MailChimp
INTERNATIONAL
Hello.
MailChimp makes it easy to create and send beautiful email newsletters,
manage your lists of subscribers, and track your performance. And it’s
totally free for lists with up to 2,000 subscribers.
But what if you’re using MailChimp outside of the United States? Or what if
you set up shop in the states, but your subscriber base calls Europe or Asia
home? This guide will help you get the most out of using MailChimp
internationally.
Setting Up Your
Account
The first step after creating your account is setting a default time zone. We’ll
reference this time zone when you schedule campaigns and use it to report
data across your account, so make sure it’s correct. Here’s how to set your
default time zone:
1. Go to the Account tab, then click on My Defaults.
2. Select your time zone from the drop-down menu at the top of the
page.
Chances are, if you live outside the United States, you probably use the
date format DD/MM/YYYY instead of MM/DD/YYYY, as all new MailChimp
accounts are set up to display. You can easily set your default date format
in addition to your time zone:
1. Under the default time zone settings from My Defaults, choose your
preferred date format from the drop down menu:
In addition to setting up a default time zone and date format, you’ll also
notice a setting for your default currency format. MailChimp currently
accepts payment in U.S. dollars (USD), British pounds sterling (GBP), and
EU euros (EUR). All plans are billed in U.S. dollars (USD). For more info on
how we calculate exchange rates, check out the article, How do we
calculate exchange rates?
Next, select the correct format from the list of options if you’ll be using one
of our paid plans:
Once you’ve made your default time zone, date format, and currency format
selections, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save to finish
setting up your account.
Creating Your
List
Before creating a signup form to add to your website, you’ll need to create
your list and upload your current subscribers. When filling out your account
information the first time you log in, we’ll go ahead and create a list for you.
You’re welcome to use the list we created, or you can follow the steps
below to create a new list on your own:
1. Go to the Lists tab, then click Create List.
2. Fill out the list details, then click Save to complete your list setup.
MailChimp supports Unicode (UTF-8), ASCII, and extended ASCII characters,
so all list uploads and campaign content that may contain special or
international characters outside of the ASCII range will need to be encoded
as valid UTF-8. If any non UTF-8 characters are uploaded to a list, you may
find that some parts of the application don’t appear or behave as expected.
So how do you know if your list file is encoded as valid UTF-8? If you’re
working with a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, you may not be
prompted with an option to select an encoding scheme for your file. Not to
worry, though—you can easily force this encoding by following the steps
below:
1. Save your Excel or other spreadsheet file as a .csv
2. Locate the file on your computer, rename it to whatever.txt (notice the
new text type file extension), and save this new copy.
3. Open the new copy as a text file in Excel. At this point, you should
be prompted to choose the file type and character encoding. The
encoding should be set to UTF-8.
*If you’re already starting with a tab delimited .txt file, just make sure your
editor is set up to support UTF-8.
Now you’re ready to upload your current list. Follow the steps below:
1. Go to the Lists tab, and click Import.
2. Choose Upload from File or Copy/Paste from Excel, and follow the
steps to import your list.
After the import has completed, you can review all the email addresses that
were added to the list, as well as any errors or other notifications that need
attention.
Next, if you’re viewing your list or a single subscriber and see a bunch of
crazy characters instead of the correct subscriber data, revisit the list file
saving steps above, and make sure your browser is set to display content in
the appropriate encoding scheme: UTF-8.
Good chimp:
Bad chimp:
Creating Your
Signup Form
Now that your existing subscribers are all set up, it’s time to create your
newsletter signup form so new subscribers can sign up! When using our
default visual form builder, our entire opt-in process, including your signup
form, can be automatically translated to one of more than 30 languages. You
can edit using your own custom translations, or use our convenient autotranslation option to present your signup form and response emails based
on your subscribers’ browser language settings.
Auto-translation is a great feature to enable if you’ve got a widespread
subscriber base and need your signup form to display in multiple languages.
With this feature enabled, folks will see your signup form translated into the
language they’ve set in their web browsers. So your Italian friends will see
an Italian version of your form, and your French subscribers will see the
same form en français. Here’s how to enable the auto-translation feature:
1. Go to the Lists tab, and click Forms for the list you’ll be working on.
2. Click the Translate It tab at the top of the form builder.
3. Check the Auto-Translate box..
We’ll provide default translations for all of your forms in the languages we
offer, but if you’d like to customize these auto-translated strings a bit more,
follow these steps:
1. Choose the form you’d like to edit from the drop-down menu at the
top of the form builder, then select the auto-translation language
you’d like to customize:
By default, we’ll show the English equivalent for each string you’re
customizing in the column on the right. Edit any of the default information
that you’d like in the column on the left, then click Save. Repeat these steps
for any of the other auto-translate languages you’d like to customize, then
click Save and Exit.
Use our custom-translation option if you’re not looking to cater to folks
outside of your language base. This allows you to customize any of our
default translations for your selected language for the entire opt-in process.
Here’s how to do that:
1. Go to the Lists tab, and click Forms for the list you’d like to work
with.
2. Click the Translate It tab at the top of the form builder.
3. Choose your default form language from the pull down menu at the
top of the page. This is the default language for all of the forms and
response emails for your list.
4. Edit any of the default strings you’d like, then click Save.
To edit the translations for any of the other forms and response emails,
simply choose the form from the drop-down menu and follow the steps
above. We’ll even automatically save your translations for you as you switch
to a new form to customize.
*Are you a coder? Have a peek at our advanced forms for even more
customization.
Fields
When you build your signup form in MailChimp, we’ll let you add just about
any field you’d like (up to 30), so it’s good to have an idea of what sort of
information you’d like to get from your subscribers when they sign up for
your list. To begin adding fields to your signup form, follow these steps:
1. Go to the Lists tab, and click Forms.
2. Click the Build It tab at the top of the form builder.
3. Choose your field type with the Add a Field choices (more details on
field types).
You might like to add a birthday field to your list so you can send out
targeted birthday promotion autoresponders. Since you’re probably dealing
with non-U.S. subscribers, you might also want to set a default date format
of DD/MM for the birthday field (or any other date fields) you add. To do so,
follow these steps:
1. After choosing your field type from the Add a Field choices, you
customize that field by clicking on the Field Settings tab.
2. Update the Field Label to reflect your language, then choose any
defaults, like the date format. Then click Save Field.
Adding a Form to Your Website
Now that you’ve customized your form to your liking, there are a number of
ways to add it to your website. To get the most out of the autotranslation
option, you might consider grabbing the unique link to your signup form to
add to your website. To do that, go to your Lists tab, click the Forms link,
then head over to the Share It tab. There, you’ll find your signup form’s link
under Subscribe Form URL. Just copy the eepurl link, and you’re ready to
go.
Interested in a more integrated option for your signup form? Check out our
embed-code forms under the Lists tab, click on the Forms link, then click
the For Your Website link and choose Signup Form Embed Code from the
drop-down menu. You’ll notice a few options from the menu on the left:
1. Choose the Super Slim Form for a streamlined approach. This form
contains only the email-address field, so if you need additional fields,
you should choose one of the forms below. The Super Slim Form
utilizes inline success and error messages that are automatically
translated based on your subscribers’ browser language settings. To
translate the field labels in any of the embed-code forms, simply edit
the HTML before copying and pasting to your website.
2. Choose the Classic Form for the most customization options. Add
required fields, enable evil popup mode, and even add a link to past
campaign archives if you’d like.
The Classic Form also features inline success and error messages based
on the default form language set in the visual form builder. Form labels will
need to be translated manually by editing the HTML form code.
1. The Naked Form doesn’t utilize CSS or Javascript, allowing you the
most control. Form labels for the Naked Form will also need to be
translated manually by editing the HTML form code.
Finally, you might also be interested in integrating some of these plugins
with your MailChimp list.
Creating Your
Campaign
Your list is uploaded and your signup form is ready to go—it’s time to create
your first campaign. There are several ways to create a campaign in
MailChimp, but in this guide, we’ll focus on using the Campaign Builder to
create a regular ol’ campaign.
To begin, from the Dashboard click the Campaigns tab, then click Create
campaign.
Next, choose Regular Ol' Campaign. In the first step of the campaign
builder, select your list, and click Send to Entire List to proceed to the next
step of the campaign-builder process. In the Setup step, you'll name your
campaign, add your message subject, and set your form name and reply-to
email address. You can even personalize your to-field with merge tags from
your list.
You can enter all these details in your own language, with any of the
characters you’d normally use. If you’re copying and pasting your content
from an outside source, just make sure the content of that source is saved in
UTF-8 format. After setting your campaign details, click Design at the top of
the page to move to the next step of the campaign-builder process.
There are a few ways to add content to your campaign. Let’s take a look at
some of these in detail:
1. Type your content directly into the WYSIWYG editor. From English to
Japanese, even right-to-left oriented languages like Hebrew and
Arabic, MailChimp can handle your campaign content.
1. If you’ll be importing your content from a URL or copying and pasting
your own code , just be sure your code is valid, UTF-8 formatted
HTML.
Now that you know how to add content in your own language, consider
customizing it even further. What if you’d like to present content to your
subscribers based on their language preferences, but you’re not looking to
create several different campaigns? No problem. Using dynamic merge tags,
you can easily present unique content to each of your subscribers.
For example, let’s say we collected our subscribers’ language preferences
on our signup form, and now we’d like our French subscribers to see our
content in French and our Spanish subscribers to only see the content in
Spanish. Simply set your merge tag opening and closing statements and
add your content in between:
You can even set a default language to appear in your campaign archive
page or for the folks who didn’t select a language when they signed up. For
even more dynamic merge tag examples, check out our Knowledge Base
article .
But what if your subscriber base is diverse, and you’re not looking to
translate portions of your campaign into several different languages? Simply
add our translate merge tag into the sidebar of your campaign, and call it a
day! We’ll turn that merge tag into a list of clickable Google Translate links
for your subscribers on your campaign archive page.
For example, if you’ve created your content in Polish, your translate merge
tag would be formatted as *|TRANSLATE:PL|* and your campaign archive
page will look like this:
If you have our campaign-archive toolbar enabled for your list, you’ll also
notice a translate button at the top of page in your toolbar. Just choose the
language you’d like from the drop-down menu, and your campaign will
automatically translate into the language you’ve selected. Check out the
following article for even more information on the awesome archive toolbar:
What’s included on the campaign archive toolbar?
Want to add a human touch to your translated campaign content? You got it.
We have a handy plugin that allows you to grab your MailChimp API key,
hand that over to Straker’s expert translators to do a little translation voodoo,
and then automatically create a campaign from the results. Check out our
blog post for more info in that.
You’ve added your content, and now you’re ready to send a campaign to
your list. During the final step of the Campaign Builder, you’ll notice a couple
of sending options below your campaign checklist: Send Now and
Schedule.
If you’d like your campaign to go out to your list immediately, click Send
Now, and we’ll usher your campaign to our sending queue. If you’d like to
have your campaign go out at a future time and date, click Schedule. You’ll
now see two additional options appear:
If you’d like to schedule your campaign to send at a specific time and date,
be sure the first radio button is selected, and choose a date and time using
the fields shown above. We’ll automatically pull in your default account time
zone to schedule the campaign, but if you’d like the campaign to be sent in
a different time zone, click edit time zone. This will bring you back to the
My Defaults portion of your account settings.
But what if your subscriber base is geographically widespread? Let’s say
you’re located in Atlanta, GA, USA and schedule your campaign to go out at
11am EST. That may not be the best time for your subscribers in France to
receive your campaign, because they’ll be heading home from work for the
day. You need our magical Time Warp feature. With Time Warp enabled,
we’ll deliver your campaign to your subscribers based on their time zones
instead of your own. That means each of your subscribers can now receive
your campaign at 11am in their respective time zones, whether they’re in
Christmas Island or Paris, France. Because we’ll need to account for all of
the different time zones available, all Time Warp campaigns will need to be
scheduled at least 24 hours in advance.
You may be wondering how we accomplish such a time traveling feat. As
new subscribers sign up for your list, we’ll gather their IP addresses and use
that information to approximate their locations. The location data and IP
address can even modify itself as your subscriber reliably changes
locations. We won’t have a location for subscribers who were just added
manually or imported, so these subscribers will be assigned your default
time zone from the My Defaults portion of the account settings.
*Please note: Time Warp is currently available for all paid accounts (both
monthly and pay as you go).
Tracking and
Reporting
All your hard work has paid off, and the results are coming in. Every
campaign sent from MailChimp generates its own unique report. Reports
show you who opened your campaign, who clicked the links in your
campaign, which links they clicked, and even how many times they clicked
a single link. We’ll even show you how many subscribers liked your
campaign on Facebook or viewed it on Twitter, plus your Time Warp
statistics.
To view your reports, click the Reports tab from the main Dashboard, then
click on the campaign you'd like to view stats for. This will bring you to the
main reports overview page:
This page features a brief rundown of your campaign’s performance. You
can even see how your open and unopen rates compare to your list as a
whole (this is helpful if you’ve already sent several campaigns), or even how
your open rate compares to others in your industry . We’ll even offer a bit of
performance advice if any of the rates are significantly lower than average
for your list or industry.
Across the top of the page you’ll see these options: Subscriber Activity,
Social Stats, Click Performance, Advanced Reports, and Time Warp.
Click the Social Stats link to view your campaign activity on Facebook and
Twitter. You may see that a large number of subscribers retweeted your
campaign or liked it on Facebook.
If you want to extend your social reach even further around the globe, and in
turn widen your subscriber base, you can include some of our social merge
tags in your next campaign. See our Social Merge Tag Cheat Sheet for
details.
If you want to extend your social reach even further around the globe, and in
turn widen your subscriber base, you can include some of our social merge
tags in your next campaign. See our Social Merge Tag Cheat Sheet for
details.
Finally, head back to the top of the page, and click the Time Warp link to
view an interactive map with each of the different time zones that produced
opens, clicks, and bounces, plus any time zones that are still pending
delivery. Who knows—you might uncover a large subscriber base you never
knew existed before!
To drill down even further into campaign reports, check out our
Understanding Reports guide.
Wrapping Up
You’re now officially armed with all the necessary tools to get the most out
of using MailChimp outside of the United States. If you have any more
questions, feel free to reach out to our support team, join one of our free
online training webinars, or even watch one of our pre-recorded videos in
your own language. Check out our support page for the details.