Mailchimp Deconstructed:
A Journey into Automation
Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Messaging, Resources
Work smarter not harder.
Let Mailchimp do the work for you with automations. Automations (and journeys) can look very different based on your needs, but, simply put, they help streamline communication with your audience in the background automatically. It’s like magic. An automation can be a single email or a series of emails that send based on triggers that you first have to set up.
What’s a trigger?
We’ve rounded up a glossary of terms, including the difference between a classic automation and a customer journey.
Classic automation: automated emails that are targeted to send when a specific action is triggered.
Customer Journey: does the same thing a classic automation does but with more options by building an automated marketing path. These can include multiple starting points and branches.
Trigger: the action that starts a classic automation. Here is a list of all the different triggers.
Starting point: the action that starts a customer journey. Likewise, here is a list of the different starting points.
| Rules & Actions: | Rules guide a customer’s journey and help set the pace. Actions help keep your audience organized. |
|---|---|
| If/Else: | is a branch point. It works like this: If they say yes then they go down one path. If they say no they go down a different path. |
| Wait: | sets up an event that must be triggered before they continue down the path. |
| Delay: | sets up a specified time period before the contact continues on the path. |
Building a Journey
Here is what a simple email welcome series could look like.
Step one:
Choose your starting point. For this example, we’ll select ‘Signs up’. That means when someone signs up, it triggers an action.
Step two:
Select an action that will happen next. For this, we will choose “Gets email.” Design this email to be the first in the welcome sequence.
Step three:
Add a rule. In this case, let’s use the “wait” option. Next, a popup appears (seen below). Click on the “marketing activity” option, then select “opens email”. Choose the email that you set up for the first in the welcome sequence. Now, if your contact opens the email, they will progress in the welcome email series.
Step four:
Add an action. Gets email. Setup the second email in the welcome series.
Step five:
Continue this process to build out your welcome series! Add as many options as make sense to meet your business goals.
As mentioned before, automations can look very different based on your marketing objectives. At first the Customer Journey may be overwhelming because there are many components and options. The best way to get comfortable with it is playing around with the option and testing to see what works. Start with something simple, like the welcome series laid out above. Then, slowly create more complex journeys.
To learn even more about Customer Journey’s there is a very helpful video and breakdown from Mailchimp here.
Congrats, you did it! You made it to the end of the series. Now get out there and start sending some emails.