I’ve been playing around with some of my client accounts recently in MailChimp and setting up some future campaigns for them.
These are campaigns that when you get to the final “send” page, you don’t press send (I’d argue you should never press send!), but rather schedule the campaign for some time in the future.
One question I get asked a lot is:
When I schedule a campaign for the future, when does MailChimp decide who gets the email?
In other words, when MailChimp schedules it for the future, does it decide who to send the campaign to at the point you create it, the point you press “schedule”, or when it actually gets sent?
The answer is that once a campaign is scheduled. It decides who gets the actual email at the time the email is sent.
How can you use this to your advantage?
Well, say you want to send a campaign on the 1st of the month, but want to send it again to those who haven’t opened it 7 days later.
(n.b. remember, that because the way that opens are ‘recorded’, it may be that someone actually opened the email… but it didn’t get recored – so don’t just resend exactly the same campaign, add a line to the top that says something like “we hope you don’t mind, but we checked and you don’t seem to have seen the email we sent last week – but if you did, just ignore this one” – ohhh… and remember to change the title as well)
You can set up the campaign to go on the 1st of the month, replicate it (with the caveats above), and then send it “to anyone who didn’t open the original email“. When the 2nd (reminder) email gets sent, just before it’s sent it checks to see who didn’t open the first and sends only to them… so even if someone opened the email a few minutes before the 2nd one is sent, MailChimp would know and then not send it to them.
This has loads of different uses – why not let me know how you could use this feature below!
