Top 5 Mailchimp Beginner Mistakes

Below are the five most common mistake that I see people new to Mailchimp make.

1. People have more than one audience (list).
2. Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word causes text to lose formatting.
3. Images that are too small or are added to text content blocks distort and pixelate.
4. Email campaigns contain too much content.
5. Email addresses are old or invalid.

Read on for further information about these issues.

Don’t Have More than One Audience

An audience is the ‘thing’ into which we add our contacts. When we send or publish a marketing campaign, we do so to an audience (or segment, which is a part of an audience).

Mailchimp have recently renamed lists to audience. Part of the reason for this is to convey that an audience is a singular entity into which we add our contacts rather than having multiple lists.

Once we have a single audience in Mailchimp then there is one place where all data about contacts is kept. We then use, as mentioned before , segments to divide our list for our targeting purposes.

Copy & Paste from Word Causes Problems

Microsoft Word is not HTML. Email is HTML. Unfortunately if we copy from Microsoft Word into Mailchimp, the formatting of text will be ‘all over the place’.

If you use Word and want to paste into Mailchimp then the safest thing to do is paste the Word content into a text editor and then copy that text and paste into Mailchimp.

Adding Images That Won’t Work

There are certain ‘rules’ regarding images and Mailchimp. These are:

1. Don’t add an image to a text content block.
2. Images must be a minimum of 600px wide.
3. Images must be one of the filetypes; JPG/JPEG, PNG or Gif.

Unfortunately if we get any these wrong, our images may well look distorted, pixelated or may not show at all.

Ensure Email Addresses Are Valid

Every contact that is added to a Mailchimp audience must have an email address. Email addresses do however become obsolete; people change jobs, companies change their domain name, people change their name and so on.

It is worthwhile checking that the email addresses you add to Mailchimp are valid before importing those email addresses. If a significant portion of the email addresses you import are considered risky or invalid, Mailchimp won’t let you import your contact email addresses.

There are numerous services that will check the validity of email addresses such as Kickbox and BriteVerify.

Less Is More When It Comes to Content

All too often I see people new to email marketing sending way too much content. In general, the organizations getting the best results from email marketing are using a simple layout and never more than five or six ‘articles’ per campaign. The content for each ‘article’ should just be a teaser and the reader should then click a button to view the full content.

There are many reasons for keeping our email marketing short and sweet. The three biggest reasons are:

1. In Mailchimp we can tell where people click; if we don’t have somewhere for people to click we don’t know if they’ve shown interest in the content.
2. Gmail, the largest email service, clips messages that are too long.
3. Recipients can become confused by multiple stories. Many organizations have found higher conversion rates by focusing on a single objective per email message.