Why Free MailChimp Autoresponder is Best for Beginner Blogs

The first Rule of Blogging states ‘Start building a Subscriber Email List as soon as possible if you want to use your blog to make money online’.  OK, but how?  First, you need to know

How to Add a ‘

Subscribe to My Blog by Email

‘ Form

to your Blog

.

Then your readers will start signing up for your Newsletters

(please do…the Subscribe Form’s on the right),

so they receive your emails and Free Gifts, and in return, you will get their email address.

Why Do You Need To Build An Email Subscriber List?

You need to build a Subscriber List, because a List of Email Subscribers gives you online access to those readers who are genuinely interested in you, your blog, and your blog’s information and content.

Once you have a list of Subscribers, and you have their email addresses, you can ‘reach’ them by email. This means, they don’t have to remember to come back and visit you to see wot’z-up at your place –  a message lands in their Inbox (hopefully not their Spam Folder) and they think…..’Oooh! A new message from Carol!’

Great – but now you have a new problem: how to organize your lists.  So….

Mailchimp

to the rescue! And it’s free.

A Subscriber List allows you to interact, and build a relationship with your trusty Subscribers. You build this relationship by giving them Special Offers, free gifts, regular Newsletters, insider information and back room gossip.

Important:

Subscribers are very special people indeed!  You know who you are!  Take a bow, my friends – and thank you for subscribing to My Second Million – and, oh yes, did I mention it? – the Subscribe Form’s over there, on the right of your screen….

What Is
MailChimp

Once you start getting email Subscribers to your blog, you need some means of organizing the email data you’ve received – your List.  MailChimp has a free email marketing software service that allows you to organize and automate the management of your Subscriber Email List. These automated online email services are known as Email Autoresponders. They provide email tools and templates that make it easy to organize everything from simple weekly email Newsletter mail outs, to complicated, email marketing campaigns.

Those marvelous people (your Subscribers), have gone to the trouble of giving you their Contact details because they trust you, and they are interested to get your blog’s Newsletters and Update. Now it’s up to you to to deliver!

MailChimp makes it very easy to do all that.  Here is an article that explains how to design and install a Subscribe By Email Form so you can start to build your Subscriber List:

How to Build Forms With MailChimp’s Design Forms Software.

How Do You Organize Your list of Email Subscribers?

Normally, you will want to send out regular emails, with all the same Content (a Newsletter) to all of the subscribers on your ‘List’.  Sometimes you will want to send more specific emails to only some of the subscribers on your list.  It’s possible to do this by hand, using folders and sub-folders in your Blog’s ordinary WordPress email account.  But – no part of the basic WordPress email account system is automated.

Organizing Newsletters is definitely possible using basic WordPress email accounts, but…it involves manual data entry, plus copy and pasting – it takes organization and time – time that should be better spent writing riveting articles, building traffic, and getting new Subscribers.

The solution is to use an Auto Email Responder Service to help you with these time consuming tasks.  Mailchimp Email Autoresponder is one good software option to use.  And it can be free.

What is an AutoResponder?

There are several well-known Email Auto mail responders, including

Aweber

,

iContact

and

Get Response

.  They are used to automate email distribution Lists for mass email send outs, and to send a series of pre-sequenced, pre-written email send outs and sales funnels.

But all these Email Responders I’ve just listed above, cost money.  Their prices range from $14 – $19 a month for their entry level plans.

If you are just starting out, and have a small-ish Email Subscriber list, your blog won’t be making much money, if any, …. yet.  It doesn’t make good financial sense to pay over $200 per year in order to use an expensive email automation system, when you only need to send out regular emails to relatively few people.  So, a

Free

Autoresponder would be great for starter blogs.

Mailchimp

offers a free not-quite-fully-Automated Email-responder.

But Can a Free Email Autoresponder Deliver the Goods?

Yes it can – depending on how big your List is, and how you want to use your list to market your website online.  If you only want to start building your List of Subscribers by designing and installing a Subscribe By Email Optin Form on your blog, send Welcome emails, and send out weekly newsletters to your trusty band of fans, then a Free Email system is fine.  And Mailchimp’s Forever Free account will make this very easy to do. The Free option is

almost

fully automated, and makes managing your Subscriber List a breeze.

MailChimp’s ‘Forever Free’ Email Auto Responder Service

With a

MailChimp

Forever Free Email Account

, you can send

Up to 12,000 emails per month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers

That’s a lot of free emails.  MailChimp’s Forever Free is great – I’ve been using it for my Newsletters. It’s really easy to understand, so you don’t need to be a clever-clogs geek to set up your Email Subscriber List, design a Subscribe By Email Form, or a Newsletter Sign Up Form, and install it on your blog –

see

You can organize your lists, send out mass emails with one click of your mouse, and get feedback and Stats on how many emails were successfully delivered, how many were opened and by who(m) –

for the ‘correct grammar nuts’, including me

), and lots more Stats and Reports besides.  Mailchimp also makes it very easy to divide up your Lists of Subscribers in various ways, and send some emails to only some of your Subscribers.

It does lots of clever things like automatically inserting an individual’s username into the start of each email.  It uses what are called Merge Tags to do that, but MailChimp email software does that automatically, even with the Forever Free account.

The

MailChimp Free Email

response service is fantastic for start up blogs where money is tight, but…. there is one option that isn’t included in the Mailchimp Free Account that you will probably be prepared to pay for at some stage.  The clue is in the names of all these Email services: it’s the

auto

r

esponder bit!

Fully automated Email Auto response systems make an easy task into a joy…..well, I could be exaggerating again slightly.  One advantage of a fully automated autoresponder email service is that it can be set up so that every new Subscriber

automatically

receives a Welcome email after signing up.

Of course you can easily send Welcome Emails from inside Mail Chimp yourself, and the Free version of MailChimp email responder makes it very easy to do that.  You do that by designing, and saving a MailChimp Welcome email Template, with your pre-written Welcome message (probably with links to your website’s content). Mailchimp can automatically collect all your New Subscribers into one group, and with one click, you send your Welcome email template out to

all

of them at once.  You do that from inside your Mailchimp Dashboard.   It’s easy to do, takes 2 minutes to send many emails out with one click, but you do have to do it yourself from inside MailChimp login.

But a

fully

Automated Autoresponse Service does this sort of thing without you having to do anything at all, once it’s been setup.  And for that level of account, you do have to pay money.  Not much money if you choose

MailChimp

, but some.  In fact it can cost you as little as 3 cents per email for the MailChimp fully automated autoresponder email system.

The next few articles will cover more of the details of the Mailchimp Autoresponder, how to use it, and why it’s the best Auto Responder for start up blogs.

If you want to experience the wonders of the MailChimp Subscribe sequence, no worries!  Just click on this Subscribe Link below and all will be revealed!  Go on, you know you want to.

.

……..Cue Motto!

Plan Well.  Start Small.  Think

BIG!

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