A collection of articles, tips and resources to help you make the most of Mailchimp. If you find them helpful, or have any comments or suggestions for topics please do let me know.
And if you’re a Mailchimp user you should probably sign up for my weekly-ish email too - give it a try.
A question I get asked very commonly is what does it mean if a contact has the little grey label saying “Cleaned” alongside them in Mailchimp.
This little ditty tells you what it means, why it happens and what you need to do about it.
Over the last 15+ years of Chimpology, I’ve had a LOT of businesses come to me because they got help from a Mailchimp expert on PeoplePerHour, Fiverr or Upwork. And then it didn’t end well.
In fact I had another one just last week. Here’s what happened…
This oh-so-innocent little innocent looking dropdown to change the font size in your Mailchimp emails can cause an absolute mess when your emails are viewed on mobile.
Find out why, and how to make sure it doesn’t.
Are you thinking of resending a Mailchimp email to non-openers?
Mailchimp will often prompt you to do it and offers you a quick way. But the quick way does not equal the best way. Here’s how an extra 5 minutes can make all the difference…
When you add an image or a gif into your email, there are two different settings you NEED to adjust for each and every image in your email. One of those is alt text.
Read more about what it is, why you need to, some surprising stats, can you use AI to do it for you, and examples of good and bad.
Mailchimp is busy making heaps of upgrades and improvements to the platform this year. And as a Mailchimp Pro Partner I get the heads up on all the latest changes and what’s coming up.
Here’s what’s happened over June and July 2025. Some great. Some really annoying.
I recently had a question from one of my newsletter readers about using Product Recommendation blocks in emails. They hadn’t worked as she’d expected and she reached out for advice. So here’s a quick run-down on what they are, what they do, and if you should use them. (Clue: probably not)
Do you ever use AB testing (sometimes called multivariate testing) in Mailchimp? It’s one of the tools you have at your fingertips to help make your marketing work harder for you, so if not, give it a go. Here are some tips.
Quite understandably, it’s easy to think of open rates as a good way to understand how successful an email campaign was. Presumably if the reported open rate is high, that means lots of people read the email, right?
Wrong.
If you’ve sent a Mailchimp email campaign lately, chances are it’s bounced to a few people. What does that even mean? How do you find out? And do you need to do anything?
So you’ve sent an email campaign from Mailchimp and you’ve hopefully(!) looked at the campaign report. And in that report you’ve seen a “Bounce rate”. Now what?
Mailchimp has launched a new pop-up form builder and the old ones will disappear form your website on 24 June.
The new versions are VERY different - lots more options and features. Read on for more info and to see some examples.
Mailchimp is busy making heaps of upgrades and improvements to the platform this year. And as a Mailchimp Pro Partner I get the heads up on all the latest changes and what’s coming up.
Here’s what’s happened over the last few weeks - some amazing stuff!
If you have a look at this link, you can see a library to back issues of previous Mailchimp emails I’ve sent out - not all of them, just the ones I’ve chosen to share access to. I get asked about how to do this fairly regularly, so here’s how.
After recent convos about democratising AI and improving productivity, I decided it was high time I started adopting AI more myself.
Here are 5 ways I’ve made life and work easier. And no the doll is not one of them - getting that image to generate was a PITA.
You know how you just tick along in life and then suddenly a door opens unexpectedly, and you just have to walk on through and see what happens.
Well it opened. So I walked through… into 10 Downing Street!
I’ve had lots of panicked emails in my inbox asking what you need to do following this email from Mailchimp yesterday.
Some are from businesses that do need to take action, others that it just doesn’t affect.
Here’s how to find out if it affects you, and if so, what you need to do.
I’m always dabbling and trying things that impact my own Mailchimp account. My subscribers get to experience aspects of Mailchimp that others just don’t.
Where are your subscribers coming from? A lot of clients I first start working with have no idea aside from perhaps very basics. But that’s INCREDIBLY useful information. Find out why and what I do here behind the scenes.
In principle you can use a merge tag to add each recipient’s first name into your Mailchimp emails, in ways like this:
In the greeting e.g. Hi Claire,
Within a sentence e.g. “I’d love you to be there Claire”
On a button e.g. “Get yours Claire”
They can be super-effective and catch the eye. BUT should you actually use them?
Here are some questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge and some tips to make names work for you.
Are you paying the right amount for your Mailchimp account?
About 30% of accounts I audit aren’t - and usually because they’re paying too much.
Want to find out how to check? It only takes a few minutes…
When was the last time you checked who has access to your Mailchimp account. In fact have you EVER checked? Do it now. Trust me, I see some shockers. Here’s how…
Your contacts subscribed because they want to hear from you. And email marketing simply can’t work for you if you don’t send emails…
But there are never enough hours in the day so here are my tips to make it all quicker and easier, gleaned over the course of 14+ years of doing this. A 5 minute read that will save you HOURS and mean that Mailchimp can work harder for you and your business.
The subject of images comes up a LOT in my day to day as I work with clients on their Mailchimp accounts. I have rarely come across a client that has been using more than 2 o 3 of these tips, despite them being incredibly useful at a) make your life easier and b) making your emails work harder for you.
So here are 10 tips to make images work more effectively and efficiently for you in Mailchimp:
Email marketing takes time, energy, resources and, very often, money. Testing means you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t to avoid wasting them all.
We can all make educated guesses, but they’re just that. If we don’t test, we don’t actually know! So here are 5 things to test regularly...
I get asked this question a lot. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, have a look at the All contacts part of Mailchimp and scroll right a bit in your “spreadsheet” - chances are some of your contacts have a grey label that says “Cleaned”.
Find out what it actually means, how it happened and what to do with your cleaned contacts now...
I’ve talked about buying email lists before (and why you almost certainly shouldn’t). But how DO you grow your mailing list?
Key to this is that you should be aiming to grow it with the right sort of people - who are...
A few experiences lately means I need to ask you this VIQ (very important question)…
Do you actually know what your email subscribers experience when they try to sign up for your emails / newsletter? Have you actually looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes lately?
Initially, this question was prompted by
Recently I sent an email out about using AI for Mailchimp etc. You can read it (and subscribe so you don’t miss future ones) here.
Below are some tips and demos of how to do some of those things. Lots of them use Chat GPT, but others are using some different tools I’ve find and like. Enjoy!
Your Mailchimp archive is a page where potentially all of your past campaigns can be publicly access. That makes it both a blessing and a curse - great if you shape it to benefit you, potentially dangerous if you ignore it and merrily get on with your day without ever making a few tweaks. Read on to find out more...
Mailchimp folders are incredibly helpful, but despite that are a very little-used function. After years of doing this, I could probably count on one hand the number of accounts I’ve worked on that had them set up. But I HAVE dealt with a lot of messes because they weren’t.
Once in a while I invite my newsletter subscribers to send me their questions about Mailchimp and email marketing - the answers are usually helpful to everyone else too, so here they are…
Understanding recipient locations in reports
How often you should back up
If you can reply on opens and clicks
How you can tell your all-time most popular links clicked