Seriously Impressive NEW Functionality on Mailchimp!

Do you use Mailchimp as your email marketing system? There’s lots of discussions around which system is best – there’s so many to choose from! But Mailchimp’s new functionality may have just bumped it up to the top of the list…

Mailchimp has recently released ‘Surveys’ and ‘Customer Journeys’ to their platform. And we’re here to explain what they do and how you can use them for your business!

Surveys

‘Surveys’ allows you to create branded and user friendly questionnaires all within Mailchimp. Other tools you could have used before this came out include Survey Monkey and Google Forms. But without paying for Survey Monkey, there was a question limit of 10. And with Google Forms there was a lack of being able to customise your questionnaires to be on brand. But Mailchimp’s ‘Surveys’ overcome both these issues!

‘Surveys’ are accessible to any user, whether you are on the free version of Mailchimp or on one of their paid plans. And just like your email campaigns in Mailchimp, you can make them look exactly how you want.

Plus, they’re really easy to use! It’s just a case of writing your question and choosing which answer format you want. The answer formats include:

• Radio Buttons – Select a single answer from a list of options
• Checkboxes – Selecting multiple answers from a range of choices
• 0-10 Range – Select a score from 0 to 10
• Open Text – Allowing users to write their opinion
• Email – A box for users to enter their email address

You can make any of your questions ‘required’, and you can easily add a tick box to your Survey to give users the option to sign up to your email newsletter list.

Once you’ve created your Survey, you’ll be able to share it with whoever you like. You’ll be given a link which you can include in your emails, on social or on your website.

There are so many uses for Surveys:

• Measuring customer satisfaction
• Gaining customer reviews and testimonials
• Asking your customers what products/services they want to hear about
• Getting comments from your staff about their engagement and input in the business
• Building customer loyalty by getting your customers involved with business decisions such as a logo change or product improvement.

Customer Journeys

More and more digital marketing is becoming ‘automated’. And so is Mailchimp! There was already some automated functionality within Mailchimp, such as setting up emails to be sent out when:

• Someone signs up to your email newsletter
• It’s someone’s birthday
• When someone purchases something from your online shop
• If someone leaves something in their basket in your online shop, but didn’t purchase

The above are now known as ‘Classic Automations’, and are still very effective.

But with Customer Journeys, you’re able to go much further. You can set up ‘workflows’ that your customers go through automatically depending on the actions they take. For example:

1. Your customer signs up to your email newsletter
2. A ‘thank you for signing up’ email is sent to them along with product/service information you think they may be interested in
3. If the customer clicks on a specific link in the email, 2 days later they get sent an email with a 10% off code for the specific product/service
4. If the customer purchases, 2 weeks later you can send them other products/services you think you could upsell to them

This is a very simple example of a ‘Customer Journey’. You can make them as long and complex as you like!

‘Classic Automations’ are available for both free and paying users of Mailchimp. ‘Customer Journeys’ are only available to those on Mailchimp’s ‘Standard’ Plans or higher.

Summary

Both Surveys and Customer Journeys are still in the testing phase (Beta), so they may not be fully functioning for every user just yet. But keep an eye on your account, because they will be soon!

We’d love to hear what you think about these 2 new bits of functionality. Will you be using them? We definitely will!

If you have any questions on email marketing campaigns or Mailchimp, please do contact us. We’re a flexible outsourced marketing agency based in East Sussex working with SME’s across the UK! And we offer Mailchimp Training! Learn more about us and our other services.