In the Club
Split your club’s mailing list into groups
When you get an email from an organisation that you’re not interested in, what do you do? Chances are you’ll delete it and unsubscribe from future ones. Don’t give your club members an excuse to do the same with your emails. Instead, create email groups using the excellent Mailchimp emailmanagement tool to make sure you only send your members emails that are relevant to them. If you’ve never used Mailchimp before, you’ll need to create an account at www.mailchimp.com/ signup. We covered the basics of Mailchimp back in Issue 560 (page 48), but it’s easy to use so you can quickly get to grips with it simply by trial and error. And as long as you don’t have more than 2,000 email contacts, it’s completely free (£7.75 a month for up to 50,000 contacts).
Create your groups
Mailchimp uses what it calls ‘segments’ to send targeted emails, but before creating these you need to split your email list into groups. In our example, we want to send emails to three different types of people: those who have expressed an interest in joining our club, current members, and those whose membership has lapsed.
Log into your Mailchimp account, click the Audience menu at the top, then Manage Audience on the right. Select ‘Manage contacts’, Groups, then click Create Groups on the right. Next, select ‘Don’t show these groups on my signup form’ – this means you can control which members belong in which groups. Next, choose a category for your group (we’ll call ours ‘Membership type’), then create your individual group types (Prospective, Current and Lapsed in our example – see screenshot below left). Now click Save, followed by Done.
You now need to place individuals into the appropriate groups. To do this, return to your mailing list by clicking ‘Manage contacts’, followed by ‘View contacts’. You can click an individual contact and choose which groups to assign them to, but it’s often quicker to assign contacts to groups in bulk by ticking the boxes next to each one. In our example, we want to assign all contacts who aren’t yet full members to the Prospective group – so we tick the box next to each relevant contact, click the Actions menu, followed by ‘Add to group’, ‘Member type’ (our group category), then Prospective (see screenshot below). We then need to repeat this process for our Current and Lapsed groups.
Add your groups to segments
Now we’ve organised our groups, we can move on to the segments. Go back to the ‘Manage contacts’ menu, then select Segments, followed by Create Segment on the right. Leave the ‘Contacts match…’ setting as ‘Any’, click the box below and select the group type you created earlier (‘Membership type’, in our example), then select the specific group you want to email. Click Preview Segment to make sure you’ve chosen the correct list, then Save Segment and give it a name (we called ours ‘Prospective segment’). You can now repeat this process to create your other segments. Each segment can be made up of one or more groups, so we also decided to create a ‘Non-member’ segment, containing both Prospective and Lapsed groups.
Send your targeted email
With our groups and segments created, it’s time to start sending the emails. Click Create (top left), Email. In the To box, select ‘Choose an audience’, then choose one of the segments you just created (‘Prospective segment’, in our example). Finally, follow the instructions to design, write and send your email.