Mailchimp-specific terms
Mailchimp is most popular for (and built its business on the basis of) its email marketing features. However, the reality in the platform today is that you can manage more of your business and content creation within various channels all from one place, instead of needing different applications for each channel beyond the email channel. Today, it would be most accurate to refer to Mailchimp as a marketing and commerce platform.
Digging in, let’s get specific with how we will be using some general marketing terms to refer to something more targeted within the platform itself before we get into the features themselves.
Channels
Speaking more generically, a channel is defined as the people, organizations, and activities that make goods and services available for use by consumers. When using it, people may be referring to a myriad of formats, such as direct sales, outbound calling, conference and industry events, and, of course, bulk or targeted emails.
Within Mailchimp’s platform and knowledge base, a channel has a narrower definition – here, we’re specifically referring to the mechanisms available to you within the application using which you plan to connect your business or content to your contacts. This is a narrowed definition to largely digital means of design and communication with your target audience.
Campaigns
When we say campaigns in a marketing context, we are usually referring to a set of strategic efforts and outreach to promote something or put certain content in front of your audience by leveraging various means. These are typically coordinated but different types of media, such as print, radio, and online platforms.
Within the context of Mailchimp, we are specifically referring to email marketing campaigns when we use the word campaigns. Even if we talk about classic automation and customer journey builders later on in the book, when we begin to turn our eyes to automating contact with our subscribers, these are collections of campaigns that rely on events occurring between them. More on this later though in Chapter 12.
Additional terms will be defined within the relevant chapters, but channels and campaigns are persistent terms that we will use throughout the book using their narrower scopes defined here.
So, keeping those key terms in mind and the relative hierarchy for how we should be considering these various channels inside the Mailchimp platform, next, let’s take a look at some of the common reasons people come to Mailchimp. This will include a very high-level definition of some of the most popular channels such as Classic Automations, in addition to common reasons people generally use Mailchimp. So, let’s take a quick, high-level view of these automated channels.
Classic Automations
Throughout the application, there are several features that, at least conceptually, seem to be a product that will automate something for you. You’ll see as we go from feature to feature within the product that some of these things really will automate more for you than others. In the context of the platform itself though, you will see references to Classic Automations. These are sequences of emails that the Mailchimp application will generate for you with event-related logic in between. The terminology here refers to linear, prebuilt automation. What I mean by linear specifically is that these automation styles rely on single emails with single events between them. They will not fork or diverge to alternating emails. For example, the automation sequence might look something like this:
- Event 1: New subscriber joins Audience A
- Email 1: 1 hour after subscription, the application sends Email 1
- Event 2: Subscriber opens Email 1
- Email 2: 1 day after Email 1 is opened, the application sends Email 2
As we can see here, there are no forks or deviations from a single thread of logic.
Customer Journey Builder
This is also an automation-based feature. The main difference between Classic Automations and Customer Journey Builder is that Customer Journey Builder does enable you to apply forks to events. You may have heard the term customer journey elsewhere specifically in the context of product management and development. You can think of it as a feature within Mailchimp that empowers you to create more advanced marketing pathways for your audience to move through. When we refer to a customer journey map specifically in Chapter 12, we will talk about the visual that the application makes for you as you develop your event and email maps that relate to how your audience members move through the content that you’ve pre-made.