Your Mailchimp Archive: blessing AND curse (and how to make it just a blessing)
I recently sent an email about your Mailchimp Archive - both a blessing and a curse. You can find the email here in my archive if you missed it.
As promised, here are a few ways you can make it a) less of a risk and b) actually work for you.
/1. What is the Mailchimp Archive?
Your Mailchimp Archive is a publicly visible store of your past email campaigns.
It’s most commonly accessed via the “View this email in your browser” / “No images, click here” link right at the very top of your email (have you ever looked at it?) but can be made to work hard for you.
It’s a page where:
Existing subscribers can see every email you’ve sent to that audience unless you restrict what can be seen
New contacts can subscribe if they like what they see
A link that you can share if you want to give a give access to your past emails.
A code that you can embed on your website which adds them to a page.
/2. Make it look better
If you do nothing, your archive will look something like this and include every single email you have ever sent to that audience, including ones which only went to specific segments (I’ll talk about why that’s really important in a moment).
But with a bit of effort it can look a whole lot better - more on brand with better wording and calls to action, and much more suitable list of campaigns, excluding the ones you don’t want just anyone to access:
/3. Control what past campaigns can be accessed in your archive
Now this goes back to last week’s email about folders. If you sort your campaigns (emails) into folders, you can then select to only make one of those folders available to show in your archive. This means you can exclude e.g.
Campaigns that you sent to a specific segment telling them something that others shouldn’t know about (like members vs non-members, or a discount code you only offered to certain subscribers)
Old campaigns that were maybe in the wrong branding or just not the way you do things any more.
You can select which folder you want to show in your archive via the Campaign archive page in your Form Builder (it’s tucked away and a bit tricky to find).
/4. Actually USE your archive
Instead of just hiding it away and hoping no one notices it, consider how you could make good use of it instead.
For example:
Give subscribers access to back issues - perhaps in your welcome email. This could be incredibly helpful if it’s a connected series of emails and they subscribed part-way through.
Give potential subscribers a taster of your emails so they can see how amazing they are
Add a feed of campaigns into your website
Need help to make your archive work for you?
Not getting my weekly email?
If you’re a Mailchimp user, give it a go. It’s short, sweet and hopefully useful, and you can of course unsubscribe any time if you change your mind. Just scroll down and a bit and you’ll see where to subscribe.