One of the most important things about getting started with email marketing is to learn how to set up your Mailchimp lists.

Organization is key, and it’s going to be something you wish you’d done if you don’t get some good organizational systems in place before your list starts getting too big.

And we all want our lists to get big, right?

So in this video, I’m going to show you how to set up and configure lists in your Mailchimp account so you can start sending your audience the messaging that they’re dying to hear from you!

How To Set Up Your MailChimp List

Okay, another thing that we’re going to do here is just to go through. Now that we’ve got everything set up, before we go and add it to our website, we’re going to make sure that we’ve got all our list settings ready to go. What we’re going to do now come over here in your Mailchimp account click on List and then by default, Mailchimp is creating for you a basic list.

This is enough to get started. Again, this is not a complicated setup. We’re just trying to collect emails and give our audience an opportunity to find a way to stay in touch with us and to help us start building our community. We’re going to just start with this basic example here that Mailchimp creates for us when we create our account.

We’re going to come over here, and we’re going to go to Settings. Let’s go to List and get on your settings. Then here you have a variety of different options that you’re going to want to confirm that you have set up.

Most instances, the default will be good, but let’s just take a look at a couple. We’re going to go over here to list name and default. We’re going to change the name of this to My WP Example Default Starter List.

That’s fine as far as what we’re going to do now. We’re going to leave this and then we are going to check a couple different things here. You’ve got the Form settings. Generally speaking, double opt-in is good for a couple reasons. It’s required by law in some places to be in compliance with spam laws.

It also helps clean up your list. If somebody is opting in on your website, and then they never click the confirmation email that comes through to them, they’re probably not the most attentive of subscribers. That’s always an option that’s available to you here.

We’re going to go ahead and enable this by default here. Then that’s going to turn on this reCAPTCHA, which basically what that does is keep spam bots from submitting your list. This has been a problem in the past with some of these opt-in forms, but this is going to help clean that up.

This option here confirms that you’re working with an actual human here who is submitting this form and then we have this new set of regulations here, this enabled GDPR fields and if you are familiar to all with what was happening in mid to late 2018. The European Union put in laws that basically have global implications for how people submit and maintain their information with various different websites.

The default is really using these is going to be something that I think is a good thing to go ahead and turn on by default for your list. We’re going to go ahead and check that. Then you have these default fields.

We’re going to change a couple things here. We’ve set up our custom domain. We want to go ahead and use this here as the default from address for all of them. Then if you want, you can create a default subject line, something that will prompt you to change it so they’re never, not changed before you sent an option.

Then you can send a final welcome email if you’d like. You can let users pick whether they want plain text or HTML. If you want to send an unsubscribe confirmation email, I wouldn’t do that specifically, in this case, I don’t like those emails.

If I’m taking the time to opt-out of your list, please don’t send anything else to me. That’s just my personal preference, but it’s up to you on what you want to use there.

I think this is a good option so users can use plain text or HTML. Some folks are using old mail clients and HTML emails can be problematic. This gives them the option if they want to have control over how they receive those emails.

It’s purely optional. It’s not really a big deal one way or the other.

I’ll leave that up to your personal preference. Then down here you have this update of information as new subscribers are added. You have the option to get email alerts when somebody joins or leaves the list if you’d like or you can get a daily digest. It depends on how many people you have being added to your list every day as to whether or not those are good idea.

For now, we’re just going to leave all that for default. Because again, we’re just putting in the default settings here to make sure that we are good to go.

We’ll go ahead and save that and we’re good to go there. We’ve got our lists of default set. We got our Mailchimp account setup. We’ve got our domain branded email setup.

We are good to go. Next time we will be jumping into getting all this connected to our website.