Save Time with WordPress and Mailchimp

This article courtesy of Nuttify Champion Websites

 

Time is one thing that you can never get back. It’s the one resource that is non-renewable. Once you’ve spent that hour, it’s gone. So when you can automate some business tasks, then you get to claw back some time and spend it on more useful activities like improving your services, making more sales, or spending time with your family.

Automation saves you time.
Now, I know,  as a business owner myself it can be scary to use automation and remove that personal touch. Because you don’t want to appear  like a robot to anyone, much less your customers. But automating your services can actually deliver more value to your customers.

Now, there are some things you can automate that actively build your relationship with your customers. For example, automatically feeding out your Champion blog posts straight to your clients’ and subscribers’ inboxes using a free tool like Mailchimp.

Here are some champion benefits why you should send your blog posts automatically using Mailchimp:

• You save time
  By feeding your blog posts out to Mailchimp automatically, you only have to do the task once: write the blog post. As opposed to 1. write blog post 2. copy blog post to Mailchimp campaign.
• Leverage
  Set it up once, and it runs forever. Once your Mailchimp RSS to Email campaign is set up, you don’t need to edit it again.
• Easy to set-up 
  Mailchimp is easy to setup. Check out this YouTube video of how to create a Mailchimp account or this Mailchimp Knowledgebase article
• Integrations
  Mailchimp integrates with heaps of apps like Xero.com, WordPress,  Zapier.com, Google Docs, and many more
• Customisable
  Mailchimp allows you to create email templates that help you keep that personal touch, and maintain your brand.
• Segment your List
  You can create custom fields to segment your list members into different “sub-lists”
• Enhances engagement
  People actually do love receiving your emails. Strange, but true. Sometimes people will stay subscribed to your list for months or years until that moment when you are there for them at the time that they are making the decision to buy.
• Email marketing has a better conversion rate than social media
  Email remains the most effective online marketing tool, with customer acquisition reportedly 40 times better than social media. This report from McKinnsey layouts out some impressive facts about the effectiveness of email marketing
• Take a look at these links for more info on the effectiveness of email marketing
  • http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/why_marketers_should_keep_sending_you_emails
  • http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251752
• Sharable
  Email is shareable, like social media. Remember the “Forward” button. Yeah – it works just like “Share” on Facebook. Since your audience are reading right from their inbox, hitting forward to share your champion content is as easy as 1, 2, 3!

How to connect your WordPress blog to Mailchimp

WordPress is your Champion content publishing platform. It’s super easy to use, and is easy to publish content. The other great thing that WordPress provides is an RSS feed.

RS-WHAT?

Yes an RSS feed. I have to be honest, no one really knows what RSS stands for, but usually it’s understood to mean Real Simple Syndication.

That’s all you need to know. It’s a TLA (Three Letter Acronym). But what’s important is that you can setup an RSS to Email campaign in Mailchimp.

What I like to do is setup the RSS Email campaign to check every morning at 8am to see if you have any new posts published. If so, Mailchimp automagically creates an email campaign and sends it out to your list.

Easy.

Once the RSS Campaign is setup, you can virtually set and forget

You do have to remember to publish blog posts every week, however.

But as long as you do that, then the next day (at 8am) a summary of your blog post goes out to your list and people find it in their inbox. Then some of them click through and read your post, and some of them call you up to buy stuff from you. That’s what we all want.

Conclusion

So, if you take one thing away from this blog post, it is this: Automating your blog posts out to your email list will save you time. Time that can be spent on more valuable tasks like increasing sales, and improving your products and services, or spending it with your family.

So to maximise the effectiveness of your blogging strategy, I recommend setting up Mailchimp to automatically feed your blog posts out to your email list.