When we sign up for email marketing list, companies typically send us newsletters on the certain schedule (weekly, monthly, etc.). We will be added to the list of existing subscribers (or to a specific segment), and we receive the newsletter when the next one is sent out to all the subscribers. Sounds logical?

Logical it might be, but far from optimal. Intentionally or not, marketing newsletters are often better suited for advanced users of the product or service. It is natural as your previous newsletters have already shared tips for beginners, and the following newsletters develop the story further. However, receiving a newsletter with advanced topics might be off-putting to a new subscriber – new members are not often familiar even with the fundamental topics you’ve already been covering, and in almost every case they are not experts of your products and services. You would not start reading a book on the advanced topics, so why would you serve that content to your fresh customer lead (unless you have data that the person is already an expert of this domain)?

How to do it right?

What you should provide instead, is an educational content flow of newsletters helping the subscriber to develop from a newbie to an expert. The content flow should start with easy tips and tricks, and slowly progress to more advanced topics in your industry. The key difference is that the content flow is the same for each new member of your list no matter when they join, and a newsletter is scheduled to be sent out every week.

Often the journey from a newsletter subscriber to a paying client might be a lengthy one, and as a marketer, you can not be certain what eventually triggers the conversion and when it will happen. You can increase the probability of conversion by providing a well-designed flow with call-to-actions that match both the content and user’s experience level. If you provide multiple versions of your products and services, your CTAs should link to the basic version at the start of your content flow and a more advanced version at later stages.

How to set up a content flow for MailChimp?

At Flockler we are using MailChimp, and the set up of an automated flow is fairly straightforward. Here’s a step by step guide how to do it:

1. Go to Campaigns tab and click “Create Campaign”

2. Select “Create an email”

3. From the first navigation select “Automated”, from the second navigation “Date based”, and then “List added date”

4. Type campaign name and select one your subscriber lists (you might want to create a new subscriber list for the automated flow).

5. The next step is to create a flow of weekly emails starting from easy tricks and examples. There are some example templates added by MailChimp, and you can add more emails to the sequence by clicking “Add email”. You can use your existing campaigns or create new ones.

6. Select a time when email is triggered (e.g., 3 days after sign up, 10 days after sign up, etc.). We’d recommend to send out newsletter weekly or bi-weekly. Pro tip: you can also select weekdays and time of the day when emails are sent out. 

7. Awesome, confirm the set up and start the flow.