As those of you that know us will know, we are big advocates of using the best of the web, and not about re-inventing things for the sake of it. Mailchimp is an email marketing web application that we have used for clients,and internally, for a year or so now. 

Email marketing can be a dangerous area if you go in blindly and can ultimately have very negative implications for your domains, if abused. Hence we use the really cool, nicely simple and highly functional Mailchimp system.For limited numbers of emails, it's free to use and even for larger distribution lists or more regular email marketing the price is almost negligible (about 1p per email).

Email marketing can be a great tool to push some information to your customers and should be carefully considered to make sure they will gain something from the activity….otherwise your efforts will simply result in the dreaded 'unsubscribe'.

Mailchimp has loads of standard email templates, so with just a little effort, you (or we) can configure one to reflect your brand. Importing your distribution list is a cinch, either through Google, Excel or a variety of other web apps. 

Then it's just a matter of working out what you want to say to your audience – this is generally the hardest bit! But sit down and have a brainstorm about what your audience might want to know – a promotion, some value that you can add to them, a new product or service? Keep it simple is our advice.

Once you've sent your email campaign, the fun really begins as, either online or in their really handy iPhone App you, you can watch how your campaign performs – who opens it, who clicks on links and where they go. These stats prove to be invaluable when developing your future campaigns and content,as you really start to see how your audience responses to different content and messages.

Check out Mailchimp for yourself, or if you're busy doing what you do best, why not contact us to help?