Send email, not newsletters

2013-11-22

Do you have that mental filter on when you open an email newsletter? The one that makes you just quickly sift through the message, or even send it straight to the trash bin without even reading it?

I know I do, and recently I started moving away from elaborate newsletter templates and instead using an extremely basic template that just looks like something sent from Gmail.

I’m sort of a Mailchimp hardcore user, and I even use it for a lot of personal correspondance. Gmail’s interface makes it tedious to send the same email to more than 5 people, so instead I use Mailchimp for dinner invitations and updating my friends on what I do.

So now I use my basic “Gmail” template in Mailchimp also for my business email. I do my best to be as personal as possible:

  1. Making sure I have a personal greeting,
  2. Writing in the recipient’s language,
  3. Maybe even including a special message for some recipients (using a custom field in Mailchimp).

So far, it works great. I feel I have a much higher open rate, and get a lot more replies on my messages.