded to a specific promotion. Now we know the information we need because we covered that. We know the trigger that's going to trigger those emails to be sent. Capturing wise. Well, again, that's going to be forms or landing pages. And what we'll be doing is basically going into some of the principles that I'd really recommend you look at when it comes to forms and landing pages. Now, one last thing before we actually go and jump into mailchimp and actually start playing around with forms and landing pages. And that's testing. All right, now is the best time to talk about it, because once you built your forms and landing pages, you'll want to test them. You want to complete that form and have it go through to mailchimp and have that email automatically sent. But the problem with testing is the fact that generally speaking, you've probably got just one email address. And if you're going to test this multiple times, the email, basically, it won't work. You really need to make sure that you've got a process that allows you to test things. It is key. If you don't test it, you're stuffed, basically, because you're not sure it's going to work. And that's going to mean that email is going to go to the wrong people at the wrong time and that's all going to be counterproductive. Now, as I said, the problem with most of us is that we just got one email, and if we use that email to test it once, it then can't really be used again because of the way that mailchimp works. So what you want is you want an unlimited supply of emails. Well, how can you get an unlimited supply of emails? Well, you can because you use Gmail to create what I call disposable email addresses. And that will make the whole process a lot easier. So how do you do this? Right, when you go and create a free Gmail account. So just go to gmail.com and create a new account completely free. When you've created that account, you'll obviously give that a name. So I've given it as example of mylovelyvenuemail.com when I created it. All right? Now, when you want to create a disposable email address with Gmail to test it, what you actually do is you basically use the Gmail account that you've created. So My Lovely venue, but then you add a plus sign and then a word, and that word can be absolutely anything. You can create them almost on demand. So you don't actually have to go into Gmail and create my lovely venue plus Test 1 or my lovely venue plus Test 2 or my lovely venue January 20th or my lovely Venue. The date is, you know, the time is ten past two. Yeah. What will happen is that when you basically use that, type it in. Gmail treats anything that's got the plus and whatever text you in as the same email. But mailchimp will see them as different. So what you're then in a situation is that you can go, My lovely venue plus, I don't know, test landing page one. All right, you can use that to test your landing page. All right, mailchimp will see it differently as it's a new email address, but it will still go into your My Lovely venue Gmail account as if it was like a normal email. You could then go, right, well, actually, I've changed that landing page and I've changed the bits and pieces behind It. I want to test it again. Well, then I do an email, which is my lovely venue landing page test two. And again, don't need to go into Gmail to create this in advance. I can do these on the fly. Send that, use that email to test it. Mailchimp sees it as a different email, which is great, but Gmail sees it as the same. So you don't have to keep logging into separate Gmail account. They all go to wallet Gmail account, which is really, really clever. So now if you do that, you've got unlimited email addresses which you can use to test your system. And I will show you this when we actually go in and actually create it. I've got a Gmail account set up already and it just allows me to actually go in and create test emails on the fly, just like that. All right, so with that in mind, let's go on to mailchimp and to one or two other platforms to actually build some forms and landing pages and, and test them to make sure that they work. So, welcome to mailchimp. What we're going to do now is we're going to go through the process of updating the data in mailchimp to allow us to send the emails that we want to send. Now, the first way that we're going to do that is just to do a basic data update where we actually just go into mailchimp and update it. Then I'm going to create a landing page and show you how to go through the process of creating a landing page page. And then finally, we're going to go over to a WordPress website and I'll show you the process of how to actually create and embed a form in a Mailchimp WordPress website. So you can use that as well. I'm also going to give you one or two other little hints and tips with regards to forms and bits and pieces that you'll find useful as you go through the process. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do, like I said, is if you go back to our four emails, let's focus on the two emails where we had direct information that we needed to put into the system. So that was the lapsed customer email, who hadn't been for a fair while, and the referral request that we wanted to send to someone seven days after. All right, so basically the only information that we need to have in the system is going to be the actual departure date. All right, so hypothetically, let's say that you've had a couple of visitors who come in recently and you want to update the system. Right. All you need to do is you need to go over to audience. And then go to view contacts or alternatively just tick the number 12 or however many is in your database and get to the spreadsheet view. And then once you're in the spreadsheet view, all you need to do is to basically find the person that you want to update who's hopefully in the system and update their record manually. How do you do that? Right, well, let's go through, let's find the person. Now obviously you can use the search button here to find someone if you've got lots of people. But here obviously I can see everyone soon. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click this one. So this is Phyllis, I think. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to up to date their date field. Pretty simple thing to do. Just go over here on the right hand side, I'm going to go click here edit and you'll see departure date, month, day, month is going to be 09 and departure date is going to be 12. Okay, so just click save. Now the other thing I want to do is because this person has now actually been registered as a guest, I want to tag them as a guest. So all we need to do there is once mailchimp's kicked in, go over to the tags at the top here, click the plus sign and just click on call guest. So now you've updated that person, they've got the right information. In some reason it didn't actually store. That's the problem. I actually put the date into the birthday. Shouldn't have done that. Sent. Just to basically show how to change that again, just go to edit, scroll down. That's always a good idea, Robin. Okay, so the date is going to be the 1209 2020. Let's delete the birthday because obviously I put it into the wrong field there. Those of you paying attention would have spotted that. So we've now basically updated this record so that this will now tags. This is now this person is tagged as a guest and we've updated their departure record. Now obviously what you could do is you could create a spreadsheet with all these people in and do it on a weekly basis and actually just have a column which actually had the date information just imported. And if you remember back in the first video I showed you how to import and update those records. So that's another way of actually doing it. But Here we can see departure date now has been set. 1209 2020. If we go over to campaigns and we look in the specific campaign for the let's wait for it for the long term customer. So here we go. So what we're talking about here, we're talking about the See Sonic Competition Sonnet homepage. Oh, I didn't actually set it up for the six months, did I? So what I'll actually do is I'm going to basically just quickly set that up. So I'm going to just replicate the referral request campaign because if you remember, they're basically working the same way. The only difference is the actual delay of the due date. So we're going to go in here. This is a refresher, just so if you watch the automation videos previously, this is just a quick refresher of how to actually create the automation. So I'm actually replicating the campaign because like I said, it's a very similar campaign. Wait for it to kick in. Mailchimp's obviously running a bit slow today. There we go. So I'm going to just change this. So instead of being a referral request, I'm going to change this to call it Lapsed customer because it is Lapsed Customer. Change departure date. That's fine. But all I need to do now is instead of say seven days, I need to set this at a particular time period over a longer period. So theoretically, and you can have up to 999 days here. But basically we want to send this probably about between six months after. So let's just roughly say that's going to be 180 days after all. Right click Update trigger. Okay, it's going to schedule. I've got no conditions. All the bits and pieces I could go in and design the email, but you've seen me design an email before, so there's not really any worthwhile reason to do that. So for now just click next and what this will do is allow me to actually go and set this automation as live. There we go. And now I just need to click wait for it to fully load in because it's still having a bit of fun. There we go. Click start sending. And now this automation is live and hopefully it will add the person who we've just done Phyllis to the queue. And how can we check that? Well, if we go to our campaigns tab and then we go and look at this specific campaign. There we go. This is Lapsed customer. If I now click on this, it will go into the automation and it Will show is it will show me the queue. Sorry, I've gone into the report there. What I actually need to do is I need to edit. So let's just go back to all campaigns, Wait for this to roll through. If I go over and click drop down menu and click Edit, it will show me how many people are actually in the queue to receive this email. So here we've got view queue 180 days after departure. If I click on View Queue, it will open up another mini window. There's the mini window. And you'll see there Phyllis, which is the person that I added, is now in the queue. And this email will send 180 days after the departure date that's in the system. So it's actually going to send on the 11th of March, which is 180 days after we've actually done. So all I need to do now is that information that setup, it's live. So basically whenever 180 days is reached after someone's departure date, the email was sent. Now you can, it will work on backdated. So obviously you saw there I put a date in for, I think it was the 9th of September. All right. And because it was the 9th of September, Mailchimp automatically calculates 180 days from that point. So you can actually, if you want to go in and actually put all the people who've had any, you know, visited you for the fast past 180 days into the system. And Mailchimp will automatically send them an email when that 180 date kind of like hits, as it were, so you can actually backdate it. So if you've got data that goes back a couple of months, put it into the system. And 180 days later, not from today, but from when the date in the system is, they'll actually receive this particular email. Okay. So that's how you actually just go in and update the information on a normal basis so that that's where you can add in those departure dates and. And that will automatically trigger those emails. All right. The second thing that you want to be doing is obviously talking about how we actually get data into mailchimp is to go through and create a mailchimp landing page. All right? Now, landing pages are very good at handling people from a very specific point of view. So creating a landing page allows you to capture people's information through a form. But the great thing about the landing page is that unlike a page on your website, your landing page is very, very specific. Its purpose to some extent is actually get people to Fill the form out. So from that point of view, you can actually create a landing page. You can create as many landing pages as you like in mailchimp. It's one of the great things about it. And then that landing page can be connected up to your database and it's a great way to drive traffic too. So if you're doing the competition, so you can have, if you wanted to, you could have a competition of the month and just create a different landing page each time. And as long as you're making sure that people are being tagged appropriately, everything's fine. So let's go and actually build a landing page in mailchimp. So how do we do that? Well, we go over to the create campaign button and then we click scroll down and we want to create a landing page. So what's the landing page we're going to name? So what we're going to do is we're going to call it lp just because again, I like to have a way of describing each of these campaigns and it's going to be my competition page. Click begin. And then, just like. The campaigns that you send from an email point of view, mailchimp gives you a number of templates. Now, the one thing that you need to be aware of with the landing page templates is that you can't save your own template. So what I would suggest that you do is once you've created your base template, which has got your logo on and the right text and other bits and pieces, if you want to create another landing page, I would very much recommend that you just replicate the previous landing page, because that'll have all your fonts, text, all the logos, bits and pieces, and then change the text and obviously change the way that it's set up. But for the purposes of this example, I'm just going to click on the lead generation example over on the left hand side because there's lots of distant designs here, but don't worry too much about them. Just basically, again, take it down to its brass tax, break it down to its roots, just like we did with the standard email campaign, and then add your logos, your typefaces, everything in as you see fit. All right, so now it's just going to load this in. Mailchimp is running very slow today, so I do apologize for that. Just wait for it to kick in. Here we go. And here we are for our landing page. Alright, so again, what we want to do is you see all the recommend all the things that you recognize. Put my teeth in today over on the Right hand side, but a couple of other things. So you can see it's got a payment button so you can actually set up to have payments. Or you've also got the ability to add in a form which you can see over here on the right hand side. Okay, so what I'm going to do is just going to delete all the various things from the template and take it down to its base level. So just delete all the various bits and pieces. Delete that, delete that, delete that, delete that, delete that, delete that. And then obviously we've got the footer at the bottom. Okay. And obviously what you can do now is if we go over to the right hand side and click style, you could style each part. You've got the header, you've got the body and then the footer. So the body, we want to have a white background to that. So I'm just going to click on body, click on color and click on white. And that's now done. And the footer, because I want the footer to be a specific color, our brand color as it were, I'm just going to click on footer, go in here and change this to a code which represents the color that we've got. Just do that, that's purple. And there you go. So then you've got your base template. So again what you can then do, so you can basically bring your image over to the header. So again you want to have your kind of like so your brand logo, as it were. Because again, the whole idea of this is to make sure that things are branded so I can input set the logo here. And again that's a bit on the big side. So I'm going to bring that down. And then what I want to do is basically bring across text. All right. Now I'm not going to sit here and spend forever talking about the past power of text and the flow of text that you actually want to put into a landing page. There are articles galore on the Internet of how you structure a landing page to actually be effective and to get people to sign up. But the key thing obviously is you need an eye catching headline. I'm going to make highlight that, click on stars and make that heading one. And then we want a kind of like a getting people interested text block underneath it. And then what? One of the things that I find really powerful with landing pages is if you're getting people to kind of like want to sign up, what you want to do is you want to present a problem and Then present your solution and the solution is what you're giving them. So if this is your kind of like get a free mini break almost that, you know, kind of like the, the problem that they're gonna have is you can't find the time to get away, you don't know where to go and wouldn't. It be amazing to get a free weekend? Oops, can't type away. Okay, so obviously you can add loads of other bits and pieces but the whole purpose you want, what you want to do is you want to make sure that people fill out the actual sign up form. So what we do is we can go here to make sure we've got a sign up form. So just grab the signup form, bring it over back into the text and it's just a standard timeup form. So you've got all the fields automatically set up over here on the right side so you can ask for people's information if you want to. So I'm just going to click on first name and add that to the actual form there it appears. First name. Now unfortunately email is always going to be the first thing but you've got first name here. We're not going to ask for any of the other information because to be honest the more information you ask on a landing page the less likely someone's going to complete it. So we don't want to actually do that. We're not going to basically worry about interest groups or whatever. And the only thing I would, the other thing that I want to change is I'm going to subscribe, I'm going to change this to enter our competition now. Yeah. And then automatically when someone puts their details in they'll get successive adequates. We don't really want to change, have that there's. You've been added to our competition. Thanks for entering, we'll be in touch very soon. So we've got that. Now the only other thing that you really should be looking to do is to add a little bit of text underneath the actual signup box and you can make this text small because this is kind of, this is what we'd call the terms and conditions. I'm just going to bring the size down to 12, but you really should add some information about how you're going to process people's data from a GDPR point of view in the UK and Europe. You really need to have something in there. So what I recommend is something along the lines of you can review our. What's it, we can view how we handle your data in our privacy policy. Hopefully you've got a privacy policy page on your website, so which you can view here. And obviously you want to make sure that there is a link there to your privacy policy. You'll. And then you want to say what you're actually going to do with your. With the data. So you'll be added to our database and receive information about our property along with further details about the competition. Now, many people would argue and say that this isn't 100% GDPR. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but certainly you need to have something there to explain what they're signing up for and the fact that you've got a privacy policy in place in terms of how you're going to handle their data. This is not the time or the place to go through into the minutiae of GDPR and how to handle data, but you really should have a privacy policy. And one of the rules of GDPR is people need to know what you're going to do with their data when they sign up. And at least by putting this kind of light in, you've got, you know, your backside covered a little bit. All right, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. If you want to go and research more of exactly what you should have, please do so. But having a link close to your privacy policy at every point that someone signs up is definitely a good practice. Okay, so obviously you can add other text and other bits and pieces. There's lots of things that you can play around with here to make it good again. This isn't the place for me to actually do that. It's much better for you to actually have a play yourself. But don't get overly designed. All right? Remember, the whole purpose is that you want people to fill the format. So the more you make it complicated, the more you clutter the design up, the more opportunities there are for people to make a mess of it. All right, so we've got that done. So what I'm going to do now is just save that and then click save and close. And this will take us back to the main landing page, kind of like value setup. So first of all, you want to give your landing page check that you've got a landing page name correct. So just wait for mailchimp to kick in. There we go. So you've obviously got the right name. Mailchimp gives you a URL. So what you want to do is probably edit this URL so that it's a Little bit more, how should we say, appropriate. Okay. And this is where mailchimp will store your competition. They'll store it at this particular address. So when you're sharing it, this is the URL you want to share. Now if you want to, you can actually create a custom domain and actually host your landing pages there. Now again, don't do this unless you're competent with playing around with DNS settings and other bits and pieces. So this is the type of thing that allows you to, instead of having it as mailchimp forward slash blurs competition, you can potentially have your actual domain. So it could be my.lovelyvenueharrogate.com competition. So you can actually make that as a branded one. But that's a conversation for another time. So click that. Just wait for this to save. There we go. Not sure why it didn't allow that. Right, so key thing here though is audience and tags. All right, now the reason this is key is because remember what we want to do is when someone fills out this form form, we want to tag them because we know that that's what they're interested in. So I'm going to go over to here, click Edit Audience. It's going to our audience. But what we want to do is we want to tag everyone who signs this form up and how we do that is just click on the plus button. We're going to click on here as ep, LP competition because we want to tag people who've completed and entered the competition so that we can communicate with them. And because we know that this is going to be kind of like for mini breaks, we also know that anyone who fills this form out is going to be interested from a recreational point of view. So what I do is just go down to type recreational. So anyone who completes this form will be added to the audience and they'll get this tag and they'll get this tag. And what that means is that because of the way that we set the automations up yesterday, because we've got this tag being added as a trigger, the email will automatically be sent saying thanks for entering the competition. So it all starts fitting together. So I'm just going to click save and that's all done. And what I'm going to do now is just check to make sure that this page is valid. So I'm just going to copy that, create a new window. And here's that page completely live. Oh, didn't work. Let's see if, because I haven't published, you've always got to click publish. Getting Ahead of myself there, click publish. That page will now be published. And now if we go over here, if I refresh this, hopefully, there we go. Our competition page is set up. So now we can complete that and add people to the system. Okay, so what we're going to do now is actually going to test this. All right, now, if you remember, what we were talking about from a Gmail point of view is the fact that you can basically create a free Gmail account and use that to create completely on the fly things. So I'm going to basically create. I've got my Gmail account. So my Gmail account is Robin Adamsmail. Then instead of just clicking IM, I'm going to go plus and I'm going to go boostly testmail.com and click Robin. All right, so this will actually go to my main Robin Adams mail Gmail account, even though it's got this plus boostly test at the back. But mailchimp will see this is a separate email address, therefore treats it differently. So I could now do this. I could click enter our competition now. I could refresh this window so hopefully it will go back to the form and I could type in robin adamsmail plus testboostly2mail.com Mailchimp will see these two emails are separate, but Gmail will see them all coming into the main Robin adamsmail root domain. So let's change that to Peter and click Enter competition now. Okay, so what we can actually do now is we can go back into mailchimp. We can go into our audience because we've just added two new people to the audience and you'll see that these numbers have actually gone up now just for reference, these numbers. Sometimes there's a little bit of a lag and I know we've added two people in. This is only showed as one added at the moment. All right. But what will happen is when we actually go, hopefully both of them will actually be in the database and it will actually be up to 14. So don't read those numbers as they're not kind of like they don't update instantaneously. Sometime there is a little bit of a lag between them actually being added to your database or whatever. You can see now it's now updated to 14. And yes, we've got two new people into the database. We've got the test, Boostly 1 and Bootly test. This is the Boostly test two, if I'm not mistaken. You'll see both of them have got the tags. So they've both been assigned to those tags. Yeah, they both show that where they first signed up was the landing page. And what we can actually do is if we want to go and check about those campaigns. So remember, we set up a competition campaign, click on the campaigns, wait for the campaigns to load in. Here we go. You'll see the competition. We'll see two visits and two clicks to the actual landing page that we set up so we can actually track how many people have gone through the process. And if we go down here to the competition sign up, thanks for registering. If I click edit, it will actually show me that there are either two people in the queue. In other words, it's just about go to actually it's already sent them. It's showing us two recipients. So those two recipients are the two email addresses that I've just logged in. I'm not going to log into my email account because, to be quite frank, it's going to take a little bit too long. But those emails will actually have been received in my email account and then obviously those emails are now part of my ongoing email communication. They're in my database. So that's how we set up a landing page in mailchimp, how we make sure that that landing page is connected to the tags. And obviously previously we set up an automation which was triggered when the tags were assigned. So we've now got all of the steps of the process. So all you need to do now is put a social media post out there which says, interested in a mini break? Visit this page to register. You give them the link of the landing page, they go, they complete the form, they, they get added to the database and they receive the thanks for being part of our competition. Look out for more details. And it all flows through very nicely indeed. And you've just seen also how we can actually test that by using the Gmail disposable address setup, by adding the+blah blah, blah after your core emailmail.com and then gmail treats that as one email address. So you don't have to keep creating lots of different email addresses. But mailchimp keeps those separately. So it means that you've basically got the ability to create unlimited test emails without having to actually create them, as it were. So that's great. And we've seen that that actually works all the way through. People have been added to the database and they've received the email. So A, B, C, all nicely flowing. So that's all the stuff that you need to know with regards to landing pages and regards to testing the one last Thing I'm going to do is to show you quickly how you can actually embed a form in a WordPress website. Now the one thing I will say is that mailchimp does provide you the ability to create embedded forms itself. If you go to audience and if you then click on the Manage Audience and click Sign Up Forms, mailchimp gives you a number of different signup forms. Okay. It gives you the hosted signup form which is actually behind the phone builder. It allows you to create HTML col and embed it in your blog. All right? Right. If you are using a WordPress website, do not do this. Use a WordPress plugin to create your website form. It's a lot easier, it's a lot simpler and gives you lots more flexibility and that's what I'm going to be showing you how to do. If you don't have a WordPress website, then you may need to use these embedded forms, as it were. They're fairly self explanatory. But realistically, if you can find a way of using a plugin for whatever platform that you're using and that plugin integrates with mailchimp, then that's really the route to go. Because those plugins are designed to be easy to use and they're a hell of a lot easier and simpler than trying to embed a specific code on your website. All right, so with that in mind, we're going to go over to a website and we're actually going to embed a form and I'll show you the process to go through for that. So the last part of this particular video is going to be how we use a plugin to create a form and connect it to Mailchimp within a WordPress website. WordPress is pretty much the main platform that most small businesses use to build their website. So hopefully it's something you're familiar with and you use. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go. I've basically logged into my dashboard, going to go to plugins and I'm basically going to add a new plugin. Okay, so let's go to plugins, Click Add New and it'll now allow me to search. Now this one I'm going to search for is called Yikes Easy Forms. Okay, so this is a free plugin there. So there's your Yikes Plugins, Easy Forms from mailchimps, from Yikes. Okay, click Install. Now. Once that's loaded in, I can now click Activate and it'll basically set the form tool Live. Here we go. And over here you will see easy forms on the right hand side. Okay, so the first thing we need to do once we've actually installed the plugin is go to Settings. And what we need to do is we need to basically connect the formula form on the website to mailchimp. And the way that we do that is we basically get what's called an API key from our mailchimp data mailchimp database. So we go to our mailchimp account, we go to the account settings. So click on account and then within this section we then go to the. Wait for it to load up. There we go, the extras and you'll see API keys. Now what an API key is, basically it's a long list of characters that is pretty unique, as it were, that allows them to recognize that this is coming from mailchimp and those two accounts need to be linked. Okay, so all I need to do now is click Create a key. Mailchimp will create the key and I recommend that you label it because if you're going to be creating a number of these keys. So he's used to. So I'm going to do is just do here go. Yikes. Easy forms. I'm then going to copy my key and then go back into the settings that I've done. I'm going to paste it into this block and click Save changes and hopefully it will tell me that there is now. Ok, so setting successfully set up. So we've now got this connection. All right, next thing we want to do is we actually want to create the first. So we go over here to opt in forms, no forms created. Okay, but you can already see over here on the right hand side, it's showing that it's automatically collected to our mailchimp account because it's pulled this information in. So that's great. So what we need to do is we need to create a form. So quite simply we're just going to call this a homepage form because this is going to be the form we're going to have on our homepage for people who are making an initial inquiry as per. Per the automation we've already got set up. So all I need to do now is once I describe that, I'm going to click create. And what it will do is it'll create that form and allow us to actually start editing it. And editing a form is exactly the same way as we did when we were playing around on landing pages. So here we've got all the fields which it's pulled in from mailchimp. So what I want to do is I want to bring first name across, click Add Form Builder and I want to click Email address and add to folder. Again I don't want to ask for too much information. The more information you ask on a form, the less likely someone's going to fill it. So a concept called form fatigue. So you get more tired the more fields that you've actually got to fill in. So if you just make it simple, first name email, that's great. Now the only other thing that we want on this particular form to happen is we want to tag people. So we can do that. So obviously here on the right hand side if we click on tags, it gives us all of the different tags for the people who are actually going to fill this form out. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tag this one. So anyone who completes this form will be tagged with the form homepage. All right, nice and simple. So what we can now do is click Update Form. That form is now ready and what we just need to do is check some of the settings over here in the right hand side. But to be quite frank, all we then need to do is actually to just basically put this shortcode into a page and the form will automatically appear. So let's just check. So go to settings. Yes, it's going to the right setting list. It's going, sorry, right list within mailchimp visibility test. Opt in Settings. I'm going to set it as single opt in. I'm going to update the records and I don't want to send an update email. And then finally submitting settings, I'm just going to check anything there. I'm just going to make sure that we update as opposed to replace anything. And you can read through those again at your length. But you're basically they're all relatively self explanatory. But what you've got now is you've got a particular form, very simple form that we created. So we can click over here, we can check the code. So just going to basically copy the code and then go to pages, go to my home page and click Edit homepage. Now this is just a standard kind of like templated site, so I've not edited this at all. So kind of like don't worry too much about what it looks like. But all you need to do is to take that little shortcode and basically put it onto your landing page. So wait for here. So what I'm going to do is going to just find an appropriate blocks. Oh, there's one I've already got. Actually, you know what, this has already been added in previously. So I'm just going to, just going to basically change this. Just going to remove this block so you can actually see the process. All right, so again, everyone's basically the way everyone creates their pages in WordPress is potentially slightly different. All I'm going to do is to basically add in. Where is it going to add in a new block. So up here, add block. I just want to add basically a code block because I just want to put some code in. It's created the code and now if I just go V control V paste it in, Then that should hopefully create the page. So if I now click update. Let's go over to preview. And see how it actually looks. Let's just see whether that's actually brought it in. So preview, new tab, Scroll down. Oops, hasn't done it because it's basically put it in as code. So I need to do is to go back to here, basically delete this block because I put it in in the wrong way. And over here I'm going to do another block. Now what you can see is that actually let's just double check, just checking something here to see where it works. No, so basically all I want to do is just, basically put just a paragraph in. All right? So the reason I think that that failed was because I tried to get clever and add in the information, basically add in the form as code. Okay. So now what I'm going to do is add that short code in, Click update. And now if I go to the preview and refresh the preview, there's the form. Now obviously this is basically gone full width and obviously we don't necessarily want it to be full width, but that's down to the way that I've actually set the form up. So again, this is purely because of the fact that this block has been set up to be a full width block. Okay. So I'm not kind of like going to edit around and too much with it because ultimately this is going to be down to the design. So if you're familiar with the design of your website, you'll obviously create a block that's not going to be full width and as a consequence it's going to work. I mean, if we wanted to, I could actually delete this underneath this block. Let's see whether it allows me to insert after. So go insert after. I'm just going to delete, add in the code and then this block I'M just going to delete the Learn more click over here. Remove block. So now this form is going to appear just underneath this block branding. If I now click update, that's updated. If we go over to the preview and I preview again. There we go. And you actually see now it's added it in where I actually put it within that block so it's not full width. So there we have a form that works. So all I'm going to do now is just do a quick test. Type in Robin email address. Remember Robin adamsmail. This is mine, you obviously need to use yours. And I'm going to call this homepagetestmail.com click submit. Thank you for subscribing. So now if we go back into mailchimp, if we go to audience we can see we're now up to 15 subscribers. So it's obviously added it straight in so we know the connection works so we can actually look at the subscribers, wait for it to load in and we should see our new homepage test email address. Keep fingers crossed. There we go. Homepage test. And we can see it's added the tag EP form homepage. And one last thing, if we want to just make sure that this email has actually been sent, we can go into our campaigns tab. Over here we can see we've got our homepage sign up. So homepage sign up and then it should automatically appear in there if memory says right. I put a condition on this for recreational business so I'm not going to worry because it won't actually triggered but that there's will actually automatically work. So if we just want to have a standard homepage, I'm just going to go in and edit and check this. Yep, it's actually sent. So everything's set up immediately after tag is added EP homepage there. So you can see that actually that has gone out to everyone. So that's the process of adding a form to a WordPress website using yikes easy forms, making sure that it's coming connected up into mailchimp to push the right information in. And now we know that when this form is completed on your website, people added to the homepage tag, it'll be added to your mailchimp database and the email automatically sends and there you go. That's how it all fits together. So you basically now we've talked about the segmentation automation side of things and we've talked about how you can go into the data capture. I'm going to do in the next video is just give you a couple of ideas and thoughts of different ways that you can use some of the technology that I've just outlined to actually build a really effective system for your business. And that's what this is about. Everything that we've talked about here is very easily replicable, but you've got to go back to those four steps. The emails you want to send, the data that you need to send, those emails, where you're going to store that data in mailchimp and then how you're actually going to get the information there. And it all flows through like that. Hope you found this useful. I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video. Hi everybody and welcome to the next video in the series of mailchimp advice, tips and guidance videos that I'm producing for the Boostly Academy. And for you guys out there, this video is going to be focusing on the nine most common mistakes I see people make with mailchimp. All right, so we're not going to be diving into mailchimp as such. I've covered that quite extensively over the last few videos and hopefully you've got a real good feel for using mailchimp and playing around with it now. But the key thing you need to be aware of is that most of the time when it comes to success with email marketing, it's not actually the tool that makes the difference. It's the strategy and tactics that you're putting in place and also avoiding some common mistakes. And that's what this video is going to be all about. It's about avoiding those obvious mistakes that I see again and again. People using mailchimp make and making sure that you don't fall into the same traps as they do. Okay. Now, I've done this video before about kind of like 12 months ago in the group, but I've updated it for 2021 and I've added a few extra bits and pieces that I've seen. So even if you've seen this before, there will be some new stuff in here. And to be quite frank, I could probably show this to most people and then come back in six months time. They probably would have not remembered what I actually said. But these are the obvious mistakes that you need to avoid when you're doing any sort of email marketing or mailchimp. If you avoid these, you are going to be much more successful with what you're doing. All right, so let's actually go and have a look at these mistakes. Okay, so the nine mistakes of mailchimp, that's what this video is going to be about. So let's go straight into it and mistake number one, hopefully something that you've picked up already in the previous videos. But having more than one audience in your mailchimp account, the fact is that you do need to be segmenting your audience. I've mentioned this several times before. A key element of success in marketing is segmentation. Being able to be specific to a group of people in your audience who have something in common is essential for success. So you need to be able to segment them in mailchimp. So what's the best way of doing it? Well, I think you probably know the answer to this already. Now, most people start by segmenting through separate audiences. Mailchimp. Now, if you're on a free account, you no longer have this option. But three, four years ago, it would be regular that people would create a new free account and they'd have one audience in there and then they'd add another and then they'd add another and it would just get very messy. Messy indeed. Okay. The audience is the core building block of mailchimp. People subscribe or unsubscribe from list or audience. And you obviously send emails to a list or an audience. But unless you've got a really good reason, you should really only have just one audience in your database. Which means that when it comes to multiple audiences, this causes problems. Because if you want to send an email to everyone in your database but you've got more than one audience, well, you can't. It's just not possible. You've actually got to send two emails. And to be honest, there are a whole multitude of other issues with regards to having multiple audiences. And this is one why the goal is really just have one list or audience, but use groups or tags to segment the database. Now, I've mentioned tags already. We used tags in the previous videos. And I really recommend that you get your head around the whole concept of tagging because they're fantastic. You can use them in a whole variety of different ways. Now, like I said, I would suggest that you have some tag structure so that you kind of like, you track your entry points. You can tack your kind of like types of customer. You can even track where they are in a sequence of emails. So you can have, say, a tag for which for welcome, a tag for kind of like ongoing, a tag for customer. Different ways of understanding where they are in their journey from being didn't even know you existed to you're the best thing that I've ever met and trying to make sure that you're tracking that, but you can use tags for all of that. And I recommend that you don't get too much into the weeds on this because, you know, your businesses aren't that complicated. But you should really be trying to use tags to track the different sectors, certainly how people get onto your list and potentially where they are in the journey, which typically is going to be whether they're a guest or whether they're just an initial inquiry. You can always use groups. So if you're using groups up to this point, there's no reason to move to tags, as it were. But if you are starting out with segmenting for the the first time, I'd very much recommend that you look at tags to do this. And like I said, they allow you to segment and split your database down based on interests, other factors. And as long as you can put people into the right tag or group, whether that's manually or through forms, you're basically going to succeed. You know, whole thing about segmentation is that segmentation means that you're being more relevant to people. And the more relevant you you are, the more likely they are to take an action. And that's what marketing at its core is all about. It's about being relevant, which is going to stimulate an action. The more relevant you are to someone, the more likely they're going to go, you're speaking to me, I'm going to pay attention. And as a consequence, they're more likely to take an action. So please warn audience only. That's the goal here. And if you want to succeed, use the tags to actually segment your audience. All right? Okay, so question point mistake number two, Something I'm called. Wanton chimp abuse. Okay? You basically don't want to mess with mailchimp. All right? Mailchimp does one thing really well. It sends emails. And its goal is to get an email into somebody's inbox. Now, anything that's going to come between mailchimp and that goal is going to be seen as being a very bad thing by mailchimp. And because of that, it's actually got what's called something called omnivore. All right? And now this is an inbuilt protection system that mailchimp's got, which basically means that it will try and track things that you can do to stop you trying to game it or to cheat, because if you do, you're very likely to be found out. Okay? So don't load emails in that you know are bad or haven't opted in. And I'll come to this in the next mistake I see, because mailchimp will know, don't send spammy emails and don't send too many emails. Don't send pointless emails because mailchimp's going to know. And don't add people from networking or other places that you've captured people's information without their approval. Because although mailchimp might not know, it's just not good etiquette. And this is the thing, is that not only are you going to be potentially undermining your legal ability to communicate with people, which we'll come to next, but the fact of the matter is that you're going to completely mess your mailchimp account up, all right? And that's something you don't want to do. So please, please, please, when you're using mailchimp, use it responsibly and ethically. I guarantee that by doing that, you are going to get a much better result. And when it comes to the legalities of kind of like sending emails, not getting consent is something that unfortunately has always been a problem, but now even more so with gdpr. Okay? So the fact of the matter is that as I've said previously, you can cannot just add people to your system and then send them emails. It just. You just can't. All right? It's basically what I call not good practice. All right? But the fact is, not only is it not progressive, it's actually against the law nowadays with gdpr. Okay? Because when it comes to gdpr, as businesses, there are a number of things that we can look at, but basically against gdpr, we basically need to be able to say that we've got consent to send emails or we justify it with a legitimate interest that allows us to. So when consent is given, it needs to be informed. In other words, they need to know what they're signing up for. Okay, so what that means is that when you've got any form on your website or anywhere else, you need to make sure that people understand what you're going to do with their email and ideally have a link to a relevant privacy policy close by. So when you see that little lines of text underneath the form box where they put their details in, you need to be clear what they're signing up for, and you need to have a link to privacy policy. So when we say clear what you're signing up for, let's say you've signed people up to a competition where they can win, you know, potentially get a free weekend break, well, when they're signing up for that, they're not Actually just signing up for that competition. They're signing up for the competition and to receive ongoing emails. So according to gdpr, you need to actually say when you sign up to the competition, you will also receive further emails down the track. Now there is a gray area here when it comes to GDPR because there's an argument that says, well, actually, hang on a minute, I should be able to enter the competition without having to sign up to the other bits and pieces. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not here to say what's right or wrong. But certainly if you are clear with people, you are certainly erring on the right side of things. Okay? Now obviously there is the other area which is legitimate interest. Now legitimate interest is I see this very much as a gray area because it's actually down to you to justify and say, yes, I feel comfortable sending this person an email. But basically what it means is that have you got a reasonable reason to send a person an email? So would it be reasonable for you to send an email to previous guests and actually get them to give you the thumb basically and communicate with them and tell them about the future offers that are around your property? Well, yes, that I would say is very reasonable. Would it be reasonable to communicate to your guests about a kind of like the fact that you are involved in some other marketing activity which is not related to their property? Well, that's not really reasonable because people have got no idea about that. And you've got their email address, but you haven't got permission to communicate to them about that. But you have got a reason to talk to them about being a previous customer and new offers and things, bits, pieces like that. So I'd certainly recommend that you kind of like look a little bit more into gdpr because I'm not a solicitor and it's not my job to be able to say do this or don't do this, but you want to basically make sure that you're educated. And the way that I look at this is to say get consent if at all possible. And if you can't get consent, at least justify when you're sending an email that you can use legitimate interest. Okay? Because GDPR is here. It is a thing. It's not going away. It's part of kind of like the operation. And there's going to be more rules. There's been a rule over in California where basically their privacy controls over there are coming in place. More and more places around the world are putting rules in to protect these personal information of people. So you need to be clear with what you're doing with the data. You need to be clear why someone is on your list. They need to to know at signup what they're actually signing up for. And obviously they also need to be able to opt out, at least. Now, one of the great things about mailchimp is the fact that every email that mailchimp sends has got an unsubscribe link, so people can opt out. Okay, just for reference, this is why you should only have one audience, because you've got two audiences. Then they could opt out from one, but then they'd still potentially be in the other audience and receive extra emails, which obviously is not what you want to happen. So that's another reason why having one audience is good. But basically, you need to make sure that you are responsible and ethical when you're capturing people's data to make sure that your email marketing as a whole works. All right, now that's from a GDPR point of view. But this kind of like people are regularly saying, well, I don't care about gdpr. That's not for me. That's a choice that you've got to make. Just like, you know, speeding on the motorway. There are lots of things that you know are a personal choice, and obviously if you get caught, you reap the consequences. But I want to bring back to one thing that I think really, really needs to be paid attention to, and that's consent. And consent really matters, because if you can get consent from someone with regards to email marketing, it is a big key to success over and above, whether you think about GDPR or not. Because think about it, when someone actually says that they're happy to receive communication from you, that means that they're actually expecting it. You know, they're actually going to. And because they're going to expect it, they're probably more likely to open it. They're probably more likely to engage with it. And that kind of like, that's actually quite important, you know, because getting consent, even if you want to use legitimate interest, getting someone to say, oh, yes, I'm happy to receive that email. Well, like I said, that's great because you're prepping them to receive the email. If you just send them an email without actually kind of like getting their consent, well, they're less likely to open it. And yes, I know that's kind of like common sense, as it were, but that means that you should really be looking to get consent at every opportunity. And just remember, does this doesn't mean to say that you can't sell the benefits of consent. You can't tell them, well, if you are on my email list, we'll send regular discounts and competitions and bits and pieces. It's in your benefit to be on our email list. You can still do that, but you've got to get consent because the more consent that you can get from your database, the more engaged it is, they're more likely to open emails. So please always try and ask for consent. Obviously with forms you're going to be doing that anyway. But even if someone is kind of like in your property and you're having a conversation before they go, get them to say yes to actually receiving further communication from you because they are more likely to engage to open, you're going to have a much healthier email list and you're going to get much more success from email marketing. Okay, so all that said, what's the next mistake? No welcome. Well, you've all probably got welcome mats at home, but actually, have you actually got a welcome email? Now obviously we've covered this already and Mark's provided a number of templates and emails that you can actually send to people. But the fact of the matter is that your most important email that you're ever going to send to someone is usually the first one that they receive. Okay? Because when someone signs up, they're telling you that they're interested in you. They're telling you that they kind of like want to learn more. So why wouldn't you take advantage of that and go back to them straight away? It's like meeting the girl of your dreams. Insert appropriate sex here or gender, as it were. It's like meeting the girl who dreams. She gives you her phone number and then you leave three weeks before you call her back. What's the point of that? You know, when someone joins your list, you need to set it up so you reply immediately. And obviously we've talked in previous videos about segmentation and automation and how to connect that to forms and so on. So hopefully you actually understand the importance of this. Because when someone signs you up for a list, they are hot for you. You want to basically go back to them with an automated email just to basically say to them, even if it's just to say thanks for being interested, you need to have something in place. Okay, so welcome automations. Right, well, first thing is that they need to be immediate. They need to be something that happens straight away. Okay? So if you're sending an email a day later or two days later, that's not Good enough. They really need to be there up front. Also, they need to be directly linked to why someone joined up and they need to refer it. So if someone completes a form on your homepage that says that you're going to send them something, then you need to send an email back to them straight away, which has got the thing that you promised to send if they signed it to a competition. Make reference to the fact that they've signed up to the competition. Because what you're doing is you're linking their action with the reaction when those two are linked. The email is much more powerful and strong because people go, oh yeah, I did sign up, I did go through that process. So they're more likely to open emails in the future because they acknowledge the fact that they've actually signed up to do this. Okay? And obviously, as we've said previously, you need to segment at sign up, if at possible, using a tags so using tags so. So you can identify where they've signed up, which entry point they came through. Now, the welcome emails also need to explain who you are and what makes you different, what makes you stand out from all the other, you know, kind of like hospitality venues in your area. Why should they be choosing you over them? Because, hey, you've got their attention. Why wouldn't you? And also the other thing you need to do with these emails is you need to make them interact, interactive. All right? If you can get someone not just to open an email, but to click in the email, to scroll in the email, what it means is twofold. First of all, it means that future emails are not likely to go to spam. They're more likely to go to the inbox because that actually helps from, kind of like from an engagement point of view, all right? Also, by interactive, it's just going to get them more interested in what you're doing. So please, please, please make sure that you're adding some level interactivity, even if it's getting them to go to your Facebook page and like and registering there as a fan or a follower of your business. All right? But the fact of the matter is that this is your first opportunity to make a good impression, okay? Don't screw it up. The welcome email, the first email sent, is the most important email you will ever send. And I see too many businesses out there. I sign up to them every day. I go onto the website forms to check they're working, whatever, and there is no automated email. And it just beggars belief. It does my nut in that people haven't taken Advantage of the welcome automation. So make sure you're not one of these people. Right, so what's the next? We're now halfway through up to my state 5. This is where we're going to start focusing on the quality of your database. And I've called this a clean chimp is a happy chimp. Alright, what do I mean? Well, your data is valuable but the key thing you need to remember is people in your audience who aren't opening emails, who aren't engaging, that's not good. And what you need to do is you need to stop hoping that they open and need to have a plan to keep your chimp clean. Now I call these people zombies. All right? They're just a term that has now been adopted. Lots of people seem to be using this term. They're people who sit on your list. They're. They're dead to you to be a sense in a sense, but they're still on your list. Now there's a possibility some of them might cure themselves and come back to be active subscribers. But there's also kind of like there's no indication that that is the case. So you need to be basically going through a process of trying to keep your database clean. Okay, you can use segments and we talked about segments previously to identify those people who haven't opened or engaged in previous emails. You can then send specific emails to those people, basically saying to them, you don't seem to have been involved or interested in our emails in the past. Do you still want to receive them? Because if they opt out, that's not necessarily a bad thing. To be honest, from an overall email marketing point of view, it is better to have someone opt out and unsubscribe from your email database than to be on your email database and never open an email. You're better off getting rid of them for a number of reasons. So when you send a re engagement email, you want them to basically decide, yes, I'm still interested. And if they say they're still interested, going back to our point of consent, they're more likely to open your emails moving forward. But if they say no, I'm not interested, then get rid of them because they're not adding any benefits at all. Now obviously there's no reason why you can't incentivise the opt in. You can't actually, there's no reason you can't say if you re opt in, we'll Send you a 15% voucher off your next stay or whatever. There's nothing stopping you doing that, but you need to get them to take action. Now, the one thing I would suggest is that once you've gone through this process a couple of times and you've got people who I classify as stubborn offenders, these are those stubborn zombies that just won't die. They won't say they're interested, they won't unsubscribe. They're just kind of like sitting in the corner looking at you going, well, what are you going to do? So what you need to do in those processes, you need to manually unsubscribe those people so that they're not going to be involved in the future. Just get rid of them. If they're interested, they will come back. Don't try and, you know, flog a dead horse, as it were, or flog a dead donkey. So the fact of the matter is that your list is a very important part of your business. It's a well that you keep going back to. It's an apple tree that every year is going to bear fruit for your business. One of the things you need to do is you need to cut off the dead weight. You need to make sure that the database is clean. And getting rid of those zombies, that will really help your deliverability overall. But it's just good business practice. Getting rid of the dead weight is something that I recommend that you do. So what's the next mistake? Well, this is one I've not really mentioned much before and hopefully it's not going to be something that you guys are going to adopt because you've seen the previous videos, but really trying to kind of like force people to go down the route of using mailchimp forms don't. Because as the image suggests, as far as I'm concerned, mailchimp forms suck. You know, they just, they just, they're not good. They've been around for 10 years and, and there are so many other tools out there and things that you can use to handle forms. There's no reason to use the mailchimp's own force. Okay? They've got their hosted form, which is the one that's actually core to each list. The fact is they give really little flexibility from a design point of view. They're hard to play around with. Use mailchimp's landing pages. Now, I know mailchimp landing pages technically are mailchimp forms, but they're really, really cool. I really like mailchimp landing pages, so I'm keeping those separate. But don't use mailchimp hosted forms. Don't use mailchimp's embedded forms, they've got lots of different limitations. The reason you're using an embedded form is because you want to put it somewhere else. You want to put it on a website, for example. So if you're going to do that, use a tool specific for the web platform that you've got. So if you've got a WordPress website, use yikes. Easy Forms, which I showed you in a previous video. Or, or if you really want to take things to the next level and you're going to use lots of forms, use a tool like Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms. Both of those are really good for WordPress. If you're using Wix, use MailMunch. I think you can almost say use MailMunch on Squarespace. Now maybe some of these tools you might need to pay for. But remember, if you're using this tool effectively, it's going to mean more people on your database, it's going to mean more bookings, it's going to be more revenue. So consider it in information in your marketing. And finally, don't use mailchimp's own pop up solution. I remember doing a jokey post in my Facebook group, the mailchimp Answers Facebook group recently where I just turn around and says, kind of like, are you using mailchimp's pop up tools? Stop. Don't use them. They're bloody useless. Now maybe going over the top slightly, but I found when I've played around with them, they're quite inconsistent in terms of how they work. They don't give you a huge amount of flexibility. Realistically, if you're going to have a pop on your website, and don't get me wrong, you know, pop ups do work. We all kind of like complain and say, oh, bloody pop up. Don't like that. The fact is, the reason they exist is because they do work. But if you're going to do a pop up, find a pop up solution that's native to the platform that you're going to be using. All right. And one last thing about mailchimp forms, something I've not written here, but I've just remembered a number of times people ask me, how can I get my mailchimp form to appear on my Facebook page? All right, so there is a way of embedding a form into Facebook. I'll be honest with you. Don't bother. The time and effort that you're going to put into trying to get your mailchimp form to work on your Facebook page is lost. It is not a positive action as far as I'm concerned, it's actually something that takes a fair amount of time. It never looks good. And I'll be honest, when I put did a survey in my Facebook group asking people whether people had actually signed up through the Facebook form, virtually none had. No one was able to comprehensively say that the time they spent putting the Facebook form and setting it up was worthwhile. It just hadn't worked. You're much better to actually just do regular posts on Facebook which lead to a mailchimp landing page, because the great thing about mailchimp landing page is that you can design that. You can sell the benefits of signing up, of completing the form. So it's much better to do that. So don't try and use mailchimp forms apart from landing pages, which are the only good forms that mailchimp ever done. And don't try and crowbar a mailchimp form into Facebook. It is not worth the effort. You're much better to just post a link to a landing page and then obviously you can sell the benefits of signing up there. All right, Right. Mistake number seven, one that I see happening far too much. In fact, it's probably one of the things that gets asked, you know, kind of like probably every couple of days in my Facebook group. And that's the whole idea of making your emails look pretty. Emails do not need to be pretty. They don't. Now, obviously this is a generalization, but the whole point I'm trying to say is that the more time you spend on making an email look pretty, the less time you're actually spending on what the email is going to say. An email that looks fantastic but has got a really bad message is going to have a negative impact. An email that doesn't look impressive but has got a really good message will still have a positive impact. So you need to focus on that element. Emails get the message across, and they're steps on a journey. All right? So you need to understand what the next step is, the journey is. And you need to think about who you're sending the email to and make sure that the words that you're using are relevant to the audience. Now, I always jokingly say, typically, the best emails you ever receive are those going to be personal emails, emails from friends, from family. Well, most of those don't have any images at all. They don't have any formatting. So from that point of view, don't overdo it. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that adding images is a bad thing. Adding images Tactically, that are going to showcase your location, that's certainly something that may be worthwhile. But if you go over the top, if you start worrying about all, all of this stuff, it's going to take away from the core message. If you look at the email templates that Mark's provided for you guys, all of those emails are actually designed to just be text emails because it's all about the content. Personally, my standard email design is a logo at the top of the email so people know that it's coming from my business, the actual content of the email and a footer. And occasionally I may chuck an image in, as it were, but that's really it. So please stop worrying too much about the way your emails look, but make sure that they sound good. Make sure that the content you're putting is relevant, okay? And when you are designing your emails, don't forget the mobile phone. The fact of the matter is that nowadays most emails are read on a phone. Over 50% of emails are opened on a phone for a first time. And generally speaking, two out of three at every email at some point is viewed on a phone. So therefore, if you don't take into account mobile phones when you're designing emails, you're going to struggle. Your emails are not going to work. Okay? So the problem you've got there, however, is that mailchimp, and this is kind of like one of the things that really surprises me. Mailchimp basically designs emails on a desktop format so you can test and prove email, you can send, send it to yourself, which is something worthwhile, or you can use something like Inbox Preview. But the fact of the matter is that you need to make sure that you're thinking about mobile when you're designing it and you can also look at your stats. So, for example, I had two recent campaigns for customers that I work with. On one campaign, 80% of the emails were opened on a mobile phone. But on another campaign, 23% of emails were opened on a phone, which basically meant that you need to understand your database, you need to understand how people are actually reading your emails, because then you can design for that in mind. So, key thing here is that mobile matters. And if you're not taking into account the way that you're designing for mobile, then that potentially is going to have a negative impact on your emails. Okay? And then the final mistake, now fortunately, I think, because this is something that I know Mark is very hot on, it's not necessarily a mistake that you guys are going to make, okay? But it's really coming down to knowing your who now when it comes to it. To send an email, you need three things. You need to know what you're going to say, you need someone to send it, and you need to know who it's going to to. And bad emails are ones that forget about who it's going to because the who matters more than anything else. Having that detailed understanding of your audience is everything. Identifying those specific avatars and speaking to them is really important across everything. And this is why I think Mark is really spot on in getting you to really drill down to who your avatars actually are and what motivates them and how are they feeling and what are they going to respond to. Because by doing that, it's going to make your marketing so much more powerful. If you know your avatar, you know what their hopes and fears are. You know the fact that they're coming to visit you because they just want to get away from their, their regular life. They want a slice of kind of like a little bit of heaven, as it were, away from home life. Or alternatively, they're business customers. They're kind of like, they don't want to have to worry about the fact that you know where they're staying so they can just concentrate on doing their job. And they know they've got a safe, secure and welcome environment when they've been basically working for the day, as it were. You know why they're interested in you. They know what's stimulated to come to you in the first place. You know what their objections are. You know the questions they're going to ask when they pick up the phone and go, hey guys, I'm really interested in coming, but can you tell me this? If you know whether they're a recreational customer or whether they're a business customer, you know those questions, which means that you can actually respond to those questions and put them into your email so you can talk to them in a voice that resonates with them. You can give them the information they need. The fact of the matter is that it's very easy for us to all blame technology when it doesn't work. But the fact of the matter is that if your email marketing is not succeeding, it's usually not technology that's a problem, it's actually us. And one of the primary reasons is because that we've forgotten the who. It really is that important. And this is reason why this is the last kind of like mistake that I see people make. Because as far as I'm concerned, you can make most of the other mistakes and kind of like struggle through, as it were. But if you're not focusing on what you're putting into your emails and making it relevant to people, then you know what, your emails just aren't going to work. And this obviously is not just for email marketing. This is in every aspect of your business and the way that you sell it to your potential customers. So don't forget the who. Okay, so there we have it. There's basically the nine most common mountain mistakes that I see now. There are lots of other mistakes that I see as well. I could quite easily do two, two or three, four more versions of this video with another, you know, 20, 30 mistakes. But these are kind of like the ones that I think are key and the ones that I want to make sure that you're aware of when you're going through your marketing. So hopefully you've written them all down and you're going to start adopting them, but just to make sure that you didn't miss anything. The nine mailchimp mistakes that you need to avoid, you need to avoid having more than one list or audience in your database. Hopefully you're already doing that. But please don't be tempted to create a new audience. You're going to avoid using bad email addresses because mailchimp will basically come down you on like a ton of bricks. So don't go out and buy email addresses and use them in mailchimp. It won't work. And don't add people to email address email. Don't add people to mailchimp unless you've got permission. And you don't want to make sure that. So you want to make sure that you're complying with gdpr. You, you don't want to ignore gdpr. You want to make sure that when someone signs up to your email list, you're got a welcome email message. Now, hopefully over the last couple of videos you've seen how easy it is to set those up and get those running. So make sure that you're setting them up, make sure they're immediate and make sure they're irrelevant to where people have signed up. Sticking with non openers, if someone's been on your list for two years and they haven't opened a single email, take the hint. They're not that into you, they're not interested in you. Doesn't mean to say just wipe them completely off the database, go back to them and send them an email and all the other people like them saying are you still interested? Do you want to still be coming on, I'll give you a 15% voucher if you want to maintain your presence on our email list. But if they don't respond to that, get rid of them. It's going to make your email list more healthy. Don't use mailchimp forms. Now, fortunately, because of the fact that I've been able to talk to you about data capture, that's something that you should almost be aware of. Find a form that's appropriate for what you're doing and the platform that you're on. Don't spend too much time worrying about the way your emails look. People get millions of emails kind of like, well, it seems like I get millions of emails as it were, and I spend less time worrying about if I can't find the information I need in an email because it's too pretty, it's failed. So don't spend too much time on the way it looks. Concentrate more on what it says. And please, please, when you're designing your emails, do bear in mind that a lot of people read your emails on mobile. Make sure that you're checking that email looks good. And then finally, do not forget the who. Don't forget who the email is going to. Don't forget the way they signed up. Don't forget the area they're interested in. Make sure that the information and the messages that you're putting to them are relevant and specific to them. If they're not, they're not going to react positively. And as a consequence, they're not going to actually come and rebook or even book for the first time with you because you're not treating them as an individual. You're not paying attention to who they are. So there we have it. Those are the nine mistakes that I've picked up with regard to email marketing, marketing and mailchimp that I see regularly. And hopefully now you've got a real good understanding of those. You've taken notes throughout this video and you're going to make sure that you don't make these mistakes. Please do not make these mistakes. All right, so this is the last in the pre recorded set of videos. The next video that you're going to see me on is going to be a live Q and A that's going to be held in the Facebook group. So if you're watching this the first time it comes out, I look forward to catching you up in the Q and A section. I know that Mark has actually set up a post so you'll be able to ask your questions and that'll be like a free, informed discussion between me and Mark because, yeah, I know a fair thing about mailchimp, but the fact is Mark knows a hell of a lot about marketing and very specifically about hospitality businesses. So I'm sure he'll be able to chip in and add value there as well. But get your questions in. We want to make sure that you're doing your email marketing as successfully as you possibly, as we possibly, possibly can. Okay? So get those in. If you're watching this on replay, then the next video is going to be a recording of the Q and A. But hopefully that Q and A is going to be really informative and it's going to answer some of the questions that you may have that you've kind of like that you obviously didn't get a chance to put live. All right, but ultimately, if you do want to get more information help from mailchimp, if you've got questions, then the best way that you can do that is to actually join my Facebook group, which is called mailchimp Answers. So if you just go and look at search on Facebook for mailchimp answers or alternatively you type in the words chimp tips fbgroup into your browser, that will automatically redirect. It's a free group and it's great place for specific mailchimp questions. Now, obviously I'm part of the booster community. I will be in the future. So if you do want to have any questions answered about mailchimp, just basically go into your Facebook group in boostly and actually type tag me in and I'll basically be able to see it. But if you want to understand a little bit more about mailchimp and you want to see some of the other questions that other people are actually putting out there, then go and join the mailchimp Answers Facebook group. It's a great place. Otherwise, thanks for watching. I hope you found these videos useful. If you are joining us in the live video, I look forward to answering your questions there. Otherwise, enjoy the live video and enjoy the information that you get. And I really hope that this has helped you get a real good handle on email marketing and mailchimp has removed any of the fear that you've had about using it and you feel comfortable and confident that this is now going to be a big asset and something that's going to help you grow your hospitality business. Thanks for watching.