What’s this about?

Most, if not all, Indiegraf publishers have one email list as they have just one type of newsletter product. In Mailchimp, this looks like one big group of subscribers who get all the publication’s emails – including marketing and fundraising emails, as well as various mini campaigns, etc. This means that if a subscriber doesn’t like fundraising appeals or is frustrated with too many recap emails, they unsubscribe, and the publication loses that reader as a subscriber wholesale.

The purpose of getting publishers set up with email lists broken into groups is to retain subscribers, and honour a reader’s email preferences. There are added benefits of allowing readers to tailor their email subscription with the publication, thus increasing their satisfaction with their subscription.

In practice, this requires a publisher organising their Mailchimp audience into groups. Details on that below. Tangibly, this requires a publisher to think about what sort of “groups” their emails fall into, and then to email those groups accordingly, with the content readers anticipated signing up for.

To start, a publication might have a “Newsletter” group, and a “Fundraising” group. This alone would help retain subscribers during a revenue campaign who wish to opt-out of appeals, but like receiving news updates.

Migrating contacts to groups

  • Update ConvertPro settings so new subscribers get added to all relevant groups
  • Check to make sure welcome series don’t get triggered when people get added to groups (vs. added to audience)
  • Check update your preferences form (hide groups that you don’t want people to see etc)
  • Update any customer journeys (e.g. email courses) so that readers get added to all relevant groups after course completion