In this video I'll introduce you to marketing email systems the MailChimp marketing email service and
email auto responders marketing e-mail is different than transactional email in that it's initiated
by the website or the email list owner not an action performed by the person receiving the e-mail.
And it's sometimes called bulk e-mail because it generally involves sending the same exact e-mail to
a list of subscribers at once.
A good example is an e-mail newsletter that goes out periodically to a list of subscribers and the list
grows as people join by filling out a form on a Web site.
By the end of this lesson you'll have a marketing email service at MailChimp and you'll understand marketing
e-mail and auto responder systems.
Let's start by checking out the MailChimp bulk e-mail or marketing e-mail service.
Go to the resources page from your Wordpress dashboard at the student's sandbox or just navigate to
students.
WP of course dot com and click resources near the bottom.
There's graphics and miscellaneous and there's a link right to MailChimp.
It's known as one of the best.
There are a few other services but MailChimp is excellent because it allows you to have a list of up
to 2000 subscribers for free.
They begin charging you above 2000 subscribers but this is a great way for starting up inexpensively
or starting your clients out without having to pay for an e-mail service.
MailChimp also really easy to use.
There are a lot of third party services that work with Wordpress and MailChimp and it's very very powerful.
They're well known in the industry for being able to successfully send and securely send bulk emails
to lists as large as thousands tens of thousands even millions of subscribers at a time on the MailChimp
home page go down to the top right or down here on the front page and click sign up free.
All you need is to choose a valid email address which you'll need to open an email they send you and
confirm your account and choose a username that no one else is using and a password MailChimp as you
sign up and log in will direct you to set up the proper address and email fields so that you can comply
with the spam laws so that they can send out bulk emails on your behalf and have no problems.
Once you've created your account you'll be able to create different lists and you can use multiple lists
within your MailChimp account and you can even create sub lists called segment's or groups within a
particular list.
So a list in MailChimp is just a single series of email addresses and possibly other information like
names or addresses and phone numbers that you can keep within your MailChimp account especially email
addresses so that you can send particular emails to that group or that list all at once.
Templates are just email designed templates that you can save and reuse for later and you can use heading
images and logos inside of those templates campaigns in MailChimp are single emails that have gone out
or you're making to go out to a single list so once you've got all your account information set up within
MailChimp the first thing you should do is to create a list.
You can navigate to the lists page and then at the top right click Create a list and then create a name
for it.
Now once you have a list created click on the name of that list so that it opens itself into a page
and let's go over what the different tabs are across the top here and take a look at what they do.
First of all you can look at the stats of course for people that are signing up for your list.
And when you can manage the subscribers in some different ways like you can unsubscribe multiple addresses
at a time you can create groups within a list and segments and you can do some other things generally
adding subscribers is not something we do because we're working with wordpress Web sites.
But you can add UPSs subscriber manually or if you already have a list you can import subscribers using
a CXXVI file or an Excel spreadsheet file to get those names and e-mails onto your MailChimp list the
settings tab is where you can change and modify all the different information that you put in when you
signed up the place that I use mostly is the sign up forms button.
Go ahead and click the sign up forms button and there's four different types of sign up form areas that
you can manage for this particular list.
One is general forms where you build and design your forms adding or subtracting fields for collecting
data for the list.
And this is also where you would define and edit your response emails.
This is the first place we're going to check out with MailChimp in this video.
But just to go over what the rest of the areas are inside of Sign-Up forms this embedded forms area
is where you would generate some code to embed into your web site to collect Sign-Up so sign up form.
You can get from MailChimp and you get a little bit of code and you can manually place that in your
Wordpress Web site and you're off and running.
We'll do that in the next video a subscriber pop up is very similar to an embedded form.
But as you can probably surmise it pops up in front of the Web site at a prescribed time and a form
can be embedded there inside of a pop up with pop ups you can define conditional elements so that you
can say that oh if a pop up comes up in front of someone and whether they join it or whether they close
it it won't pop up a second time.
And then finally there's some form integrations that MailChimp provides and you can then use forms on
your Twitter account or in some other places.
I generally don't use those but I really use the general forms to create forms and response emails and
also the embedded forms code quite a lot.
Let's click general forms to get a look at how we create the fields for our forms for signing up for
the list as well as the response emails now that we've klick general forms under the Sign-Up form section
of MailChimp.
We can control both the forms that users will use to subscribe to the e-mail lists as well as the response
emails that MailChimp will send on our behalf so that people can opt into the list and conform with
the commercial e-mail spam laws.
We call those auto response e-mails because they are e-mails that are generated automatically when the
person takes an action like joining a list and giving the Web site or the owner of the list permission
to send them e-mails in the future.
It's always a very good idea to use what's called a double opt in system where the person first fills
out a form on a Web site and then they receive an e-mail asking them to confirm their e-mail address.
If they don't click confirm in the e-mail address they won't join the email list.
But if they do then the website owner or the e mailing list owner knows that they've given express permission
to send them e-mails.
Also MailChimp provides a link at the bottom of every e-mail that's required by law which is an unsubscribe
link so you can assure people that subscribe to your list that they can unsubscribe at any time.
The other thing that's required by law is to have an the name of a business and an actual address.
In each commercial e-mail that gets sent are each bulk e-mail that gets sent to the user.
In doing this MailChimp keeps their email servers clean from fraud or from illegal activities and it
prevents their email servers or IP addresses from being accused of spamming if you scroll down just
a little bit you can see that there is a default sign up form that's right here and on the right side
you can see you can use these buttons to add fields to it.
You can click on any of these fields and you can see that there's a plus or minus to add a field or
get rid of this field right here.
And sometimes you will have a message and you can click the edit button here at the right to edit the
content and put anything you like in there.
Which would be a message at the top of your form.
And we don't always use these actual forms and have them designed this way later on in a future video.
In this chapter I'll show you how you can have your forms styled to look really good on your website
even though you have forms styled a certain way with MailChimp.
But for now let's go back up and finish this video by looking at the drop down here under where it says
forms and response e-mails.
If you click the arrow on the right hand side you can see there are a whole bunch of different forms
and response e-mails that you can edit within your MailChimp account for the particular list that you're
managing.
The first thing we'll look at is a sign up thank you page.
Let's just take a look at that.
Now it does look like the form that we filled out but instead of fields to fill out all it has is some
text and then a button that says return to the Web site.
So the thank you page just tells the user that to complete the subscription process you need to click
the link in the email that we just sent you.
So if I go back up and I open up the dropdown again the next thing is the opt in confirmation email
we can edit this content.
And now this is a web page but this is an email that goes out to the user that subscribed to a list
using your form.
It says Please confirm subscription and of course you can edit that.
And it's there's a button that says yes subscribe me to this list and there's some other text that you
can edit here as well.
Now the next step would be if they click the button in the confirmation email they would go to a confirmation.
Thank you page.
Now this opens up a web page not an email and if you're using the default thank you page with MailChimp
you can edit the content just a little bit.
You can put a link to a PBF download or something like that.
Or you can send them to a particular web you Arel at your Web site and you can provide whatever information
that's there.
We'll be making Thank you pages and customizing our optin e-mails in the next video.
So when they go to the thank you page.
There's one more item that always comes in.
If you choose to.
And once they confirm and go to the thank you page you might want to send them a final welcome email
and you can uncheck this box so that they don't get a final welcome email.
But if you have it checked and the user will get a final welcome email in addition to the opt in confirmation
e-mail that they got before once they've opted in you can opt to send them another e-mail that has maybe
a link to the download.
It also by law has to tell them what they signed up for and you can see that it provides the unsubscribe
link and some other information down here in the next video will set up all of these items and test
them on our WordPress Web site.
In this lesson you set up a free account at MailChimp for sending marketing e-mails.
Otherwise known as bulk e-mail and you created a list within your MailChimp account.
You also checked out the Sign-Up up form system MailChimp provides and the auto responder e-mails that
get sent to provide a double often system to get permission from subscribers to send them e-mails in
the future in the next video Julias MailChimp embed code to place a sign up form on a WordPress Web
site and explore the thank you pages and in emails that MailChimp uses as a part of the sign up process.
Let's go