How To Grow Your Email List (Exporting Your Contacts & Importing To Mailchimp)

While you’re working from home, take this easy step to supercharge your marketing. 

Financial advisors across the country are now working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Even if you can’t meet with prospects face-to-face, there are steps you can take to beef up your online presence and attract your ideal clients—without even leaving your couch.

Over several posts, I’m going to share with you five simple things you should do today to improve your digital appearance as a financial advisor. These tips build off of each other, so you’ll have the most success if you do them in sequential order.

And just a heads-up: We show you exactly how to complete each tip, so feel free to follow along and complete each task as you read through the article and watch the videos. 

Let’s get started by discussing Step 1.

Grow Your Email List (Export Your Contacts From Outlook Or Gmail & Import To Mailchimp)

The first step to growing your business is to have a solid email list in place. Why? Because email is still the bread and butter of marketing. It drives traffic to your website, builds trust, helps people understand what you do best, and turns prospects into lifelong clients. 

So, for this tip, we’re going to show you how to export your email list from Gmail or Outlook and import it into Mailchimp. This way you can keep on winning over prospects even while you’re stuck at home. 

First up, you need to export your current email list from Gmail or Outlook. This part is pretty easy thanks to Google’s and Microsoft’s clear instructions. If you use Gmail, follow these stepsto export your contact list as a CSV file. If you use Outlook, follow these steps. (This part should take no more than 5 minutes.) 

Once you have your exported email list, it’s time for the fun part. We’re going to import them into Mailchimp. To complete this step, watch the video or follow the instructions below.

Watch Video Here! 

1. Log in to your MailChimp account and navigate to the Audience tab at the top of the screen.
2. Click the Manage Audience drop-down menu and select Import Contacts. 
3. Make sure CSV or tab-delimited text file is selected (it should be by default), and click Continue to Setup. 
4. Browse to find the CSV file you exported and click Continue to Match. 
5. Check to make sure the fields match. Then click Continue to Review. 
6. Organize your contacts by creating a tag for them. You could label them as current clients, prospects, COIs, event participants, or whatever you’d like. Then click Continue. 
7. You’ll see a You’re all set to import! message if you’re ready to import. If you get an error message instead, follow the steps to correct any mistakes. Then click Import. 
8. The next screen will tell you how many contacts were successfully imported and how many were invalid. 

Quick tip: MailChimp doesn’t let you import role-based email addresses that start with words like admin or info. If you have any role-based addresses in your list, see if you can get a better email address for that person. Then you can manually add them as a contact in MailChimp. 

Here’s how to do that:   

1. Log in to MailChimp and click on the Audience tab at the top of the screen. 
2. Hover over the Add Contacts section and click Add a subscriber. 
3. Enter your contact’s email address, first name, and last name. 
4. Tick the two checkboxes at the bottom of the screen. The first box confirms that the person gave you permission to email them. The second tells MailChimp to update this person’s profile if they’re already on your list (which helps prevent duplicate contacts). 
5. Click Subscribe. 

That’s it! Now you can send personalized emails to your newly imported contacts whenever you like. 

Do you use Constant Contact instead of MailChimp? Here are instructions on how to add people to your Constant Contact email list. 

If you’re stuck at home due to COVID-19, it’s the perfect time to invest in your marketing so you come out of this crisis poised for more success than ever. Take this step today and let us know if you get stuck, we’re happy to help. 

Stay tuned for our next post where we’ll discuss another step to supercharge your marketing from home!

Looking for more ways to improve your financial advisor marketing? Find more information on our blog. Or learn more about how we help financial advisors just like you grow their businesses with our Total Marketing Package.