Organizing your email list can be a pain in the neck, but luckily there are tools which continue to improve.
MailChimp recently announced that it is going to move away from static segments and instead change over to tags. Here’s why your church should care. The long and the short of this is it will help you save on your email newsletter and let you refine your email targeting even further.
To explain why this is the case, I’ll briefly look at the old segments, the new tags, and how this means money saved and better targeting.
What were MailChimp static segments?
Segments are a way to split up your email list so you could send more specific targeted emails. Segments have filters that can contain multiple parameters. This could be certain data about their profile or their activity on your recent campaigns (useful for cleaning up your list). In MailChimp, there were two types of segments.
- Auto-update segments (groups which add new members who meet your criteria);
- And static segments, these meet the rules of your segment and don’t update when new members meet those rules.
Auto-updating segments are great for groups within your church who may change over time, for example, whoever’s involved with the sound team. Static segments are useful for one-off events or running a course at a particular time.
These dynamic auto-updating segments are sticking around, but the static ones (which never change) are becoming tags.
What are MailChimp tags?
Tags are a new way of sorting files and contacts based that people who sign up to your list don’t see. You manually add or remove them. However, you can use filters to identify the right people to add tags to, as well as importing data from CRM and other tools. If you had previous static segments, they will be changed to tags.
This means you can create a tag for members who sign up from certain landing pages (for an event for example) or who haven’t given you a release form for their child to go on a trip. These tags can then be used in your auto-updating segments as well.
This means we now have three tools to organize a list in MailChimp.
- Groups (people who sign up see and select what they want);
- (Auto-updating) Segments (which you create based on attributes);
- Tags (which you add to users data).
Previously, you had to set up your own merge tags and create default values. It wasn’t very user-friendly but you could create a similar result. Now, this is much simpler with MailChimp tags.
Why should I care about MailChimp tags?
Tags make it much easier to keep one main email list and add multiple attributes to that list. Instead of creating a separate list just for an event, you can now add tags to people’s profiles and then use that to message the attendees.
With multiple tags, you can also really dial down into different groups of people and send a more specific message to those people.
That’s great for churches.
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