How to Use MailChimp to Follow-up with Your Most Engaged Subscribers

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Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

According to a report by DMA, 77% of ROI from email campaigns comes from segmented, targeted and triggered campaigns. If that’s the case, why not target your most engaged subscribers, those who have opened your emails recently, with a campaign of their own?

Let’s take a look at how to use MailChimp to create a targeted campaign, such as a special sale, to just those users. In this example, we’ll send target only list members who have opened the most recent email you sent.

Note: plain text campaigns don’t let you track opens, so you won’t be able to target this audience if you only use plain text campaigns.

Start by logging into your MailChimp account and going to the Campaigns page using the top menu bar. On the top right you’ll see the Create Campaign button. Click on that:


We’re going to start by creating this message the way we would any other campaign email in MailChimp. For this example we’ll select a regular campaign:


Now we’ll have the choice of who to send the campaign to. Normally, you might send it to your whole list. But not this time. This time we’re going to select “Group or new segment”.


Selecting that will bring up some options on how to create the segment. Recently we sent out a campaign creatively titled “Engagement Campaign”. We want to send this new email only to people who opened that campaign. Because that’s our only segmentation condition, it won’t matter if we select “any” or “all” for the matched subscribers drop down:


Next, we’ll start setting up the conditions that will choose our segment. In the first condition drop down, we’ll choose “Campaign Activity”, since we’re selecting users based on their interaction with one of our campaigns:


For the second drop down, we’ll choose “opened”.


Since we only want this message to go to people who opened our campaign “Engagement Email”, in the last drop down we’re going to find the “Sent Campaigns” and select our campaign title from there:


Notice below that near the top of the page, MailChimp tells us how many people are going to get our new message. For our example we’ve only got one member of the list that matches, but that’s ok — it’s kind of a small list to begin with. From here, click on Next at the bottom of the screen.


Next we see the Campaign Info screen. We’ll fill this out as we normally would. Then click Next:


Again, this step is no different than what we would normally do to set up a campaign. Choose the template and keep going.


While we’re designing and adding copy for this message, we want to keep in mind that this audience read our last campaign, so we should make sure we’re targeting them appropriately:


Once we’ve gone through the usual motions of setting up a message, we’ll get to the review screen. This one will be a little different than a typical review screen, but not by much. Under “List” we can see “Segmentation Conditions:”


Clicking on that will show us, one more time, the conditions we used to create this segment. It’s not a bad idea to review this one more time before we move forward:


Once we’re sure it all looks good, go ahead and schedule or send the message, just like any other campaign:


MailChimp, of course, wants to make sure we’re really, really sure. But we’ve got this. Go ahead and hit that final send button.


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