Creating an account
We’ll work quickly through this section, since presumably if you’re interested in optimizing or making ideal use of Mailchimp for your marketing, you likely already have an account.
Important note
A couple of things to note: by default, when you create a Mailchimp account, the default pricing plan selected is the free account. That being said, because the book will cover features from the basic email campaign features all the way through to reviewing integrations, commerce, and automation, the feature sets we’ll be covering span various plans. However, even starting with a free account, we’ll be able to cover quite a bit of ground.
To start with, you won’t necessarily need a wealth of information just to create the account, as it can be edited in the account settings later. Indeed, if your Mailchimp account is going to be the centralized home for multiple businesses or audiences, you might not need or want to name your account after a single business anyway.
The main piece of information you will need to establish an account will be a personal email address for the account to be associated with (this can be at a private domain or with a popular email service provider such as Gmail, for example).
From there, you would take the following steps to create an account:
- Choose a username and password for your account (your username can match your email address if you would prefer not to make the username distinct).
- Choose your starting plan (this is where you can compare plans if you would like to start with something other than the free account).
- Finally, input your first name, last name, business name, and, optionally, your website URL for your business if you already have one. Figure 1.2 shows the Account Set Up page with the details filled in:
Figure 1.2 – Account Set Up page
As you move through the account creation pages, you will eventually arrive at your new account dashboard. Here, we conceptually see the three primary tasks that any new marketer should be thinking about as their starting point. In Figure 1.3, we can see the new account dashboard for a sample account, and the three sections identified there:
Figure 1.3 – New account app dashboard
The Mailchimp platform points out these three main calls to action to consider as you begin because you can think of them as the foundation of how you will start building your marketing effort. These three sections are as follows:
- Create your first campaign: In this section, you will have the option to choose the type of campaign or channel you would like to start with. For example, as we can see in Figure 1.3, you were prompted to begin thinking about whether you would like to start with an email campaign, automation, or a website as the starting point for how you are going to interact with the audience. We will talk more at length on each topic in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 respectively later on.
- Add your contacts: Here, you will be focusing on importing your subscribers, cleaning up your existing list, or if you’re early in your marketing journey, how to set yourself up to capture an audience.
- Launch: Then, of course, the final initiating step is launching your new channel or campaign, whichever you choose as the right one to start your journey with!
Now, as you may have noticed if you’ve been a heavy user of web-based applications in the last decade, account creation and different user interfaces change a little bit over time. This is generally rooted in experimenting with small ways to help you get more use out of an application. These types of experiments are to help you understand what you’re most interested in over time and how the application can help you find a feature most relevant to you.
While I’ve highlighted the most critical pieces of information to provide if you’re in a hurry and trying to speed through the rest of the account creation process, depending on when you’re reading this, it might be advisable to check out the additional, optional questions posed by the Mailchimp application as you create your account.
As Mailchimp adds more features in the future, signing up will change incrementally with more prompts being created in the app or even sometimes adjustments to what you see in the main calls to action I have referenced here.