1. From the Dashboard or the Campaign Tab click on the big ol’ “Create Campaign”
button and select the type of campaign you’d like to create (start with
regular ol’ campaign.).
2. On Step 1 of the Campaign Builder, select the list you’d like to send to. Once
you’ve selected the list use the “next” option to move forward, or click “send
to entire list”.
3. On Step 2 of the Campaign Builder, you will have the options to name your
campaign, set up a subject line, from name reply-to email and personalize
your “To:” field with *|MERGETAGS|*. You will also find your options for tracking,
authentication, analytics tracking and social sharing. (Use the “next” and
“back” options to navigate through the steps (not your browser’s back button)).
4. Select a Template for your email by clicking on “pre-designed”, “autoconnect”,
“premium”, or “start from scratch”, etc (to get a basic template layout that you
can fully customize) under the templates heading. Templates you’ve set up and
saved will live under “my templates”. If you’re providing your own code use
the “paste/import HTML” or “import from URL” options. If you want to create
an editable (or non-editable) Template for your clients, choose “code custom
templates”.
5. Once you choose your template you’ll remain on Step 3 of the Campaign
Builder. The content editor is where you will edit your styles and content. Click
on “show style editor” to bring up the style options.
6. With the Style Editor visible and you’ll have options to edit the styles for each
section. Here the “Body” tab is selected and the “title style” subheading has
been clicked. This will allow you to set the line height, font size and more for
this section.
7. Click anywhere inside the dotted red borders to bring up the content editor box.
3480 HOW PEOPLE THINK
8. After you click save wait for your content to refresh then click on the “next”
option. Our plain text generator will automagically create the plain text version
from your HTML version. Just look this version over to make sure it looks the
way you like and click “next” to move to the last step of the Campaign Builder.
9. Step 5 of the Campaign Builder is a “pre-delivery checklist”. If we see anything
missing on your campaign you’ll be alerted in red on this screen. Click on
“edit” to be taken directly back to any area that needs attention.
You can preview the campaign once more by clicking on the “pop up preview”
button.
Then we recommend sending tests to several email addresses to see how the
campaign looks in your recipient’s inboxes. If everything looks good, you can
schedule or send out your campaign.
Long and difficult to understand, right? Luckily this is not how the information is actually
presented at MailChimp. The text is the same, but it is combined with screen shots to
show an example of what the text is talking about. Figure 34.1 shows a portion of what
the screen really looks like, with text and picture together.