The basic tenets of inbound marketing are that you will create content on your website, share it to social networks to drive traffic, and then collect email addresses of interested visitors to be used for email marketing. You can then regularly reach out to your followers and subscribers and create opportunities for both engagement and sales. I rely on HootSuite to help me maintain and monitor my social media activity, and I rely on MailChimp to collect and regularly communicate with email subscribers.
With the newly updated MailChimp app for HootSuite brings these two tools closer together.
Get the App
The MailChimp app is available in the HootSuite App Directory and is completely free. I recommend that you first create a new Tab called MailChimp (or whatever you’d like), and then use the Add App option within your new Tab. Search through the App Directory for MailChimp, add the app, and choose to add both stream options (Subscriber Lists and Campaigns) to the new Tab you just created.
Of course, you’ll need to have a MailChimp account to use the app (you can create a free MailChimp account here if you need one), and as soon as you see the new streams you’ll see a button to Connect your MailChimp account. What’s nice is that each Stream is independent of the others, which means that you can connect multiple MailChimp accounts and have whatever streams you need. If you or your clients have several different account and email campaigns going out, you can monitor them all individually.
Monitor List Activity
Once you have one or more “Subscriber List” streams set up, you will see every List you’ve created within each MailChimp account, and the current status of that list. You’ll see at a glance:
- List Name
- Created Date
- Rating
- Subscribers
- Activity since last newsletter (subscriptions, unsubscriptions)
Clicking on a list name will bring up detailed reporting and a graph that demonstrates the growth of your list over time:
I have been using the MailChimp mobile app to keep an eye on my list activity and having it on my desktop within my HootSuite dashboard makes for very easy reference.
Monitor and Share Campaigns
Within the Campaigns stream, you’ll see each new newsletter campaign that’s sent out and the status of that campaign.
- Newsletter Title
- Open Rate
- Delivered
- Opened
- Unique Opens
- Unopened
- Clicks
- Unsubscribes
Clicking on the Open Rate reveals the additional statistics for that campaign. And again, this gives me such easy access to the information I need the most – how’s my most recent campaign doing?
Then, similar to the HootSuite Syndicator, each individual campaign has an arrow on mouseover in the upper right corner that allows you to share that newsletter to whatever social networks you’d like. This is a great way to share your latest newsletter to platforms other than what MailChimp supports (just one Twitter account and one Facebook profile or Page).
You can search and filter campaigns within the campaign stream to find a specific newsletter or set of newsletters that have been sent out.
Detailed Campaign Reporting
Click on any campaign title and you’ll open the Detail report for that campaign. In addition to the overall statistics mentioned above, you can also see the timing of activity, which links were clicked, and even from where those links were clicked. I particularly like that the URLs are ranked according to the number of clicks, so it’s easy to see now what link or story in a given newsletter was the most popular.
An interesting use that can come from this is sharing a newsletter campaign and specifically drawing attention to the story that you know your subscribers were most interested in.
Subscriber Search
Ready to take your prospecting and lead generation to the next level?
While viewing a tweet from anyone in any of your streams, mousing over their thumbnail pic will reveal a drop-down menu of choices. With this MailChimp integration, you can now click a button to search for that user in your MailChimp subscriber lists and see if they’re a subscriber. If they are, you can add notes to their profile. If they aren’t, you can invite them to become one!
You can save a few clicks and install the MailChimp app from here. If you haven’t yet signed up for a HootSuite account, you can get a free trial here, and you can contact me if you would like additional training and support.