Troubleshooting, relaunching  and training for a Mailchimp newsletter

Sophie Wadsworth, Communications Consultant

Sophie’s web designers created her website and integrated it with MailChimp via Gravity Forms a couple of years before she got in touch with me. She had never done mailings using Mailchimp and although her web designer had given her some initial training, after two years she needed a refresher.

First, I tested that the integration between WordPress and Mailchimp was working and it turned out that there was a fault, possibly caused by a failed plugin update. We asked Sophie’s web designer to investigate and it was fixed. Then, I…

• Set up a branded email template in Mailchimp
• Cleaned her mailing list as many spam emails had been added which needed to be removed
• Merged two audiences (lists) into one as she only needed a single newsletter list from then on.
• Provided training using Zoom, a bespoke PDF quick reference guide and support for her to create and send her first newsletter before an agreed deadline.

Website: Sophie Wadsworth Consulting

Setting up email automations and improving email open & response rates for e-learning courses

Associate Lecturer (me!), Further Education College

Please see this blog post.

Mailchimp training and digital marketing advice

Wini Thomas, Osteopath

Wini is an old friend of mine and I built her WordPress site some years ago when I was thinking of becoming a web designer. Back then, I optimised her site for search engines and she now gets most of her enquiries from a mix of word of mouth referrals and Google searches.

Wini is an osteopath who is also passionate about healthy living, so she was keen to share her wide experience of fitness, healthy eating and food with her audience. I set up MailChimp so that her website visitors can subscribe to her mailing list, then trained her to edit her own Mailchimp email template so that it has the look and feel of a healthy living magazine. Her newsletter is called ‘Chit Chats’ because it includes all the things she’d like to tell her patience but doesn’t have time to do when she is treating them!

Website: Wini Thomas,

Moving mailing lists from New Zenler to a WordPress site with MailerLite

Speedy Email Marketing Club (my own site)

I built SpeedyDigital.co.uk using WordPress and membership plugin AR Member, then integrated it with MailerLite so I can keep members up to date by email.

Then, I moved my mailing list subscribers over from New Zenler to MailerLite. I set up embedded opt-in forms on both HelenLindop.com and in the footer of SpeedyDigital.co.uk so people who are not members of the Speedy Club can join a different MailerLite group to receive my newsletter.

Sending emails from a  WordPress site isn’t recommended and can lead to poor deliverability, so I added an SMTP plugin and configured the DNS settings of speedydigital.co.uk to improve this.

Before this, the Speedy Email Marketing Club was hosted on the New Zenler platform where I used the integrated email marketing system provided by the platform. This included all the features you would expect including forms, filters and segmentation.

Website: SpeedyDigital.co.uk