How to Use Mailchimp for Email Marketing

Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any digital marketing channel — repeatedly and consistently across industries. Mailchimp is the most widely-used email marketing platform in the world, and knowing how to use Mailchimp properly means more than sending a newsletter. It means building a healthy list, segmenting for targeted messaging, creating automations that work while you sleep, and reading the analytics that tell you what to do next. If you want the full context, see our Complete Guide to Software and Apps.

This guide covers the complete workflow from account setup to advanced automation.

Account setup and audience management

After signing up at mailchimp.com, the setup asks for your business name, website URL, and physical mailing address — legally required in the footer of every email under CAN-SPAM (US), CASL (Canada), and GDPR (EU).

Configure your audience defaults first: Audience → Settings → Audience name and defaults → set a recognisable name, a default From Name, and a From Email address. Use a domain email address ([email protected]) rather than Gmail or Yahoo — emails from free email providers have significantly lower deliverability than from a custom domain.

Set up email authentication (DKIM and SPF records for your domain) — this is the technical step most new users skip, but it’s the biggest single factor in deliverability. Find the setup in Mailchimp: Audience → Settings → Domains → verify your domain. Your domain registrar’s DNS settings need to be updated with the DKIM and SPF records Mailchimp provides.

Building the audience: Audience → Manage contacts → Import contacts → upload a CSV of existing subscribers who have previously consented to email. Never import contacts who haven’t opted in — this violates CAN-SPAM and GDPR and triggers spam complaints that damage deliverability for every future campaign.

For growing the list organically, Mailchimp provides signup forms: Audience → Signup forms → choose embedded form (for your website), pop-up form (appears after a time delay or scroll), or landing page (a standalone Mailchimp-hosted page — useful if you don’t have a website yet).

Creating and sending campaigns

1. Create a new campaign. Campaigns → Create campaign → “Email” → Regular email → name the campaign (internal name, not visible to recipients).
2. Choose your audience and segment. Select the audience. Click “Segment or tag” to narrow the send to a subset — this is where targeted marketing starts. Sending the right message to the right subset consistently outperforms broadcasting everything to everyone.
3. Set the subject line and preview text. The subject line is the first thing recipients see; the preview text appears beneath it in most email clients. Click “A/B test” to create two subject line versions — Mailchimp sends A to a portion of the list and B to another, then sends the winner (by open rate) to the remainder. Run these on every campaign — the accumulated data tells you what resonates with your specific audience.
4. Design the email. Choose from Mailchimp’s pre-designed templates or start from a basic layout. The drag-and-drop editor adds content blocks (text, image, button, divider, social links) by dragging from the right panel into the email layout. Key design principles: consistent branding in every campaign, one primary call to action (CTA), and a prominent CTA button with clear action-oriented text (“Get the guide” not “Click here”).
5. Preview and test. “Preview” shows the email on desktop and mobile. Send a test email to your own address to verify rendering in your actual email client. Check all links, confirm images load, and verify mobile formatting before sending.
6. Schedule or send. “Send” for immediate delivery or “Schedule” to set a date and time. Mailchimp’s Send Time Optimisation (Standard and Premium plans) analyses subscriber engagement patterns and delivers each email to each subscriber at their most likely open time — typically improving open rates 10–20% over a fixed send time.

Tags, segments, and groups — the contact organisation system

Understanding the distinction between tags, segments, and groups is the foundation of targeted email marketing in Mailchimp:

Tags and segments work together: tag a contact as “Downloaded Lead Magnet,” then build a segment of contacts with that tag who haven’t purchased. Send that segment a campaign specifically addressing their interest. This is the Mailchimp approach to personalised marketing at scale without expensive personalisation tools.

Automations and Customer Journeys

Automations are emails (or sequences of emails) that send automatically based on subscriber behaviour or timing — they run without manual intervention once configured. Mailchimp calls its multi-step automations “Customer Journeys.”

Essential automations to set up for every business:

• Welcome series: triggered when someone joins the list. A 3–5 email sequence over 7–14 days that introduces the brand, delivers the lead magnet, shares the most valuable content, and makes a first offer. Average open rates for welcome emails are 50%+ — far above regular campaign averages — because subscribers are most engaged at the moment they sign up.
• Abandoned cart: for e-commerce integrations (Shopify, WooCommerce). Triggered when a shopper adds items to a cart but doesn’t complete purchase. Send 30 minutes after abandonment, then follow up 24 hours later if not converted. Typically recovers 5–15% of abandoned carts.
• Re-engagement sequence: triggered when a subscriber hasn’t opened an email in 90 days. A 2–3 email sequence asking if they still want to hear from you, perhaps with an incentive to re-engage. Contacts who don’t re-engage should be unsubscribed — inactive contacts lower deliverability and inflate the audience count (which affects your plan pricing).
• Post-purchase follow-up: triggered by a purchase event from an e-commerce integration. Thank the customer, provide order information, offer care instructions or usage tips, and suggest complementary products 7–14 days later.

Create automations: Automations → Customer Journeys → Create journey → choose a starting point (Joined Audience, Tag Added, Purchased, etc.) → add steps (email, time delay, condition check) → activate. The journey builder is visual — you add nodes connecting triggers, delays, conditions, and email steps in a flowchart layout.

Reading Mailchimp analytics

After any campaign sends, Campaigns → [campaign name] → View Report shows the key metrics:

• Open rate: percentage who opened the email. Industry average varies by sector — retail ~20%, software ~22%, nonprofits ~26%. More useful than industry benchmarks: compare your own campaigns over time.
• Click rate: percentage who clicked a link (any link) in the email. Typically 2–5% is a reasonable range for a healthy list.
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR): clicks ÷ opens. Measures how compelling the email content is for those who actually opened — a better measure of content quality than raw click rate, because it removes the influence of subject line performance.
• Unsubscribe rate: above 0.5% per campaign signals a problem — content mismatch, frequency too high, or a segment receiving irrelevant messaging.
• Bounce rate: above 2% suggests list quality issues — invalid email addresses that need to be removed.

Mailchimp provides industry benchmarks alongside your metrics for comparison. For current benchmarks across 50+ industries, Mailchimp’s email marketing benchmarks page is updated regularly and covers average open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates by sector.

Mailchimp plans — what you actually need

Most small businesses and creators learn Mailchimp on the free plan and upgrade to Standard when automation becomes important. The jump from Essentials to Standard is the one that unlocks Customer Journeys — the multi-step automations (welcome series, abandoned cart, re-engagement) that deliver the highest ROI in email marketing. See also How to Use 1Password for a related case.

Email deliverability — the factors that matter

A campaign that never reaches the inbox earns 0% open rate regardless of subject line quality. Deliverability is determined by:

• Domain authentication (DKIM and SPF): set up from the beginning — Mailchimp’s domain authentication wizard walks through it step by step
• List hygiene: remove hard bounces and unengaged subscribers regularly. Mailchimp automatically removes hard bounces; re-engagement campaigns handle unengaged subscribers.
• Consent practices: only send to contacts who explicitly opted in. Purchased lists, scraped contacts, and old lists from years ago produce spam complaints that damage sender reputation.
• Sending consistency: sudden spikes in volume (sending 10x the normal volume in one day) trigger spam filters. Increase frequency gradually.
• Content: avoid spam trigger words in subject lines (“FREE!!!,” “Make money,” “Click here”), maintain a reasonable image-to-text ratio, and include a plaintext version of every email (Mailchimp generates this automatically).

The single biggest deliverability improvement available to most Mailchimp users: complete domain authentication and clean up the list by removing anyone who hasn’t opened an email in 6 months. These two actions alone can meaningfully improve inbox placement rates for most small business senders. You might also run into How to Use Microsoft Outlook.

Mailchimp’s strength is making professional email marketing accessible without requiring technical knowledge or enterprise-level budgets. The free plan’s 500-contact limit means most users will need to upgrade as the list grows, but the learning curve at the free tier — campaigns, forms, basic segmentation, A/B testing — directly transfers to the paid tiers. The tool rewards consistent use: each campaign generates data that makes the next one better, and automations that took an hour to set up continue delivering value indefinitely. Related: How to Use Zapier.