Schedule email to be sent automatically once somebody signs up through your sign up form or when you import your contact list. This can also be used when certain triggers are activated for example a dropped checkout. A series of automated emails can be scheduled for example a welcome email, a follow-up email, etc.

Archive means that instead of deleting your contact you can archive them so they don’t receive any more emails from you. Archiving a contact doesn’t count towards your total of subscribers. An archived contact could unarchive themselves though if they sign up through one of your sign up forms.

An audience is another name for your contact list. MailChimp advises you to have just one list and to use tags and segmentation to identify and mail contacts. For example leads, clients, suppliers and staff.

This allows you to target and personalise your message based on how your contact behaves. How they interact with your website, email and social media. This can be combined with automation for example if a website visitor registers on your site but doesn’t buy they could receive a dropped checkout email.

This word describes when an email has not been delivered. It can be a hard or soft bounce. A hard bounce means the email no longer exists or they have very strong spam protection. A soft bounce often means they have an auto-responder on their email address, for example, I’m on holiday until… It is important to be careful not to have a high bounce rate and most ethical email providers will put a stop on your account if this happens on a regular basis.

This involves checking your contact list for possible errors like incorrect email addresses or role-based email addresses. A role-based email could be admin@ MailChimp will often stop you uploading these kinds of email addresses.

This describes the number of people who clicked on your email links or buttons. Usually shown as a percentage.

This involves adding code to your domain name to make it appear that email is coming from your email server and not MailChimp. Once you have authenticated your domain you should achieve a higher open rate. If your mailing list contains lots of email addresses which are Hotmail, AOL of Gmail then the chances are they will block lots of emails so if your domain isn’t authenticated it may not be delivered. 

This term describes the number of people who open your email. They may only open and not click though. Your subject line, timing and personalisation will improve your open rate. You can use A/B Testing which allows you to test different subject lines and even different emails before you send the final campaign.

If your email wasn’t opened you can send it again to the non-openers and change the subject line to see if it is more successful a second time. Best not to do this too often as it could mean you receive spam reports. It is still well worth doing as the person who didn’t open the first time around could have been really busy or your subject line wasn’t appealing.

Allows you to target and personalise your emails to make them more effective. If you have all the data within your account you could use segmentation to email all subscribers who are in a certain location and are of a certain age.

Visitors to your website or social media platforms use the sign-up form to subscribe. The key is to provide a good reason for them to sign up, for example, a discount code or ‘how-to’ guide. Here is our sign-up form.

One of the most important things to get right. The subject line is the line of text you first see within your inbox. 

A tag can be added to a contact to describe them for example VIP, employee or prospect. This allows you to send a personalised and more relevant email to the right people.