How to Build an Email List with MailChimp?
Do you have a blog?
You know how to write content for your blog, and getting a nice amount of traffic on your blog?
But still, you are missing a huge potential from your blog, which you can generate easily.
Want to know what it is?
This powerful aspect of a blog is called “E-mail List”…
Let me elaborate a little bit more:
When a visitor lands on your blog from Google or from any social media website, he reads your article and gets necessary information. He liked the way you presented the information and found your blog useful.
Do you know what happens next?
The visitor closes his browser or just head up to another website or blog with a new query. After that probably he forgets the URL of your blog but wants to visit again…
What can you do in all this regard?
You can get his e-mail address so; you can contact him in future and convert him into a returning visitor and a regular reader of your blog posts.
In the future, you can send an e-mail to all your subscribers to have a look at your latest blog post. Through this, you have a complete visitor bank for your blog.
Along with that, if you plan to step up in Affiliate marketing or want to sell your own product to make money online you can send them an e-mail about that. Because they are your regular readers and subscribers, they trust you and will be happy to buy something from you.
This creates a WIN-WIN situation for both, you and the readers of your blog. They get updates related to their niche of interest and you get a complete list of peoples who trust on you.
But the primary question is that “How can I start building my e-mail list?” and what’s the easiest way to do it.
Let’s start guys…
How to build your E-mail list? (Tutorial)
In this tutorial, we will use an automated e-mail marketing tool to make it easy for us to manage our email subscribers.
An e-mail marketing tool can help us collecting e-mails, send them automated welcome messages and along with that you can send your e-mail to all of them once. This will also allow users to unsubscribe from your newsletter or e-mail list, anytime if they want.
You can also export your subscribers in an excel sheet for any personal purpose.
For our tutorial, we will use an e-mail marketing service called “Mail Chimp” because I am using this service for the last 2 years and the experience was great. They also offer a FREE plan for the beginners to jump into e-mail marketing.
Setting up MailChimp
Step 1: Creating an account on MailChimp
- First of all, all you have to do is to go to MailChimp’s website and click “Signup for Free”
- Provide your e-mail address, choose a username and a password
- Sign into the e-mail account you provided and click on the verification link in the e-mail, you received from MailChimp.
- Once you verified your e-mail account, they will ask you to complete your profile. Just fill the profile with the necessary information.
- You can also connect your MailChimp account with Facebook or Twitter profiles, but it is not necessary and I am not going to do it here.
Now to get started, you have to create a list first. List are set of contacts, you can them create signup forms for that lists or set up a campaign to e-mail all people in that list.
To do this, just click on “Create list” button.
Here you can see all lists you have created in the past or can create a new one.
Once you click the button, it will display a form to create a new list. You have to fill out the necessary information. Here are some important terms to know, before you fill this form.
- Default from email address: This is your official e-mail of your blog on which you can receive emails because people can reply to this email.
- Default from the name: This is the default name, shown to all the subscribers of that list whenever an e-mail is sent.
Once you completed the form hit “Create list” and after the list is created you will see with a screen like this.
If you have e-mail list previously, you can import it into your MailChimp’s list or you can start building your e-mail list from scratch, by creating a signup form.
Now the second step is to create a “Sign-up form” and place its code on your blog.
Step 2: Creating a signup form and placing it on your blog.
Now, we have created a list and it’s time to start building it. You need to place a signup form on your blog, in order to make people able to subscribe your blog.
Here is “How to do it?”
- Go to your MailChimp’s dashboard.
- Click on “View Lists” link, in the “Create a list” section.
- Here you can see the list, you have recently created.
- Just click on the list name.
- Now go to “Signup forms” tab.
Here you can see a number of different types of signup forms, which MailChimp supports.
- Because we want to use a signup form for our blog, choose “Embedded forms”
After that, you will see a screen like this.
Here you can create your contact form to fit and suit your blog’s template. Once you finished designing your “Subscription Form” just copy and paste the below code in your blog, wherever you want this contact form to appear.
To make your Signup form look better, you can change the size, color, the text and also the number of fields.
Once you start getting subscribers, you can send those emails through “Campaigns” and can also export it and e-mail them manually. There are thousands of free and professional looking email templates in MailChimp to work and create your own designs.
The Last Words:
I’ve tried my best to keep this guide and tutorial simple and easy to understand for beginners. This is the simplest way to set up an e-mail list and integrate it into your blog. There are lots of more features of MailChimp and also several tactics to improve your subscriber’s rate, which we will discuss in future posts.
