My son turned 16 a couple of months ago.

And just like that, my boy is no longer a baby, he’s a young adult, fiercely independent and fearlessly navigating the journey of life.

And as a mum, it’s a hard pill to swallow. Because I made a lot of mistakes when I was growing up, a LOT of mistakes, the last thing I want is for him to make the same mistakes.

But the logical part of me has to take a step back and allow him to make those mistakes. Because, despite making those mistakes, somehow, along the way I learned. I learned from my mistakes.

“We learn from failure, not from success,” Bram Stoker

I learned that in order to succeed, I needed to fail. And I learned that it’s possible to get better at something — even after you’ve failed.

But let’s be honest, when it comes to your business, no one likes to make mistakes, because that results in losing time, energy, and money.

As one of the leading agencies in the Mailchimp world we’ve looked at hundreds of accounts. Yet whilst carrying out account reviews, we regularly see businesses making common mistakes – especially when initially setting up their Mailchimp account and then, without realising it, continuing to do the wrong thing.

Making (and correcting) mistakes provides us with self-awareness of what we’re doing right and what we need to improve on. But in order to do that, you need to know what mistakes you’re making in the first place.

Chances are, you’re also making the same mistakes.

We’ve outlined below the 7 most common mistakes we’ve come across.

So before you send out any more campaigns, take a few minutes to double-check your Mailchimp system for these 7 common MailChimp mistakes to avoid.

Not Authenticating your Domain

Go for the green tick… Authenticating your domain will massively improve your chances of getting an email into an inbox (and not the spam/promo folder). Authentication is like an email “passport”, that MailChimp can attach to your emails so that when an inbox provider gets your email, it knows that it’s really from you – which is a big plus point when it comes to deliverability.

To get started, in Mailchimp, click Website, Domains and then hit the Start Authentication button next to the domain you want to verify.

Once you’re Verified & Authenticated you get a nice green tick ✅ on the verified domain page.

Feeding your ‘Zombies’

One of the key factors affecting ‘deliverability’ is the relationship existing subscribers have with your emails. If they’re not opening them regularly, then this is a sign to the inbox providers that your emails aren’t very good – and makes it less likely they’ll hit the inbox.

If you have too many “Zombies” (people who are on your list but aren’t opening any emails) this can have a big impact on your deliverability, Plus they’re people who you are paying for in Mailchimp, but who aren’t actually reading your emails.

Remove Subscribers With Low Ratings

We’re talking about those with a rating of 2 stars or below. By deleting these inactive contacts you can improve your deliverability as well as reduce your subscriber count.

Before you do this though, it’s worth ensuring the contact has been in the audience long enough to have a relevant contact rating.

Failing to archive your unsubscribes

The one thing you do need to do regularly is review your unsubscribes. Archiving them removes them as ‘valid’ contacts on your system, which means that they don’t count against your overall Mailchimp bill.

Even if you’re on a legacy account and not getting charged for your subscribers it’s still good practice to archive those unsubscribes to keep your account nice and clean.

Have a read of our recent article on unsubscribes which shows you step by step how to archive those unsubscribes and do it automatically.

No Welcome Automation 

Yay, someone’s just subscribed to your list! …Now, what?

If your answer isn’t “send them a welcome email,” you’ve got it all wrong.

Because the most important emails you ever send to someone are the first ones.

The first few emails that you send to your subscribers are crucial, because they set the tone for future communications.

They are a big part of helping create the recipient’s first impression of you. You have their attention and mindshare so use this short time span to make an impact.

When you send an email to someone for the first time, it’s likely the first time that their email software has encountered you too… and consequently, that first email, and how the recipient reacts, will start to train their software in how to react to your email.

So a good (and timely) welcome email will not only create a good impression but will help ensure that all future emails bypass the spam folder and hit the inbox.

Using Basic Templates

You need good branding, and that branding needs to be consistent.

Good branding not only makes you look professional but unifies your content and showcases your business personality.

So we can’t understand why some clients still have poor branding, especially because Mailchimp makes it so easy to modify basic templates.

We’re talking about those not having basic branding such as a logo or a personalised footer to those who go over the top with too much branding.

A little bit of both is a good medium.

Having Multiple audiences 

This is probably the biggest mistake we see Mailchimp users make.

People set up a separate audience for each group or segment they want to market to. It’s easy to do, not to mention tempting to upload new contact lists for each campaign that you create – our advice? don’t.

As a result, you’ll end up with numerous audiences in your account, with different names but also with duplicate contacts and the more audiences you have in your Mailchimp account, the more problems you’re going to have.

Why is it such a bad thing?

• Managing Unsubscribes and deletes gets very messy!
• It’ll Cost You More
• Automations are a pain
• Hunting for data is a challenge
• ‘Send to Everyone’ means you need to send an email more than once..
• ‘Send to Everyone’ means you manually need to filter duplicates out
• There’s no single place to understand what how your prospect has interacted with your communication
• Keeping track of forms (and where they are connected to) becomes a nightmare
• It’s really time consuming to move data around to get it in the right place
• There is no way to automatically move or update people from one audience to another
• You’re almost definitely not GDPR compliant

Not Tracking Sources (knowing where people sign up)

 Knowing how to use forms effectively, is one of the biggest routes to success there is in Mailchimp. Yet the one thing that people miss when it comes to forms is being able to track which form someone fills in.

If you’ve only got one form on your website, this isn’t really an issue… but if you’ve got more than one, chances are you’ll want to know which one someone completed to get into your data – because in many instances, you’ll look to treat them differently based on the form they completed.

Final Thoughts

 Guess what? no one ever succeeds at everything on the first try. Failure is a part of life, as well as success because there is no success without failure.

In the next few weeks we will be launching a new account review service called Chimp Medicals.

Chimp Medicals is available to anyone with a Mailchimp account. With a Chimp Medical, we’ll give you a diagnostic observation of your account where we advise exactly what’s going on, both the good and the bad, giving you a clear checklist of how to make things better and improve the way you do Mailchimp.

What’s more, we’ll be giving a special VIP discount to the first 10 readers who pre register their interest by Thursday 18th August.

The best thing you can do for your Mailchimp account today is to get a Chimp Medical where we can audit your Mailchimp account for mistakes you may be unaware of and provide you with a simple solution.

It’s ok to make mistakes, because we learn from them, the key here is to be aware of the mistakes you’re making. Click here to find out how we can prime your account for success by pre registering for a Chimp Medical today.