One of the saddest situations of a small business owner is when nobody knows that your business exists. Today we’ll show you how to use mailchimp to attract customers and keep your business top of mind, so that never happens to you. By the end of this video, you’ll know how to capture contact info from potential customers, even if you don’t have a website, how to set up an email newsletter and how to automatically engage your customers when they sign up to your email list. Let’s jump in. To get mailchimp, head to the following website. You can click on the card in the top right, or I’ve included a link in the description below. From the homepage, click on start free trial. Now mailchimp has four plans to choose from. What we’ll cover today requires the essentials plan. If you’re concerned about providing a credit card at the start and want to start with the free plan, scroll down and click on about free. We’ll go back to the free trial at the top to keep it simple. Click on sign up free. First, you’ll need a business email. While you can use a Gmail, Outlook or other free email host, I strongly discourage it because it makes it way more difficult to ensure successful delivery of your emails. For this reason, if you don’t have a domain, I recommend you get one and come back later. Type in your password and then click sign up. Then check your email to activate your account. Type in your payment info and click pay now. Don’t worry. This is a one-month free trial. Your card will not be charged as long as you cancel before the end of your one month. Once you’re all set up, click on the close button to get to the next step, add your business name and click next. Then confirm your business address. This is required to comply with anti-spam laws and will appear in the footer of every email that you send. If you run a business from home and don’t want to share your address, I recommend getting a PO box if you’re in the United States. mailchimp also has some alternative ideas, which you can learn about by clicking on alternatives. I’ll confirm our address and click next. Now mailchimp is going to ask a bunch of questions to get to know you and your business. We’re on a mission to get started quickly, so I’ll skip through these. Finally, you’ve made it to the homepage. Let’s get to work. The mailchimp interface is pretty simple. You’ll see the sidebar on the left with several options for your main operations, including audience to see and edit your contacts, campaigns to manage your emails, and automations to automate sending emails. So, remember, we have three goals today. Get customers to market to, send emails to engage those customers, and automate sending a welcome email when a new customer signs up for our list. Let’s get those contacts first by creating a landing page. This is a great option if you don’t already have a website. So, start by clicking on audience and then sign up forms. Now there’s a default form set up for you, but it’s pretty bland. So, we’re going to create a landing page instead. Scroll down and click on create landing page. We’ll call this David’s Donut Den deals and click begin. mailchimp has a few website templates to choose from. Since we want to get customer emails, we need a lead generation template. This cactus template looks good, so let’s click on that. So now we’re in mailchimp’s landing page editor. Let’s start by making this feel more like a donut page. Let’s scroll down and hover over the background image and click on image to change this cactus out. I’ll grab a background image I made earlier by clicking upload. Okay. This is starting to look more like home. Let’s now change the headline to something that’s more donutty. Move your mouse over the headline and click on the pencil icon to edit it. Change the headline in the text editor and you’ll see it change automatically on the page. Note that you also have a number of different formatting options available to you. Next, let’s look at the email submission form. When a contact submits their email, they’ll see a confirmation message. The default message isn’t great, so let’s change it. Click on the form, then scroll down the properties editor to see the confirmation message. I wasn’t kidding, right? Here’s a better one. Okay. We’re getting close. Let’s next remove this logo from the header by clicking on the trash can icon. We’ll click on delete to confirm our choice. From here you can add customer logos and social proof, but we’ll checkpoint here and click save and close to launch this. So, before you publish, there are a few more housekeeping items to take care of. First, the site icon. It’s that little icon that shows up in your browser tab next to your website name. Sites that have these just look more professional, so let’s click on edit title and icon and upload one, just like we did the landing page image. Then we’ll click save. Next is social share preview. You don’t want a blank image and description showing up when someone shares your landing page on social media. So, we’ll add our image by clicking upload image and a description and then click save. Finally, the URL. I know what you’re thinking. This mailchimp URL is ugly. So, you can make some small adjustments here, or you can connect your own domain. The only downside is connecting your own domain costs an additional $10 per month. And that is not included in the plans that I showed you earlier. Let’s stick with this for now and click publish. Excellent work. You’ve now got a landing page. Let’s test it out and see if our contacts get added. We’ll type in an email address and hit subscribe and we’re in. Okay. Now we’ve got a way to get contacts. Let’s send them some deals, go back to the main mailchimp page and click on create, give this email a name you’ll recognize later and then click create email. Let’s advertise some deals with this first email. Even though we don’t have a lot of subscribers right now, it’s important for us to get in the habit of rewarding the customers who are interested in us. Let’s knock out these fields one by one, click on subject first. Subject lines are super important to hook your audience’s attention so that they open your email. mailchimp gives you a lot of good advice about crafting a great subject line and it can optimize your subject line using AI. Let’s try the AI feature, click on get started and then type a few words so it knows what you’re trying to write about, then click generate. There are some decent options here. Let’s choose the last one and then modify it just a little bit by removing newsletter from the front. Notice how the AI generated both the subject line and the preview text, lock this in by clicking save. Next, let’s add a send time. Now you want to send your emails at a time where you have the best chance of reaching your customers so that they open your emails. I recommend trying send time optimization where mailchimp looks at your subscribers’ patterns to identify the best send time. Now you might not have enough subscribers yet for this feature to work. So, the plan B is we know that donuts are a favorite weekend morning treat. So, we’re going to send at a specific time and choose Saturday morning at five am Eastern, so we give our customers an idea to buy from us before they start their day. Now mailchimp gives us the option to send email in batches to prevent overloading any websites we’ll send our customers to. This isn’t a concern for us right now, so let’s skip it and click save. Finally, let’s design the email. We’ll scroll back up and click on design email. mailchimp has a number of templates to choose from, but we’re going to keep things simple and choose minimal. This editor is pretty similar to the landing page editor we saw in the earlier. First we’ll add our logo by clicking on the header image and then clicking set logo. Next you can edit the headline and body text right in line. So, we’re going to advertise our new spicy Chupacabra donut. As you can see, I can edit the text right in line and make any changes that I need to. Finally, we’ve got to show a picture of this donut, so we’ll scroll down below, click on the image, then click on add, and then upload image. We’ll double click on the spicy Chupacabra image. And there we go. Doesn’t that look great? Now it’s always a good idea to put a call to action in an email like this, but we don’t have a website to direct our customers to. So, let’s delete this button. Now at the end of the email, you can put your social media handles. mailchimp includes your logo and then handles all of the rest of the compliance needs to satisfy anti-spam laws. This is looking good. So, let’s click save and exit. Now we feel ready to send this, but there’s a big step that we missed that could really bite you if you don’t do it. When mailchimp sends emails, it looks as though it comes from your email address. But if we try to send this now, most modern email clients will put our emails in the spam folder. And that’s because we haven’t given mailchimp permission to send emails on our behalf. So, let’s fix this. Click on finish later to go back to the homepage, click on your profile icon in the top right, and then click on account and billing. Click on domains. And then you’ll see next to your domain that it needs authentication. So, click on start authentication. This is normally a technical process, but mailchimp works with software called Entri to make it easy. Click continue, provide your email and your password for your domain hosting account, and then click continue. You might be asked to confirm the changes that Entri wants to make. If you’re not sure what any of this means, this is a good time to click on cancel and consult more technical help, especially if you have a domain that’s been around for a while. This is a brand new domain set up through Hostinger, so I’m not concerned with messing anything up. With authentication complete, let’s click done and get back to our campaign. We’ll click on all campaigns and then monthly deals, and then click on schedule. Everything looks good here, so let’s confirm scheduling the email. Okay, last step. Remember, we set up a landing page to give our customers 15% off their first order? Let’s make that happen. On the main menu, click on automations, then click on welcome new contacts. This is a quick start to mailchimp’s journey feature, which allows us to communicate with our customers in response to actions that they take. So, in this case, when a customer signs up to our email list on the landing page we just created, we’re going to send them an email. And now mailchimp’s AI is generating an email for us to send. Now we’re not quite ready to trust AI blindly with our emails, so let’s click on edit email and builder. Let’s spot check this. The subject is pretty decent and the schedule is every day as soon as possible because we want this to be sent whenever a new contact joins the list. Let’s quickly edit the email content to include our deal. We’ll quickly add some texts that tells the customer about the secret code for the 15% discount and then click on save and return to journey. Now we’re in the journey editor. This is a rich workflow experience, which we’ll use to increase customer engagement. Now remember our goal is to get these new contacts to try our delicious donuts. So, if they don’t open this first email for a week, let’s send them a follow up. So, after the first email in the workflow, click on add a journey point and then click on wait for trigger. Now there are a lot of different actions that we could wait for. Let’s go to marketing activity and select opens email. So, the customer goes through this workflow and gets the next step only if they open the welcome email or seven days have passed. So, we’ll configure the seven days by checking this set a time limit option, then click save. We only want to send a follow up to the customers who don’t open it. So, let’s add another journey point called if else. Again, here, there are a number of ways we can segment our audience, but we’re going to scroll down all the way to email interaction and opened, and this will be specifically the welcome email. And we’ll click use segment. We now have two branches. If they open the email, the contact exits the workflow, but if they never opened that email, then we can send them another email by clicking at a journey point and clicking send email. This brings up a familiar email builder so we can add our template and then click close. Finally, click on turn on in the top right to turn on this automation. And congrats. Now you’ve got a great deal for your first customers. Wow, we covered a lot to get your email marketing up and running. If you learned something today, please give us a like and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. Let us know in the comments if you want to see any part of mailchimp in more detail. This is David signing out, and I’ll see you next time.