Building relationship with customers is a long game. One big lesson from 2020 is the importance of connecting with audiences online.

But, social reach is controlled by the mysterious algorithm and search-engine ranking is competitive. Do not squander the holy grail of connection that is the inbox.The inbox is a guaranteed place that you connect with your audience with consistency. You just need to make sure your are following best practices.

Let’s start here.  

More than an email marketing platform, a full CRM. 

A lot of people know that Mailchimp is an email marketing system, but oh it’s so much more. Mailchimp is a complete Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). While it might not be what you typically think of as a CRM, there are three different types. Operational, which focuses on generating leads and converting them to contacts. Collaborative, which shares customer information between departments. And analytical, which analyzes customer data and provides insights to better customer relationships. Mailchimp falls under the latter by collecting, organizing and delivering insights based on customer behavior. Between their options for organizing your audience, personalization and email automation, we find that they cover all the bases. Heck, you can even send postcards now. Like in the mail.

Organize your audience. 

Organizing your audience isn’t always easy, but setting up the systems to do so will set you up for success and provide the best insights. Here is a quick run of why you need to organize your audiences.

1. Get to know who your people are.
   Knowing your audience will allow you to better deliver content that will serve them, entertain them, or solve their problem. This will increase engagement and lead to a better relationship.
    
2. Don’t waste your time with unengaged contacts.
   Why waste your time creating content for people who aren’t opening or engaging with your emails. You want to see who your fans are and cultivate a relationship at every turn.
   
3. Organize people by their interests.
   By using tags, groups and segments, Mailchimp gives users the ability to break a large audience into group of like interest. This allows you skip cramming all the information into one email, and instead, deliver exactly what people are looking for to their inbox.
   (Don’t worry, we deep dive into this in our next blog.)
   
4. Skip on sending generic messages.
   Your audience will get tired of reading generic content that doesn’t feel specific to their industry, problems or needs. At best, they will begin to ignore your emails, and possibly unsubscribe.

A final note.  

Having a large audience in Mailchimp can be good. Having a disengaged audience, however, is not. If people are not engaging with your emails, what is the point of having them on your list to begin with? We recommend go through your contact list at least once a year. If your contacts haven’t opened any of the recent emails you sent, scrub them from your list. 

Digging the Mailchimp information? Keep reading more in the Mailchimp Deconstructed series where we break Mailchimp information into bite sized pieces. Next, we will talk about all things tags, groups and segments.

Feeling overwhelmed? We can help!