8 tips for a successful Mailchimp email campaign

8 tips for a successful Mailchimp email campaign

Email advertising is a popular way – and a powerful tool – to keep in touch with your customers. To make the most of this platform we recommend you spend a little extra time in the following areas of the campaign to improve your conversion rate and customer experience.

1. The importance of your subject heading

Your email subject heading is the first thing your subscriber will read, so it needs to be interesting, to the point, and accurately describe the email’s content. It’s important to get the subject heading right, or your reader will lose interest quickly and head for the delete button.

Consider including an incentive to entice your reader to open the email from you.

2. Use persuasive copy

Making your message personal to your reader helps engagement and conversion. Including a name field in the email is a good way to do this.

Write clear, direct copy in the first person – make it feel like the email was just for them. According to an Experian email marketing study, personalised emails deliver six times higher transaction rates.

3. Call to action

A call to action is a must for click rate and conversion; this is the reason why you’ve sent the email. The call to action is usually in the form of a button or special offer and needs to sit in a prominent place. The use of bright or contrasting colour will make it more noticeable.

An interesting study by Unbounce, showed that using a call to action in a first-person voice had a 90 percent better conversion. These simple grammatical changes can make a big difference, e.g. instead of a simple ‘Subscribe’ use ‘Yes, subscribe me to this list’ and watch your conversion rates rise! Be engaging and allow your reader to feel in control of taking action.

4. Targeting your content

Targeting your email content retains a reader’s interest and helps with conversion rates for your campaign. Think about what you are offering and who on your list would be interested? Over time, the data you collect will help you decide what content works, and you can use this information for future campaigns to improve your click rate and conversions.

5. Mobile Friendly

Recent studies have shown that 55% to 66% of emails were opened on mobile phone or tablet devices. It’s a growing trend, there’s no denying that. Ensuring your email looks great on phones is important to a large portion of the population. When writing your copy, consider the length of subject lines, headings and words – keep it concise so it all looks great on small and large screens.

TIP: Consider using a graphic designer to set up your email templates, by doing this your campaigns will look consistent and professional on desktop and mobile devices.

6. Have a clean list

When you’re ready to send out your campaign, check that your mailing list is perfect to ensure the successful delivery of your campaign.

In an effort to avoid the spam folder:

  • Send to subscribers only
  • Make sure you’ve removed emails of people who have unsubscribed
  • Re-engage with inactive subscribers to gauge their interest or remove them from the list
  • Triple-check your email addresses are correct with no ambiguous words (e.g. test@test.com – remove these from the list if found, as they could trigger a spam alert in Mailchimp)
  • Make sure all your entries are in the right fields and order e.g. First name, Last name, Email.
7. CAN-SPAM Act

CAN-SPAM Act is legislation put in place to protect the public against spammers. Your email campaign needs to abide by these laws to comply with the Act.

This includes:

  • Having an unsubscribe link that must work for at least 30 days after sending;
  • Include a physical address in your email; and
  • The use of any content deemed deceptive eg. names, subject lines, reply-to-address.

For more information on CAN-SPAM visit ftc.gov website.

8. Measure your success

Use data collection tools to see how successful your email campaigns are.

The more data you gather, the more ability you will have to target your content to certain subscribers. Mailchimp has inbuilt data collection and you can utilise other software such as Google Analytics for website data, or Facebook Insights for social data.


Contact the Stream Art Design team if you need assistance in setting up your email campaign. We can customise a Mailchimp template to suit your needs and make it stand out from the crowd.