MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing solutions out there, loved by 12 million subscribers and on target to achieve $400 million revenues in 2016 with 550 people. If you are new to marketing, I would strongly suggest you try their free offer, which should equally work with the use case described below.
We used to email our trial customers individually, but decided to get to the habit of using MailChimp for some of the messages. We sent out our first message this week, and thought of sharing the steps we are taking to improve conversion rate and hope it would also benefit you.
Before we start, this technique will not work for very large lists. We’ve tested this up to 7,000 contacts, but would be ideal for smaller lists.
Step 1 – The Message
Send a short message with one clear Call To Action (CTA). If you really need it, don’t go overboard with links. Suggest you limit to 3 as a maximum. Giving too many options means user having to make up his/her mind, which takes time, even if its few seconds, at which point, s/he could abandon clicking on the CTA.
Step 2 – Review the action taken
Focus here is on Open and Clicks.
Go to MailChimp Template on UnifiedVU Platform, or any other Page populated with MailChimp Campaign Analysis App on UnifiedVU. Once you selected the Campaign, then select Clicked or Opened action to see a list of Trial Customer who have responded to your email.
If you do not know them personally, the next is to understand how they have interacted with you before.
Some of them may have:
- Exchanged emails with you (e.g on Google Mail).
- Submitted tickets whilst trialling or had queries before they started (e.g. in Zendesk)
- Could have been a paying customer in the past (e.g. invoice and payment details in Xero)
- Have responded to previous campaigns. (e.g. MailChimp of course)
And the list goes on, based on the software applications you use.
Step 3 – Follow Up 1
Once you know how they engaged, you can then send a personal email to follow up. In here, you can personally ask how they are getting on with the trial.
Step 4 – Follow Up 2
If there is no response within 3 working days, you can give them a quick call to find out how they are proceeding with trialling.
If you try to find out how they interacted with you in the past by visiting each of your software applications (e.g. Google Mail, Zendesk, Xero, MailChimp, Twitter and more), then you would end up burning a significant amount of time switching between applications. And it won’t be too long before you get bored and move on to the next daily job.
What if there is an easier way?
And let me share a secret. Now there is.
Once again, visit the MailChimp Template or similar built by you. Let’s start with your own software first.
On UnifiedVU Platform, Apps can listen and respond to each other magically without the traditional integrations. It does this in real-time without storing data in our servers, other that your logins and authentications to connected software and your user preferences.
The sequence I adopted was:
- Select the contact from Clicked or Opened after selecting the marketing campaign from the MailChimp Campaign Analysis App on the left.
- MailChimp Contact Analysis App will immediately show how this individual responded to you in the past.
- Zendesk (or equivalent) then displays any tickets (queries) s/he has filed in the past and their current status (opened or closed).
- Schedule App from CanUMeet now allows you to schedule a meeting with him/her. CanUMeet is fast growing scheduling software and more and more are switching to it from other similar software due to its simplicity and functionality.
- CRM Contacts App (I’ve shown CapsuleCRM, but works equally with Salesforce, Pipedrive, SugarCRM and others in the future) shows more information about the Trial Customer.
- FullContact App shows the social profiles, so if you wish to have a conversation elsewhere, you can quickly visit his/her Linkedin, Twitter or any other social media application.
You can app more Apps from our App Store (e.g, Google Mail), but for this use case, I was happy with the selection.
This MailChimp Template is not just for Trial Customers. It can equally be used for high value prospects in any type of campaign you run, as long as the list does not go beyond few thousands.
Why not request a demo?