Creating simple landing pages with MailChimp

If you have a Mailchimp account, are you are looking to increase your mailing list audience? By creating simple landing pages with Mailchimp, you can help your potential clients and customers sign up to receive your newsletters.

Once you have a published landing page, they are easy to share on the web and social media. Helping you to reach out to your potential audience and grow your mailing list on Mailchimp.

Why do you need a landing page?

How do you currently tell people about your mailing list? If you currently just have a link on your website, they have to know about and visit your website to sign up. With a landing page you can send out a link on a social media post, which is designed to engage with your target market.

This link takes them directly to a sign up page, which is linked to your Mailchimp audience.

Creating a social post with an eye catching image and a CTA (Call To Action), they are more likely to click through to find out more. You can tell them the benefits of signing up to your mailing list. This might be to receive special offers, priority availability or new services.

You can also engage with your potential audience by offering some sort of freebie for signing up. This might be 10% off your next order if you have an ecommerce site, or maybe a free download related to your product or service.

So you first need to create the landing page and its unique URL so you can start sharing it out.

How to create a simple Mailchimp landing page

Log into your Mailchimp account and navigate to the Campaigns page.
Click Create a campaign and choose Landing Page
Now you can choose the type of landing page you want to create. To get more subscribers, choose the grow your list
Create a name for your campaign (this will not be visible to your visitors, so you can call it something that is relevant to you).
You then need to choose which audience you will be building, so that the signup form adds the new subscribers to this list.

Now you are ready to design your landing page.

You can upload your logo and edit the page to your branding.
Add a colour or image to the background to make it more eye catching.
Create a heading for the landing page – make it short and to the point.
In the text box, outline the benefits for signing up to your mailing list. What will they receive as a result of signing up, will you be sending them special offers?
Edit the sign up form block so you collect the information you need from your audience. But it is best to keep it simple with First and last name and their email address. You want to make it quick and easy to sign up.

Once you have edited the standard form, you have the options of adding extra elements to the landing page:

You could create a footer to the landing page to contain an image. This could be of yourself if you are a sole trader, or a picture of your team. By adding an image of a person it makes it more personal.
You can also add a block to contain your social media platforms and website, so then they can always take more of a look around your business before signing up.

Save and close your design when you are ready. This takes you to the campaign overview where you can now edit:

The page title, which is what is shown in the browser bar when people visit your landing page.
Change the URL name.
Check it is linked to the right audience, you can change it here if you have more than one audience (you are limited to one audience on the free account)
You can also edit how you track your landing page. You can choose to track with Mailchimp. If you have a Google Analytics account, you can also use this to track the landing page performance. Just enter your unique UA-XXXXXXXX-X number from your Google Analytics account and it will link the campaign for you.
ReCAPTCHA is automatically enabled, so that when your visitor clicks through the sign up process, there will be a ReCAPTCHA prompt. You can disable this, but it is best to keep this enabled to stop automatic spam signups.

You have now created a simple signup page that you can share using the URL that Mailchimp has generated for you. Copy the URL, you can use a free URL shortener site such as bitly.com .

Once you have sent out the URL link, you can review the progress of the landing page on the Mailchimp Campaign page. It will show you the number of visits to the page, clicks and subscribers.

You can go back in and edit the landing page at any time. You can create one master landing page, or you can create multiple landing pages if you want to create one for a different service or target market.

Once you have built your audience, you can then create tags so you know how they are related to your business. For example, they follow your newsletter, they are a client, or a customer. You can also create segments on your mailing list, so that you can send target emails out to a specific segment of your mailing list.

At First Rate PA we offer an email marketing service, where we can take the pressure off of your day to day business by managing your email campaigns on your behalf. To find out more about this service, contact us at [email protected] or give us a call on 0333 577 9698.