New Customer Journey Automation Tool & More Mailchimp News

Christine Foulds • July 1, 2023

This post was first published in 2020.

Back in August, Mailchimp announced a major improvement to its CRM platform: it’s new customer journey automation. This was then followed by the SMART Recommendation feature and the brand-new Creative Assistant which is currently live in BETA mode. So, what does it all mean?

Mailchimp Customer Journey

Mailchimp’s old automation system was not the best to put it bluntly. I’ve had many occasions when I had to tell clients that the system cannot do this or that just yet. Now, it seems with the launch of the Customer Journey things are finally looking up.

The old automation tool was based on a single initiated trigger and was lineal. The new customer journey tool is built in a way that encourages flexible and adaptable automated workflows.

It also uses the much liked drag and drop functionality. It’s easy to drag in triggers, delays, communication channels and other actions making it easy to follow the workflow you’ve created.

The new tool allows you to include multiple triggers that will initiate and automated workflow. These are known as starting points and include behaviours (not opened email), demographics (location), sign up form and much more.

Best of all, the new customer journey tool has branching capabilities. Best example would be: has contact opened email Yes/No for which you can then choose strategy A or B respectively to communicate to the right contact with the best messaging.

Also, these actions all work independently from each which gives you even more flexibility when creating workflows.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the customer journeys don’t need to evolve around email. These can be used for CRM purposes for example list cleaning or tag management.

My Verdict On Mailchimp’s Customer Journey

I think it’s a huge improvement and should especially be of interest to medium sized businesses who have more complex data on their customers. For them, the old automation tool could simply not cater for all the different automation needed to keep customers happy.

The tool itself is very similar to the Active Campaign setup. Personally, the reporting might still need a bit of work but at least the functionality has improved massively.

Please be aware though that not every user in Mailchimp has full access to the customer journey tool as it’s linked to the pricing scheme. I think that’s need re-evaluating.

Why Should You Start Using Automated Workflows

There are five simple reasons why everyone should embrace automation:

Easier personalisation
Manage data better
Nurture leads effectively
Save time
Improved timings (right content at the right time to the right person)

SMART Recommendation

SMART Recommendation has been around for a while but it might be good to outline the existing Mailchimp tool a bit.

It consists of three main components:

Know and grow your customers
Build smart content
Know how to optimise

Each component includes handy tools that can support you in getting better results out of your marketing campaigns.

For ‘Know and Grow’, the tools include lookalike audience, purchase likelihood and customer lifetime value. Based on the information provided, you can segment your data better and nurture your customers better as you provide the right messaging to them.

Point two doesn’t include too many tools but you might have noticed that Mailchimp provides you with a subject line helper. It flags up subject lines that are too long or use too many emojis. In this component, you can also find the product recommendation tool which is extremely useful.

Last but not least, we’ve got send time optimisation and next best actions which are part of the optimise component.

Creative Assistant

This is a brand new tool which just launched on Mailchimp. The main aim is to reduce time spent on creating on brand images. The new AI tool can create those for you. All you need to do is upload font, colour hex codes and logo and apparently the system will do the rest.

I haven’t used this tool yet so I can’t really say much about it. It would be interesting to know though what graphic designers make of it.

More Mailchimp Updates

Over the next coming weeks, Mailchimp will announce further updates so keep an eye out for more announcements.

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Closures, Launches And Everything In Between

June 7, 2024

To say that the last few weeks have been extremely busy would be an understatement. There has been a lot of change over the last few weeks and we’re still in the midst of it. So, what’s been going on? Some brands were let go. Seven of the bingo brands that I was looking after have been sold to a new owner. This meant a lot of handovers, finishing of campaigns and preparing as well as executing the exit strategy well. It was with mixed feelings seeing these brands go as I’ve been working with them for over eight years. However, feelings aside, it was a very good business decision. Some brands were migrated. On top of handing over existing brands, I also managed to migrate one of our current casino brands to a casino environment that we’re already using with the remaining casino brands. This was actually a very smooth process as most of it was handled by our partner Progress Play. Nevertheless, the CRM journeys had to be updated and we also took this as an opportunity to give the marketing material a bit of a refresh. Two of our bingo brands are being launched at a completely new platform with a company in Manchester called Grace Media. This has been very time consuming as we’re starting completely from scratch. I’m getting to know new systems like XtremPush which I’ve not used in the past. Setting up new CRM journeys, promotions, terms and conditions as well as updating the look and feel of the brands has kept me very, very busy. New brand was taken on. As part of the new partnership with Grace Media , we took on a new bingo brand called BOGOF along side our two brands that we’ve migrated to Grace Media. I had the pleasure of going to Manchester and working with the team for a week. What else? On top of that, I started work with a new Klaviyo customer called Blue Line Abrasives . It’s an industry that I know where little about so it’s great to have their team at hand to assist when I have product related questions. What’s next? Over the next few weeks, things should slow down and settle a bit. Fingers crossed.

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Has it really been three years?

By Christine Foulds • September 22, 2023

On a Friday afternoon, when all the main tasks had been done, I wondered when was the last time that I uploaded content onto my blog? I knew it has been a while, but I would have never thought that it was close to three years. Yikes! It’s one of the key rules of digital marketing to stick to a frequency of posting content online but as everyone can see, I failed. Luckily, the reason puts a smile on my face. I'd always hoped that I would be in this position when I first decided to set up FouldsCRM. I’ve just been incredibly busy. Over the last three years, I’ve increased my client portfolio quite significantly. Here is a quick overview: I started to work with the email marketing platform Klaviyo assisting three of my clients to migrate from Mailchimp to Klaviyo. None of them have regretted their decision and have seen a boost in email marketing sales due to changing the platform. I started to manage the CRM for 8 additional casino brands who use the Progress Play software. This was quite work intensive as we were the first ones to run their own CRM out of all of the Progress Play partners. It’s been an incredible 12 months since we took over the CRM. I welcomed back clients that were lost due to COVID which was really lovely. The travel industry was hit especially hard so being able to work with these businesses again has been really rewarding. I joined Mayple as one of their email marketing experts as part of their partnership with Mailchimp. The project aimed to show existing customers how to use the platform more effectively. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Mayple community, I decided a few weeks ago to stop as most of the clients are based the United States. The time difference wasn’t working for me and my family. Family always comes first even though I’d have loved to continue working with the Mayple team. I worked on a few ad-hoc projects. Even though my blog and overall website haven’t been updated as much as they should have been, FouldsCRM is busy and I’m open for business!