I’ve been running Email Marketing and Mailchimp training courses for the last 10 years and the main reason folks come to me is because they find Mailchimp difficult to use.
A phrase I hear a lot is “Why is Mailchimp so hard?“.
From talking to my trainees, I think the number one reason is…
You’re not that interested in email marketing & learning Mailchimp!
I know this seems harsh but I don’t mean it in a negative way.
Understanding how Mailchimp works takes time and effort and when you’re running your own business or trying to do your “actual job” sitting down and learning about Mailchimp can be very time-consuming.
There’s also the fact that all the big tech brands, including Mailchimp, position themselves as “easy”, “simple to use”, “one click solutions”. It’s just not true.
It takes time to learn Mailchimp and its quirks and you may not have this time so hit me up if you want some training or need someone to run campaigns for you.
Here’s a few other reasons my trainees have found Mailchimp hard.
They don’t see the value of email marketing
If you’ve been running DIY campaigns and you’ve not got great results then you probably don’t see the value in email marketing.
It does work, honest. If done properly, email marketing can work really well but you need a quality, clean list to work with and you need to send the right emails to the right people at the right time.
Audiences and lists are difficult to set up and manage
They really are. You need to manage a list. You can’t just sit back and let it look after itself. Even with automations and integrations set up you still need to take time to analyse your lists and make sure the quality of your audience is high.
This takes time.
Do I tag, group or have lots of mailing lists?
This is another huge pain point for a lot of folk. How do you structure your mailing list? When should you segment? When should you tag?
Being able to identify the different segments within your list is essential.
The days of sending the same email to everyone are gone. We need to personalise emails properly and Mailchimp has some great tools to help you do this.
Again, it takes time to learn this. It also takes time and lots of experiments to work out the best ways to segment your audience.
It’s hard to write decent copy that doesn’t sound like spam!
It really is! Writing email copy is hard.
It’s so easy to end up sounding like a spam-machine or being so careful that you never ask your subscriber to engage with you.
Experimentation again is key. Trying different styles of content and understanding your audiences’ needs is essential for a successful email campaign.
The email editor can be tricky if you’re not technical
Another common issue I hear is that the editor is a little tricky to use and sometimes it is.
Some folk to expect it to be very much like Microsoft Word where you can put what you want where you want it, use any font and make it look exactly how you want.
You can build very nice-looking emails but you can’t do everything.
Emails need to be built in sections, with blocks so that they display well on devices of all sizes, especially mobile phones.
You need to use the right fonts because not all email clients and devices have the same fonts installed.
Using the default styles within the Mailchimp editor is the best bet.
Automations and Integrations are hard
They are, and some technical knowledge is needed. Sometimes IT needs to get involved.
There are ways to connect Mailchimp with CRMs, Ecommerce platforms and all sorts of databases so that you can automate a lot of the email marketing process.
Being able to send automated emails for abandoned shopping baskets or welcoming drip campaigns can really help sales and improve engagement.
It again takes time to learn but can be extremely powerful.
So that’s why Mailchimp is hard
This is what folks have told me. Mailchimp does take time to use but if you’re only using it once a month to send out an email then it’s going to take ages to learn all its quirks.
If you want some 1-2-1 training then check out this page.
If you want someone to look after your email marketing for you then check out this page.