Understanding and using online marketing with Mailchimp

Online marketing specifically refers to platforms that empower you as the end user to use multiple, digital channels to reach an audience. Most commonly, since the 21st century, the drivers that foster the prevalence of online marketing instead of other traditional marketing channels are the internet, big data, and smartphones. Additionally, if we consider that market trends overwhelmingly point to each new generation leveraging more digital screens than the one before it, we can see that creating a holistic, data-informed marketing strategy becomes more and more critical.

Trend predictions from industry leaders such as Forbes, for example, point specifically to the need to think about your marketing strategy as omnichannel or multi-channel instead of as completely distinct efforts from one another. Businesses should consider all-in-one platforms as the predicted trend in terms of leveraging data about their contacts to build an overall journey. This empowers them to guide their audiences through all of their marketing content instead of maintaining them nested to specific channels.

As you begin your journey into considering different platforms, the key pieces of information to think about as you assess various marketing platforms is to think about categorizing their available channels into one of three buckets for you and your needs:

• Non-negotiable: These are the channels that are either already critical to your marketing or are biggies, such as emails
• Known growth: These are the channels that you know would be helpful but that you haven’t attempted to work into your marketing efforts
• Curious: These are the channels you’re either unfamiliar with, or you haven’t previously considered how they would fit into a marketing effort for your needs

In Figure 1.1, we can see these hierarchies illustrated as a hierarchy from bottom to top; highest priority to lowest:

Figure 1.1 – Hierarchy of marketing channel needs

The reason I think of these needs as a hierarchy or categorization when considering platforms is that if you are starting with growth in mind, thinking of at least the two first categories when choosing a platform means that you have a longer runway for the growth of your marketing efforts. This is, of course, where multi-channel marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, instead of single-channel marketing applications, come to the forefront of your mind.

In the context of what we’ll be discussing, we’ll be thinking very specifically about Mailchimp-specific terms and then the most common digital marketing channels, which we’ll define a bit more in the following section.