I looked forward to every episode as Meg and her colleagues at MailChimp created an online store and learned through trial and error what it's like for small on line business start ups.
First My MailChimp Experience
We use MailChimp for our monthly newsletters and special announcements. We currently use their templates and are focusing on growing our subscriber base.
MailChimp has many features that we plan to take advantage of in our business in the future as we grow. I learned about MailChimp and wrote about my experience getting started with our monthly newsletter in an early blog post, Blogs, Newsletters, MailChimp, Oh...My!
We had about 3000 customers in our online store that had subscribed to our newsletter over the years and never received one because we never published one.
Our IT Specialist uploaded this list to MailChimp for us and then we discovered after sending out our first newsletter that we should have sent out a call to re-subscribe or opt-in before hand. As a result, we had a high "bounce rate" and had to start our mailing list from scratch. We survived that initial catastrophe thanks to some help from MailChimp.
We used our subscriber mailing list and social marketing to notify our customers and keep them informed about when we would be re-opening our online store. As a result, we did not have a decrease in sales in October 2016, in spite of being closed 10 days for recovery and cleanup.
You can read about our experience in my blog; 5 Things We Learned About Emergency Preparedness And Recovery For Small Business.
Back To Meg's Newsletter
I looked forward to the newsletters because I felt like I was getting to know Meg and her colleagues at MailChimp as they experienced the ups and downs of running an online business. The small moving photos included in each newsletter brought these people to life.
I want to say Thank You! for their hard work helping small businesses grow and get them to show me how they make those cool little moving gif files. I'll let you know if I make it there.