Quite understandably, it’s easy to think of open rates as a good way to understand how successful an email campaign was. Presumably if the reported open rate is high, that means lots of people read the email, right?

Wrong.

If you’ve sent a Mailchimp email campaign lately, chances are it’s bounced to a few people. What does that even mean? How do you find out? And do you need to do anything?

So you’ve sent an email campaign from Mailchimp and you’ve hopefully(!) looked at the campaign report. And in that report you’ve seen a “Bounce rate”. Now what?

Mailchimp has launched a new pop-up form builder and the old ones will disappear form your website on 24 June.

The new versions are VERY different - lots more options and features. Read on for more info and to see some examples.

Mailchimp is busy making heaps of upgrades and improvements to the platform this year. And as a Mailchimp Pro Partner I get the heads up on all the latest changes and what’s coming up.

Here’s what’s happened over the last few weeks - some amazing stuff!

If you have a look at this link, you can see a library to back issues of previous Mailchimp emails I’ve sent out - not all of them, just the ones I’ve chosen to share access to. I get asked about how to do this fairly regularly, so here’s how.

After recent convos about democratising AI and improving productivity, I decided it was high time I started adopting AI more myself.

Here are 5 ways I’ve made life and work easier. And no the doll is not one of them - getting that image to generate was a PITA.

You know how you just tick along in life and then suddenly a door opens unexpectedly, and you just have to walk on through and see what happens.

Well it opened. So I walked through… into 10 Downing Street!

I’ve had lots of panicked emails in my inbox asking what you need to do following this email from Mailchimp yesterday.

Some are from businesses that do need to take action, others that it just doesn’t affect.

Here’s how to find out if it affects you, and if so, what you need to do.

In principle you can use a merge tag to add each recipient’s first name into your Mailchimp emails, in ways like this:

• In the greeting e.g. Hi Claire,

• Within a sentence e.g. “I’d love you to be there Claire”

• On a button e.g. “Get yours Claire”

They can be super-effective and catch the eye. BUT should you actually use them?

Here are some questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge and some tips to make names work for you.

Are you paying the right amount for your Mailchimp account?

About 30% of accounts I audit aren’t - and usually because they’re paying too much.

Want to find out how to check? It only takes a few minutes…

When was the last time you checked who has access to your Mailchimp account. In fact have you EVER checked? Do it now. Trust me, I see some shockers. Here’s how…

Your contacts subscribed because they want to hear from you. And email marketing simply can’t work for you if you don’t send emails…

But there are never enough hours in the day so here are my tips to make it all quicker and easier, gleaned over the course of 14+ years of doing this. A 5 minute read that will save you HOURS and mean that Mailchimp can work harder for you and your business.

The subject of images comes up a LOT in my day to day as I work with clients on their Mailchimp accounts. I have rarely come across a client that has been using more than 2 o 3 of these tips, despite them being incredibly useful at a) make your life easier and b) making your emails work harder for you.

So here are 10 tips to make images work more effectively and efficiently for you in Mailchimp:

Email marketing takes time, energy, resources and, very often, money. Testing means you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t to avoid wasting them all.

We can all make educated guesses, but they’re just that. If we don’t test, we don’t actually know! So here are 5 things to test regularly...