A couple of tips 'n' tricks with MailChimp

We use MailChimp at MarketingFuel both internally as well as for the majority of our clients so we often find ourselves being asked the inevitable “how do you…” questions. This weeks post is about a couple of our more common questions, because if they are asking it you might be wondering as well.

Q Where can I find a simple app to edit my images and do stuff like add text to photos to include in my email campaign?

A I often point clients to http://www.ribbet.com/ which is a fantastic online photo editor. This was recommended by a friend of mine who doesn’t use the tools we use here at the studio and for the average business owner it will save a lot of time and help to generate great results.

Q Can you please explain list segmentation to me?

A Imagine your list of subscribers and the various fields of data each one has, such as City, Interests and other profile information. Now if you took all the people who live in Hamilton, that’s a segment. Similarly all people who live in Wellington and who like Movies and Restaurants could be a segment. The way these work in MailChimp is when you have a list of subscribers with various profile fields you can create and save segments of people based on the segmentation criteria. One big benefit is that subscribers are not unique to a segment as they can be included in more than segment.

Q I want to use a merge field Hi*|FNAME|* but when it is viewed online or shared people see “Hi <<First Name>>” how can I get around this?

A So first, why this happens; The merge field pulls a name from the database, when the email is viewed online there is no name so the merge tag fails. A simple solution is to use the following merge tags.

Hi *|IF:FNAME|* *|FNAME|* *|ELSE:|* there *|END:IF|*
This is basically saying that if there is a first use it otherwise just use there. Hi Robert or Hi there. The parts you edit are the greeting “Hi” and “there” i.e. “Gidday” and “Cobber”

So there it is, a couple of quick tricks to help you use MailChimp a little better. if you need help with MailChimp or Email Marketing in general we can create templates, help with content writing and interpreting the analytic reports.