Each list in your account has a list-specific email address. Send an email from your favorite email client to this email address and we'll save it as a draft campaign that can be edited and sent. Or, you can reply to a confirmation email and we'll send it out!
Before you start...
Campaigns can only be beamed from verified domains. You'll need to verify any domains you want to use for the Email Beamer before getting started.
Beaming your content
- On the Lists page in your account, pick the list you want to send to and click email beamer.
- Copy the email address shown or click add to your address book to download a vcard for the address.
- Design your email in your preferred email program such as Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or Yahoo. You can also design it in Word and copy/paste the content into Outlook or another email program. Just be sure that your images and content are added to the body of the email and not as attachments.
- Use the list-specific email address as the recipient for your email.
- Choose your subject line for the campaign, and use that as the subject line for the email you're sending.
- Send your email to MailChimp.
- Shortly after sending, you should receive a confirmation email from MailChimp Account Services indicating that your campaign has been received and is ready. Check the email account you sent from for this message.
- If you want to just send your content to your list reply with the word "Send" and we'll go ahead and send it out.
- If you want to make edits to your campaign, click the link in the confirmation email or log in to your MailChimp account, go to the Campaigns page and edit the draft campaign titled "From Email: Subject Line".
- By default, you'll be taken to the Confirm step to review your campaign details. Click resolve to be taken to any steps where we noticed a problem or edit to return to something you want to change.
- Once any missing items have been resolved and the campaign looks good, you can send or schedule your campaign at the bottom of the page using the send now or schedule button.
Note
Keep your list-specific email address as secret as possible and don't post it on the web anywhere, etc. That way you'll avoid accidental campaigns being created in your account or any spam bots hitting that email address.
Hint: If you're scheduling your campaign, the timezone being used for scheduling will appear just below the time selection boxes.
Hints and Tips
Which list will this go to?
The list is determined automatically based on the list-specific email address you use. If you need to change this or specify a segment, edit the draft campaign in your account and make any changes on
Subject line, From Name and Reply-to Address
The subject line of the email you sent to MailChimp will be used as the subject line for the campaign. We'll use the email address that you sent from as the reply-to address, and the from name will be the name specified for that email account. These can be changed on the Setup step of the Campaign Builder along with other campaign info, tracking, and social networking options.
Editing what you've sent over
Click the link in the confirmation email, or go to the Campaigns page in your account and click edit for the draft campaign. On the Design step, preview the HTML code for your campaign, send tests, and edit as desired. Our WYSIWYG editor will be used for the content, and you can edit the raw code by clicking Source in the toolbar of the editor. You can click on "popup preview" to view what the campaign will look like. In general, most email programs will use code that is as clean as possible to keep things simple, but it's always a good idea to preview and test the campaign in all cases. Here are some additional campaign testing tips.
Look over the plain-text version of your campaign on the Plain-Text step. The plain-text generator will automatically convert the links and content from your HTML campaign to a plain-text version. Here's some information about why you should include a plain-text version. If you made edits to the HTML on the Design step, click the Copy text from HTML button to re-generate the plain-text content.
Footer information:
We'll automatically add our standard footer bar to the code for your campaign to ensure that you have an unsubscribe link and a MailChimp logo (for free accounts). If you'd like to remove other information from this footer, or modify it, you can do this on the Design step. Just be sure to leave the required unsubscribe link!