Email marketing is far from dead, in fact, it’s still one of the more effective marketing tools.

Imagine going a day without checking your email? I can’t either. This is why it works and MailChimp is there to help you fine tune your email campaigns while helping you see your site in a new light.

When you make the most of the tools at your disposal, MailChimp changes your website in a positive way. It’s more than automated emails. It’s a chance to improve your site and your marketing at the same time.

Campaign Reports – Your Secret Weapon

One of the top rookie mistakes among MailChimp users is not using the campaign reports. You already know the messages are being sent, but what else do you know? There’s very little you can’t track. For instance, track general performance, activity within the message, see if your list is growing or declining and even check revenue based off your campaigns.

MailChimp’s reports show you when a campaign is wildly successful or if a recent change has subscribers leaving. For instance, if you’ve changed your blog strategy, subscribers could be leaving due to the new content. You can even see if your latest signup strategy is working or if something new is in order.

Custom Forms For More Signups

The type of signup form you use matters. The text, the colours, the font and the offer you use to entice signups all matter. MailChimp changes your website by letting you customise forms to best match your brand and campaign. The next step is to test your custom forms in different areas of your site. For instance, 63% of marketers found having a signup form during the purchase phase is most effective.

Easy Segmentation For Targeted Results

Are you sending the same email to your entire audience? Is your list dwindling and new signups leaving quickly? Custom forms help lead to more signups, but that doesn’t help you convert your list into customers. This is where segmentation comes into play. In MailChimp’s tests, segmented lists have a 62.81% higher click rate and an 8.54% lower unsubscribe rate.

With your reports, you can segment lists based on where users signed up on your site, what offer they signed up for, location and much more. You could even offer different subscribe options to allow your signups to segment themselves. You can then target campaigns for each segment, yielding better results.

Test What Does And Doesn’t Work

Does your signup form lead to more signups above the fold, as a pop-up, after a purchase or on a sidebar? Every site and audience is different. MailChimp changes your site by showing you what does and doesn’t work. Why leave a form that’s not working on your site? Customise and test it until you find exactly what works. Something as simple as tweaking your call-t0-action on the form could make a major impact in lead generation.

Rediscover Your Audience

Do you honestly know what your audience wants? If you’re sending out the wrong type of emails, your unsubscribe and unopened message rates will quickly let you know. Take this as a learning experience. Rediscover what your audience wants from you. Do A/B testing on different types of messages.

It can also be an eye-opener as to whether the content on your site is what users want. For instance, are your product descriptions leading to conversions or not? Test out different product descriptions for your emails and you might find those work better. Add them to your website too and you could see a boost in sales. Learn what your audience likes and wants and you’ll improve not only your emails, but your website.

Try Out MailChimp Yourself

As you can see, MailChimp changes your website. Use the information from your campaigns and reports to make improvements on the design and content on your website. All these improvements help increase signups and sales. With all the free guidance on MailChimp’s site, it’s easy to setup, test and improve campaigns.

Eager to try out MailChimp for yourself? Contact StuartMedia today to find out how to add MailChimp to your website today. 

Image: Bernard Goldbach

WordPress doesn’t have to work alone. By integrating with other platforms, you get two-in-one benefits.

From storing files to managing your email subscriptions, merging platforms gives you additional functions and helps automate tasks. It also saves you time from having to always do things separately.

While there are quite a few platforms WordPress integrates with, these are some of the most useful. No matter what type of WordPress site you have, you’ll benefit from using at least one or two of them.

MailChimp

MailChimp gives you the ability to design custom email marketing solutions. It’s one of the most popular email marketing platforms and even provides analytics to monitor how your campaign is performing. When you integrate with WordPress, you can add sign up forms that feed information directly into MailChimp for use with any of the platform’s numerous features.

MailChimp recommends a collection of plugins to make integration easy. Each has its own features to provide the right tools for your needs.

Slack

Slack is a messaging tool that allows for powerful collaboration. You can organise conversations, share files with other users, conduct meetings and much more. When managing a multi-user WordPress site, Slack helps you stay on top of what’s happening.

Integrating WordPress with Slack keeps you aware of various actions taken by your team, such as new posts or edits. You can customise which notifications you receive and for what. There are two main ways to integrate – via the Slack plugin or through Zapier, which we’ll talk about below.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a popular cloud storage service that also works well for sharing files on your website. For instance, if you have an ebook for visitors, the ebook could be stored on Dropbox. It’s also ideal for sharing files among members of your team. The most common use when integrated with WordPress is site backups. Imagine knowing your backups are always safe in the cloud should anything happen to your site.

While there are a variety of Dropbox plugins, one of the easiest ways to integrate is via Zapier. Currently, Dropbox doesn’t offer a direct integration via their own site.

Twilio

Twilio is designed as a cloud solution for text messaging, VoIP and voice. From tracking calls to sending out appointment reminders, it’s a must have tool for communicating with customers and within your business. When you integrate it with WordPress, you have the ability to send automatic messages to text subscribers and even post to WordPress via SMS.

The way you use Twilio mainly depends on how you integrate. With several plugins to choose from and Zapier integration, you get all the power of the SMS and voice tool with your WordPress site.

Zapier

Zapier should be a familiar term by now. As you might have already guessed, it’s a service for helping integrate other services. It’s not just for WordPress either. The idea of the service is to combine the best web apps together to automate tasks and do more with your data. The service works via various Zaps. You use Zaps to connect any two Zapier supported apps.

All of the platforms mentioned here are supported by Zapier. The easy setup of trigger and action makes it a must use tool for integrating platforms you already use to make the most out of them. Zapier offers numerous Zaps for WordPress.

From social media integration to ecommerce sharing, there’s likely a Zap to integrate with platforms you’re already using. Zapier just makes it more efficient and easy.

Conclusion

Get more from WordPress and the platforms you may already be using by integrating them. Receive real time notifications and store backups securely. Manage all your integrations in one place and boost your email marketing. The choices are endless. Choose the platforms that match your goals and integrate them today.

Need help with an integration? Let StuartMedia help and make your site more efficient than ever.

Image: Serge Kij