Understanding MailChimp Campaign Types

When creating a campaign in MailChimp, you have four campaign options to choose from: Regular campaign, plain-text campaign, RSS-driven campaign or A/B testing campaign. Each option offers flexibility with various settings, so you should understand all four in order to choose the one that best suits your needs.

Regular Campaign

MailChimp’s regular campaign is the most common, and it allows you to design and customize the email content. When creating a regular campaign, you have the option to choose from basic, themes, saved templates, campaigns or code your own.

• The basic campaign uses the drag and drop editor, making the template completely customizable.
• Theme campaigns offer predesigned templates, including drag and drop and classic, which are less flexible.
• Saved templates are templates you’ve uploaded to your account and any designs you have saved.
• Choose a recently sent or draft campaign as the starting point for a new campaign, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
• Use the code your own option if you have a customer-coded template, to paste or import it.

A regular campaign can include photos, graphics and can be formatted the way you want.

Plain-Text Campaign

As the name suggests, this type of campaign is the simplest form available. A plain-text campaign offers only text – no photos or graphics – and has no additional formatting options available.

It’s useful to use bullet points in plain-text campaigns to break up text and make it easier to read, and keep in mind that when using this type of campaign, you have to include links in order to track open and click rates.

RSS-Driven Campaign

This type of campaign pulls in Real Simple Syndication content from a blog feed. Anytime an RSS feed is updated, MailChimp pulls the content into the campaign and sends it to your subscribers on a schedule you can customize.

Note that you can’t control the content via MailChimp; if you want your content formatted a specific way, you need to edit the RSS source.

A/B Testing Campaign

Use A/B testing when you want to test how small changes affect your results. This type can be helpful to test how different areas of your email are performing, like the subject line, the content, and the time it’s sent. With this campaign, MailChimp will send three versions of your email to small parts of your list to track performance. Once you see which is performing best, you can send the best one to the remainder of your email subscribers.

For more information, read Getting Started: How to Use MailChimp.