Site Building

Send Campaigns from MailChimp for Drupal 7

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We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

Sprout Video

There are two ways you can send an email to a MailChimp list: through the MailChimp UI, or via Drupal. In this tutorial we'll look at using the MailChimp UI to send an email campaign to our mailing list. We'll also use MailChimp to segment an existing mailing list into smaller, more targeted, groups to send a campaign to, allowing us to be more effective with targeting those users on our list that we know will care about a specific announcement.

The MailChimp UI for composing and sending an email campaign is awesome, and has some great tools for content creators. In this tutorial we'll choose a a template, draft a newsletter, send a test email, and then finally send the real thing.

After that, we'll look at how we can use the values of the merge fields associated with subscribers in our list to segment the list and send a campaign to just the people in a specific location. Or example use case is that our hypothetical ice cream store has physical locations in Aspen, Carbondale, and Glenwood Springs. When a user signs up for our mailing list they can optionally let us know which store, or stores, they frequent. Then, when our Aspen store has its two year anniversary, and we're going to offer specials at just that store for the weekend, we can email our list and let them know. Rather than spam the entire list, we can target just those people who have identified that they frequent the Aspen location. Pretty cool.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to send a new email campaign from within MailChimp to your list of subscribers, as well as know how to leverage list segmentation.

Further your learning

  • Can you give two example use cases for list segmentation?
  • What are the different ways that you can preview an email campaign in the MailChimp?
  • What are merge tags in MailChimp?
  • Further exploration: Explore the various templates and themes provided by MailChimp. Are there any that would serve as a good starting point for your email campaigns?

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