Several departments at Williams College use the service MailChimp to send newsletters and announcements out to both on-campus and off-campus subscribers. MailChimp is not a mailing list, it’s an e-mail marketing tool best used for ‘one to many’ formal announcements and newsletters. Its advantage over a Google e-mail list or a listserv is it provides a number of easy-to-customize e-mail templates, tracking information as to who has opened your e-mail, as well as a friendly web subscribe feature. This tool is offered for free for any campaign with less than 2000 subscribers; after that there will be a cost.
If you are interested in using this tool for your Williams College department there are a few steps you’ll need to take in order to ensure your mailing list is recognized by our mail servers as officially coming from an approved williams.edu e-mail source. If you don’t follow these steps some recipients may flag your message as spam and the e-mails will appear as coming from mailchimp.com, not williams.edu
- Once you have created an account at MailChimp and are logged in, there will be a “Dashboard’ menu on the left side of your screen. One of the options there is ‘Website’, click on that.
- That will spill open the submenu under ‘Website’ and one of the options there is ‘domains’, click on that.
- This will pull up a number of options but if you scroll down a little bit you’ll see one that looks like this;
- Click on the ‘START AUTHENTICATION’ button here and give it a few seconds, it should come back looking like this;
- If it looks like the above, you’re all set. Your mailchimp account can now send out mail using the williams.edu domain
- If you have any questions or problems, contact Client Services at [email protected]
To learn more about MailChimp you can access an online class on “Mailchimp Fundamentals‘ at LinkedIn Learning