How to use Mailchimp to sell products

by | Thu 28 Feb, 19

A few weeks ago I discussed a past role and how we used email to drive sales of aged stock. This post I will walk you through how you can do it yourself using Mailchimp and their segmentation tool. I won’t go into detail on how to create the email itself, unless you want to do more dynamic content based on tags then a straightforward email will suffice.

Step 1 – Identify the products to promote: these will come from the aged stock list.
Step 2 – Create the email: add personalisation and do your test sends.
Step 3 – Segmentation: choosing who you will target.

By this point, you need to know exactly who you want to target this product (or product range) messaging to. You can either set this up ahead of time or build the segment during the email setup process.

Are you promoting a range of products from one manufacturer or is there a range that all work together? If it is a single product, do you want to send it to just past customers? Either way, this is where Mailchimp’s advanced segmentation will come into its own if you need to do more than 5 layers of targeting or you want to use the more advanced e-commerce purchasing segment.

The product would need to have existed and have been sold through an ecommerce platform for this method to work. The alternative would be to upload a segment of your CRM data that is subscribed to receive email marketing and tag them upon import so you can then segment them.

How to: use mailchimp to move old stock

In the above screenshot, I have used the advanced segmentation tool to highlight customers of a specific product (in this instance ‘cable’) that is available from the ecommerce platform – to ensure additional relevance I have also added a stipulation for the date of their last purchase. Nothing is more likely to upset customers than sending them an email a few days after they have purchased something and then telling them that they could have got it cheaper.

How to: use mailchimp to move old stock

The alternative is to use the standard segmentation, as shown above, the key difference is that you have to make sure you have selected all conditions are met and that the purchase date is “Not Within” X days.

How to: use mailchimp to move old stock

If you wanted to hone this even further, to target only people who are most likely to open, you can add the member rating as an additional criterion, either 4 or 5 stars will target people who are most likely to engage with the email.

Step 4 – Hit send

Best practices keenly apply to these emails, especially for tracking. Make sure that all your appropriate tracking is turned on, Google Analytics is selected and goals are set up on your GA back end.

If you have any questions, or need some help, you can call us on 01793 677 511 or you can email us.

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