MailChimp Tutorial: Sending Out Reward for Sign Up

MailChimp is the service I use to maintain my mailing list and I chose it instead of aWeber primarily because you can have up to 1,000 subscribers and send out 6,000 emails per month for free without having a monthly subscription fee.  In addition the templates and social options like showing logo’s/pictures for all your subscribers and the mail editors appeared to be more to what I was looking for at the time.

One reader asked me how they can send out free eBooks automatically with MailChimp and I wanted to share this with others who may have a similar question.

MailChimp can send out a “Final Welcome” letter which will be a final email delivered to your subscribers after they confirm their email subscription.  It is this final email letter where you will want to include your free eBook or download for them to pick up.

MailChimp does not allow you to include “attachments” in the final welcome emails so you will always be having a “link” where the subscriber can download their freebie by clicking on the link.

When making a “download” link you can either host the file on your own website or blog, or you can upload a file to MailChimp and have them retrieve it from MailChimp directly which is a better option if you don’t want that file to be publicly found on your own blog.

For this purpose let’s say you want MailChimp to host the file so that you don’t have to upload it to your own blog.

To update your Final Welcome Email click on your “Lists” and then the “Forms” sub menu.  From there you select “Final Welcome Email” from the forms & response emails drop down list.

Inside your Final Welcome Email, you would just make sure you click on the “Design It” button and edit the body of the email, here you would type whatever text you want and select the text you want to link to your uploaded eBook, in the example image I am linking “FREE eBook” to the PDF file I want to upload to MailChimp.

Click on “Insert Link” and then click on “Upload”.  Select the file (PDF, ZIP, DOC…etc) that you want to upload and click “Send to the server”.  Then MailChimp will present you with a  URL that you can use to retrieve your uploaded file, something that looks like this:

http://gallery.mailchimp.com/82baf03e5fc60f4e35df9f43e/files/FILENAME.pdf

Now, you are finished once you save the configuration and any new users who sign up for your mailing list will get a link to the file so they can download it in their final welcome email.

Note, MailChimp is extremely flexible and you can create conditional tags and customize your Final Welcome Email based on those Conditional tags.  Let’s say if someone signed up and chose “technology” as what they were interested in, you can send them a PDF related to that category instead of “blogging” if somebody chose blogging.

To read how to use conditional tags for Final Welcome Email, I recommend you look at this article on MailChimp’s blog: http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/personalize-your-welcome-emails-with-custom-freebies/

Any questions or comments, let me know I am always wanting to know and hear from my readers.

PS. You can also use the same “download” logic to add free downloads to auto responders which are sent out X # of days after someone signs up, or even include them in newsletters.

-Dragon Blogger