Chapter 3: Creating An Email Marketing Campaign

Hey there friends!

Now that we have created an email marketing template with all the necessary ingredients to drive results, it is time that we create the first campaign where we’ll use this template.

Again, we’ll be using MailChimp to create this campaign, but you can apply the same steps on any other email marketing app, you’ll just have to know your way around the dashboard.

Creating the Campaign

Create Email Campaign

To create a campaign from scratch on MailChimp, you have to go to your dashboard and click on the “create campaign” button to open the campaign creation menu.

Next, click on the “email” option.

There are several types of campaigns that you can create.

If you stay in the “regular” tab, you’ll be able to set up a regular campaign to broadcast news, to promote products, or to send emails to your new subscribers.

Let’s now click on the “automated” tab to see what type of automated campaigns you can create with this tool.

Automated campaign setups you can access from this menu include “welcome new subscribers”, “email subscribers when they’re tagged”, “respond to subscriber updates”, automated campaigns for eCommerce activity, and “date based” campaigns.

For this example, we are going to create a welcome email campaign to send a welcome email to subscribers that join our mailing list when they opt-in through the sign-up pages and pop-ups that we’ll set up in the following lessons.

To do this, click on the “subscriber activity” sub-tab under “automated”, and then select “welcome new subscribers”.

Next, enter the name of this new campaign into the “campaign name” field.

Now click on the “select an audience” menu to select the audience to whom you’ll send this message. You can create audiences from the “audiences” page in the dashboard.

For this example, we are going to select an audience that we created to add subscribers that sign up through our different sign-up forms and pages.

You can click on “begin” after you select an audience so you can start setting up the campaign.

Setting Up The Campaign

Setting Up Email Campaign

Now it is time to start configuring your campaign set up.

By default, this tool pulls information from your account to fill in information in the campaign, and uses stock content to fill the email.

Let’s see how you can edit this information to add your own configurations.

Start in the “sends to” section.

Here you can select whom you send this campaign and at what moment.

By default, this is configured to send the message to new contacts immediately after they sign up.

If you select this campaign set up you can leave this at its default value, but you can click on “edit delay and recipients” to select a different timing and contacts in case you’re configuring a different campaign set up.

Ok, let’s now move to the “from” section.

Here you’ll add the sender’s name and email address.

By default, MailChimp adds the company info and email address in your profile as the sender, but you can click on “edit from” to customize this information.

Let’s now move to the “subject” section.

Here you can customize the subject line and preview text by clicking on “edit subject”, and we strongly recommend you to check our tips, tricks, and recommended best practices to learn proven ways to craft results-oriented subject lines.

Let’s finally move to the “content” section.

Here you can edit the design and content of the email you’ll send with the campaign.

To edit this, click on the “edit design” button.

In this example, we are going to show you how to replace the stock email template with the template we helped you design in the previous lesson, as well as how to add the content corresponding to this campaign.

To replace the stock design with your new template, start by clicking on the “template” option in the lower bar.

Next, click on the “saved templates” tab.

Now click on the template selection preview, and then on the “change template” button.

Now that you’ve loaded your template into the email, all you have to do is to replace the placeholder content with your own.

In this example, we are going to start by replacing the placeholder headline with a welcome greeting for the user.

Next, we are going to replace the placeholder copy with our own welcome message for the user, as well as a call to action to invite the user to visit our website by clicking on the button below.

Then we are going to click on the “edit” button in the CTA button to change the stock CTA text, and the stock “web address” with our own website URL.

Click on “save and close” to save these changes, and then click on “save and continue” to continue to the next step.

Now that you’ve configured everything, you can click on the “start sending” button to activate the campaign.

And that is it!

As you can see, creating an automated email marketing campaign is the easiest thing to do when you use the right tools!

Chapter 2: Setting Up The Perfect Template For Your Emails

Chapter 4: Creating An Automated Newsletter Campaign