MailChimp is a beloved staple in the email marketing world. Almost everyone has heard of the platform, and if you communicate with customers for a living, there’s a good chance that you’ve used MailChimp to send out email newsletters and marketing drip campaigns.
However, MailChimp can also be an essential B2B sales tool when used in the right context. With it, you can collect leads on your website, create automated lead nurturing campaigns, and send emails to a list of contacts.
In this article, we’ll cover how to use MailChimp throughout your sales process and walk you through how to set up each specific tactic.
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How to Collect Leads on Your Website
The first step to adding a prospect to your lead funnel is to collect their contact information. So how can you use MailChimp to do that?
For starters, you can create an embeddable form. To create an embeddable form in MailChimp, go to your Dashboard and click “Lists”:
Then, select the list you want to create a form for:
From the list details page, click “Signup forms”:
From the Signup forms page, click “Embedded forms”:
Here, you can set the options for the signup form, then copy and paste the embed code onto your website where you want the form to show up:
If you want to add additional fields to this list, you can use the form builder to customize this form.
This isn’t the only way to collect leads on your site using MailChimp, though. You can also use a form builder that syncs with MailChimp.
For example, on WordPress you can use Contact Form 7 in combination with the Contact Form 7 MailChimp Extension to create custom forms that will then add people who submit your form to a list you define in MailChimp.
Lastly, you could also use a popup plugin that integrates with MailChimp. For example, you might decide to create a popup form that appears when a visitor has been on a page for a specific amount of time.
When someone fills out this popup form, they will then be automatically added to the MailChimp list you set.
Some options to integrate popup forms on your site include:
Fueled, a mobile app development company, combines popup forms on their website with automated emails from MailChimp to speak to new leads:
“We currently have a pop-up on certain pieces of our blog content, that allow interested readers to opt into our newsletter.
Based on the content they’ve submitted their email from, we can tell what the user is interested in and craft more relevant Mailchimp campaigns that suit them. Since businesses get thousands of emails every day, it’s super important to stay relevant and become a resource that will help them and pique their interest.
It also gives you a chance to demonstrate your expertise. Once we’ve collected the email, we have an automated campaign that is tailored to them, starting with a white paper on a relevant subject.
Following up, we try to engage them with more content from our blog that we think they might find interesting or a questionnaire that they can interact with but also allows us to learn more about their needs.”
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One of the best features of MailChimp is its super easy-to-use email builder. With it, you can build emails by simply dragging and dropping elements where you want them to appear. Combined with a few pre-built templates, this feature allows you to create attractive emails in just a few minutes.
This feature is great for building emails for your monthly newsletter, to promote blog posts or products, or any other type of visual content.
But here’s the thing: It’s clear to the recipient that these emails are sent from an email platform. The email doesn’t look like a “plain” email sent individually to one person from an email client like Gmail.
To work around this problem, you have two options. The first option is to use MailChimp’s Simple Text template:
This template will provide a simple text layout that you can customize:
Here’s what it looks like in Gmail with the heading and copyright tags removed:
MailChimp will still add your physical address to the bottom of the email. The MailChimp badge will also be there if you are on the free plan. You will need to upgrade to a paid plan to remove it.
The other option is to code your own email. At the “Change template” page, choose “Code your own”:
Now that you’ve collected a prospect’s contact information, you can use MailChimp to start nurturing that lead. A great way to do this is to enter them into an automated email campaign.
For example, you may decide to enter trial signups into an educational email sequence that teaches them how to complete certain tasks using your product.
These types of automated email cycles are often referred to as “Drip Campaigns”.
Setting up these drip campaigns can be one of the best ways you can speak to new signups. When we surveyed companies that use MailChimp for B2B sales, the most popular response included using automation:
“I mostly use MailChimp for email campaigns at the top and the middle stages of our sales funnel. I believe emails should be about starting a dialogue.
“I embed micro-surveys directly into MailChimp messages to enable two-way communication and to keep those messages in a conversational style. I also trigger email NPS campaigns to our webinar attendees, which helps me find out what people think about the content I provide, whether they find it valuable and useful, and how I can improve my presentations.”
Marta Kaczmarek Community and PR Manager at Survicate
To create an automated email, from your MailChimp Campaigns page, click “Create Campaign”:
Then, click “Create an Email”:
From there, choose “Automated”:
Then, click “Custom”:
Name your campaign and select a list you want to associate this automation with:
Now, you can use the automation builder. Here, you can add as many emails as you want to this automation and set triggers for each email.
To set the trigger for the first email, click “Edit”:
Then, “Change trigger”:
Here you can set the trigger for the email:
(Heads up: If this is the first email in the series, options to trigger after the previous email was sent, opened, or clicked won’t be available.)
An appropriate drip campaign might be:
The first email sends after the subscriber joins the list.
The second email sends after the subscriber clicks a specific link in the previous email. For example, you may have included a link to a PDF download. After that link is clicked, you can send an email immediately after or after a set number of days.
You can repeat this process as necessary and only send emails to your qualified leads based on their activity of opening previous emails and clicking links.
How to Use MailChimp to Nurture Existing Customers
Going beyond the sale, you can still use MailChimp to nurture new or existing customers. The conversation shouldn’t stop after you’ve made a sale.
Send customers your latest content. Based on what form they completed on your website, you can even send content only to contacts that have previously shown interest in that topic.
Educate them on features. For example, you could create a three-part automated email series on how to use a specific feature of your tool.
Let them know about upcoming releases. Consider creating a list or MailChimp group for product releases so your contacts can elect whether or not they want to receive emails about upcoming releases.
Send them freebies. Instead of only creating eBooks to attract new signups, how about sending those same eBooks to your already subscribed contacts?
The list can go on and on. But, the point is that you shouldn’t stop communicating with your customers after you’ve made a sale. Think about how you can creatively continue the relationship via MailChimp and its features such as automated emails.
By the way, Nutshell and MailChimp are a powerful combination. Learn more about how our MailChimp integration helps get the right messages to your prospects at the right time, and start a 14-day free trial to see it for yourself!
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