How to create an email course in Mailchimp, step by step

Audiences, contacts, and what an unsubscribe belongs to

A platform of this size organises people into audiences, and almost every question on this page turns out to be a question about scope. Which audience the course journey watches, what an unsubscribe belongs to, whether the same human in two audiences is one person or two, and what a suppression covers.

So the first thing to draw in a Mailchimp account is the map: which audiences exist, which of them the course watches, and what writes into it. Then ask what an unsubscribe reaches — the journey, the audience, or every message the account would send that person — because an unsubscribe that belongs to a workflow rather than to a person is how somebody who left on Tuesday hears from you on Wednesday.

The second is the contact record itself. Ask what it carries about consent: the wording somebody agreed to, the date, and something identifying the submission. That trio is supervisory guidance and ordinary practice rather than the text of any regulation, which is exactly why tools differ so widely on it, and it is what you need on the day a complaint arrives rather than on the day you export.

A builder made for branching, used for a straight line

An automation builder in this category exists for branching. A marketing sequence wants day four to differ for the people who clicked day three, wants a way to stop early once somebody has done the thing the sequence was built to cause, and wants a person whose behaviour repeats to run through it again. A course wants none of the three: it is a straight line of five days that each reader walks once. So the work in a Mailchimp account is not making five days possible. It is finding out which of those three a journey you are looking at is set to do, and deciding each one rather than inheriting it.

Stopping early is the one nobody thinks to look for. A sequence that ends the moment the reader converts is doing what a marketing sequence is for, and there is no reason to keep chasing somebody who already bought. On a course the same behaviour truncates the offer: somebody who buys on day two stops receiving days three, four and five, which are the days they agreed to. So the question to put to the journey in front of you is whether anything at all is able to end it before the last lesson, where that setting came from, and what you would rather it did.

Re-entry is the one that duplicates mail. A course trigger fires once per person and there is no such thing as joining twice, so ask what happens when the same contact meets the entry condition again. Then ask what the first step waits on and what each later delay is counted from, because a delay counted from the previous send drifts a little further every time a queue runs behind.

Every integration is a door onto the list

The reason to be on a platform this size is usually that it connects to everything else you run: a shop, a booking tool, a webinar, a form builder, a CRM. Every one of those connections writes contacts into an audience, and every one is a door onto the list the course journey may be watching.

So walk them. For each connection, ask whether an address arriving through it is asked to confirm before the first lesson or goes straight through. A service can require confirmation on its own form and take an unconfirmed address through six integrations, and the six integrations are where a sending reputation quietly goes bad.

The same walk answers a quieter question: how many of those doors put somebody into the audience the course watches when nobody intended a course at all. A customer who bought a physical thing in March did not ask for five lessons in April, so find out what narrows the journey to the people who asked, and settle it before the first stranger arrives rather than after.

If you already use Mailchimp, test these four things first

An account that already holds the audiences, the integrations and the reporting is a reason to build the course there rather than beside it. Two addresses, two days and a real lesson will tell you whether the journey behaves; the map of the doors takes an afternoon and is worth drawing once.

Four tests, in the order that finds problems earliest:

• Join today with one address and tomorrow with a second. The second should receive day one.
• Meet the entry condition twice from the same address, and count what arrives over the following days.
• Open the journey and look for anything able to end it before the last lesson, then decide whether you want it on a course.
• Unsubscribe on day three with the mail client’s own button, then send an ordinary campaign to that audience and see whether it lands.

What the account will not say

One failure is invisible from inside any platform: the send that returns nothing after the mail provider has already accepted the message. Sent late is an inconvenience; sent twice is a complaint, and what prevents it is a uniqueness rule held in a database rather than a line of code somebody remembered to write.

The other is what leaves with you. Addresses export from anything. The consent wording and the timestamps are harder, and the list of everybody who unsubscribed, bounced hard or complained is rarely offered beside the export, so it usually has to be asked for by name. Ask while the account is open rather than while you are closing it.