Mailchimp SMS: Setup, Compliance, Campaigns & Analytics (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today, you'll learn how to use MailChimp SMS to text your customers about flash sales, new product releases, event reminders, and more. I'm David, I've partnered with MailChimp for today's video and I'm working with Kevin to bring you more great tutorials like this one. To get started, head to the link in the description below. You'll land on the MailChimp pricing page and when you scroll down, you'll see all of the available plans. Now, MailChimp is an email marketing platform first and SMS is an add-on. That means to use SMS marketing, you need to sign up for at least the essentials plan. And if you wanna send images with your text messages, you'll need the standard plan or higher. Fortunately, both of those plans have free trials available, which you can activate by clicking the Try Now for $0 button. Fill in your email and your password here and then click Sign Up. As part of onboarding, you'll be asked for your business address. Assuming you are using MailChimp for email as well, you'll wanna make sure this is correct. I talk more about this in my MailChimp email marketing tutorial, which you can find in the top right. Get through the rest of the onboarding steps and I'll see you on the other side. All right, here we are on the home dashboard. On the left side of the screen, you'll see your main menu. We're gonna set you up for SMS, so click on the SMS link. Now, because of US and international law, you have to go through another registration process. So click on Start Registration to get started. Answer this question honestly. There are a lot of rules around SMS marketing and MailChimp can help you learn. This question is where the registration starts. First, choose the countries you'll send messages to. This will change the local numbers that you can send messages from. I'm gonna stick with the US. Next, you get the phone number you're gonna text from. Now, you can get an SMS shortcode. That's a five to six digit phone number that can improve your brand recognition. That's a more advanced scenario that we won't cover today, but you will need to finish this registration process first anyway. Next, we move on to business info. This is where it gets real for a lot of people. You do need an actual business, an actual website, and a business address. And once you fill those in, you'll need to fill in your tax ID and other compliance contact info. Then you'll fill in contact settings. Your company name generally precedes messages that you send, and your audience will see your customer support email when they message help. Next, you'll tell MailChimp about why you're texting your audience. It's important to get these right because there are additional requirements for some of them, like donations. And finally, you need to go through the legal stuff. This includes your privacy policy and your terms and conditions for how people's phone numbers are used. Hopefully you have one already, in which case you click yes, I have a privacy policy. But if not, MailChimp can help you draft one. Make sure you read the fine print before you accept it. And of course, you'll need to agree not to hold MailChimp liable in case there's anything wrong with the policy. Once you're through with the privacy policy, you'll do the same thing with the terms and conditions. Finish up the privacy policy by clicking next, and then follow the same process for terms and conditions. And after all of that, they'll finally spring the payment page on you. SMS works on a credit system, and you'll get 1,000 credits for $20 US per month. Each plain text message takes one credit. If you include images, that message is three credits. So that can be one plain text message to 1,000 people, or 1,000 plain text messages to one person. Once you're sure everything is correct, click on select and submit. My experience is that it takes a few days to get approved. Now, stick around to see what you need to do next. Once you've gotten SMS approval, I'll meet you back here on the homepage. Now, there are two paths forward to get subscribers to text. You can find both of those paths under the forms menu option. Here's the test. If you have a website already, follow along with me and click create pop-up form. Now, if you don't have a website and you don't wanna make one, make sure you click on other forms and then scroll down so you can click create landing page. I cover how to make Mailchimp landing pages in the video in the top right. Pop-up forms start with templates. You can filter which templates to look at based on what you'd like to offer in exchange for your subscribers contact info. You can offer a free ebook or guide or even a discount off your products. For my pop-up, I'll choose general newsletter. Then click continue to see the templates. Now, before you choose a template just for its looks, make sure you pay attention to what kind of template it is. You'll see that in the bottom right of each template card and you'll have to choose among full screen, card overlay and slide out. Mailchimp claims that full screen converts better. So I'm gonna choose this cool rounded template. There are a few setup steps before we jump into the editing. We've gotta choose a name for this form so we can look it up later. And we need to choose an audience. Depending on your plan, you might have multiple audiences. And it's important to note that you need to go through that SMS registration process for each audience. For example, this audience is not SMS enabled so I can't collect phone numbers. Let's go back to my SMS enabled audience, make sure we're collecting email address and SMS phone numbers and click create form to access the editor. Okay, here we are in the editor canvas. On the left side of the screen, you'll see all the steps a user can take to get subscribed. And on the canvas, you'll see each of those steps represented as a user interface. The property pane on the right allows you to change the overall design if nothing's selected. And if you click on something, you can modify that element. Notice how clicking on a step just zoomed us into it. You can go back to the overall view by clicking back to all steps in the top left. You can also use the mouse to move around by clicking and dragging or use the mouse wheel or the zoom controls in the top right to change your view of the canvas. Let's start by changing a few things. I think this blue is currently too bright. So I can change it to another color and it'll get changed across all steps. Now this is a pop-up form that sits on your website. If you want it to be slightly transparent, you can change this opacity number from 100 to say 97. Next, let's head into the offer step and tweak it for our needs. The quickest way to do that is just click the offer step in the step pane. So it probably didn't escape you that we have a mobile view on the left and a desktop view on the right. The editor is mobile first. So anything you change on mobile will get reflected in the desktop view. But if you need to make tweaks to the desktop, edit that one separately. So I'll change my logo first because this doesn't show up so well on a dark background. MailChimp keeps track of your logo in your brand kit. If you don't have a brand kit started, you can upload a logo here and I'll use replace from brand kit to select the dark version of my logo. That's a good change. You can also change the size of your logo by typing in a different width right here. Now, did you notice this teardrop next to the style name? That means if you change the style here, it will affect other logo images throughout the canvas too. We can see that by zooming out and seeing that our logo has been replaced everywhere else. But if you just want to edit the logo on this page, you can go up to the style menu and click detach style. That works for any element that has a teardrop next to it. Scrolling down, you'll see a few other things we can edit. To change text, just double click on it to activate the text editor. I changed the rest of the text too and notice how that gets reflected inside the desktop view without any extra work. And of course, it wouldn't be an editor unless we could change the buttons. You can change a lot in this view compared to the landing page. For example, to make the buttons more pill shaped, we can increase the quarter radius. You can also add custom CSS classes to match the style of your existing website. And if you want to change how the button looks on mouse over or on click, make sure to check out the different styles for different states. Last, we need to fix this image. I've got an image that I can replace it with. And again, changing the mobile version changes the desktop version too. It can be a pain to get one image to work for both. So check out the following customization options. If you choose cover for the size, it maintains the aspect ratio of the image, but it cuts off overflow. Contain also maintains the aspect ratio, but it fits the whole image inside the container. And then custom allows you to make your own adjustments. We'll revert to cover since it looks best. Because cover crops part of the image, it might not show the right part for you. If the wrong part of the image is cropped, we can use the align property to fix it. For example, changing the top alignment shows a different part of the image on mobile. Same thing as bottom alignment. And this image is a portrait anyway, so left and right don't change anything. And if none of this works for you, upload a different image on mobile versus desktop. Let's now take a look at the email offer step together. By default, we just capture email address, but you can add an element to capture other data as well. On this add an element menu, click on user input, and then drag the type of data that you want to get from the form. Remember, dragging that into the mobile view makes it show up on desktop, and dragging it into the desktop just makes it show up on desktop. Every new field or element that you bring in has to connect to a merge field in your audience. Those are audience-specific properties of every subscriber. So selecting first name here connects the first name text box with the first name audience field. Next, let's take a look at the follow-up step. This is what shows up when someone gets out of your popup without subscribing. Because I've told MailChimp my homepage, it shows it here, but what I'm really referring to is this button in the bottom left. Just like the other button, you can click it to change its style. And when a user clicks it, they'll go back into the popup in the last stage they were in. Now, the last step to pay attention to is the confirmation step. This is just a general signup template, so what we have here is likely sufficient. But if you want to offer something like a free download, click on the button, and then click on the button actions link. Under add action, you can add all sorts of steps. Most people are interested in go to URL. That's a great way to get people to the download that you offered. So now you know enough to be dangerous. Go through the canvas and make it look the exact way you want. Along the way, you can preview how it looks by clicking on the preview button. If your website is already connected, you'll see a way to preview it live. Otherwise, you can see it as a preview locally. And here, you can walk through all the steps as if it were live. When you're satisfied with how everything looks, head back to your popup form editor and then click save and review in the top right. There are a ton of publishing settings here, so I'll break down the most common ones. You can connect this popup to your site by clicking edit site settings. You might need to add your site here first by clicking manage sites, but if you've already connected it, you can select it here. You'll need to add some code to your website to connect it. I have not done that yet. By default, your popup will appear on every page. So if you want to exclude pages, make sure you click this add or exclude target pages and fill in the forms here. Next, under who should see it. You're basically deciding between new visitors and all visitors. Definitely recommend you stick with new visitors so you don't annoy people. Next, under when should it show, you can choose triggers like time on page, total time on site, or total inactivity before the popup form shows up. If you need more advanced settings on how to show it, go into advanced settings. You can edit all sorts of conditions where your popup should or shouldn't show. And once you've set everything, click on publish in the top right to make it live. So fill out your form so you actually have someone to text and let's create your first SMS campaign together. Back on the homepage, go back to the SMS menu and then click on create SMS in the top right to create your first campaign. Message name is like a campaign name. It's the internal label that you'll give this message. Recipients is based on all of your subscribed SMS contacts in your audience. You can use tags and segments to fine tune who you send this message to. Then the only thing left is to create the content. So click edit to go into the SMS editor. You can create your message from scratch, but I do recommend you check out the templates by clicking browse templates at least once. These are all pretty simple and they have placeholders where you can fill in your product details. I'm gonna choose the product updates new product message. Then you can fill in the placeholders, nothing fancy here, just X them out and then type in what you want. Notice that when you add a link, it gets shortened automatically. If you don't see that, head over to settings and make sure automatically shorten and track links is checked. This is SMS marketing 101. You wanna shorten links so you can track when people open it and so you don't go over your character count limit for SMS. Now, because you have to identify yourself in your text messages and let people know they can opt out, your character count is already taken up by this boilerplate. Your goal is to try to stay under 160 characters. If you go over 160 characters, some phones register that as multiple messages sent at once. That can be really annoying, especially from a brand. Now you can turn this into an MMS by uploading an image. I'll pull in this piece of product UI here as an example. This is now MMS instead of SMS and now you can send up to 1600 characters, but this triples your credit usage. So use this sparingly. Now, if you wanna personalize this message, you can do so by using merge tags. One nice thing in text is to address people by their first name. So I can insert the first name field from my audience into this message. Then I can click and drag where I want it to go and quickly fix up the rest of the message. The disadvantage of merge tags is that it's easy to go over your character limits if someone has a long name. It's not the end of the world unless you have links that could get spliced across two messages. Many modern day phones will try not to let this happen, but you can't guarantee that everyone in your audience is on a modern phone. When you're ready to go, make sure you send a test message first. Click send a preview in the top right, fill in your phone number and then click send. You can send 15 of these messages per day and this is how it shows up on my iPhone. Assuming everything looks good, you can click got it and then click save and continue. This time you'll see the estimated amount of credits you'll need to spend for this campaign. Once you're ready, click send or schedule. You can send it immediately or at a specific time in the future. One last concept to be aware of is quiet hours. Each country has a set of quiet hours that they follow. If you try to send a message within those quiet hours, MailChimp will delay your message until the quiet hours end. In the US, that could be up to 11 a.m. Eastern, so don't panic if your message doesn't go through right away. You can read more about this topic on MailChimp's Help Center. I'll send this now and it'll take a few minutes to get to me. Once it does, notice that the first name field has been filled in as opposed to in the preview, it was still the merge tag. We can also tap the link and see that it's a redirect to the app store. We're back in the SMS view, it's time to look at reporting and analytics. You gotta be patient though because it could take up to 60 minutes before you see data. Fortunately, I've got a previous campaign we can dig into together. You can scroll down and click on recent campaigns to dig into their stats. First, we see the message, that's great, let's talk about the performance. The sent number is the number of contacts it was sent to, the delivery rate is the percent of messages that successfully made it to a phone and didn't bounce, the click rate is the percent of messages whose link was clicked on, and the unsubscribe rate is the percent of contacts who unsubscribed based on this message. Remember, unlike email, there is no open rate because you can't track that on a phone. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a table of what every contact did with your message. That includes whether it was delivered, how many times they clicked, and whether they unsubscribed. Once you get more into marketing, use all of these signals to help segment your audience and plan thoughtful follow-up campaigns. Now you know how to send SMS messages to your customers, it's time to actually do it. Head to the link in the description below to get started and check out our other tutorial on Mailchimp email marketing right here. I'm David, and I'll see you in the next video.