Hello, my name is Katie Lehman, and in these lessons you will learn how to create and run a journey in MailChimp, understand MailChimp journey analytics and learn how analytical data leads to future audience content. In this lesson, I will show you how to create and run a journey in MailChimp. In the dashboard, under the automation section, select all journeys. Journeys are automated workflows that take your contacts on a journey to receive multiple emails at predetermined times. It's a great way to nurture your contacts and increase your brand awareness. You can choose a pre-built journey or create a journey from scratch. There's a great pre-built journey called Welcome New Contacts that welcomes the new contacts when they sign up to receive your newsletters or sign up to be a subscriber to your emails. Select Welcome New Contacts. Unless you have a store and you'd like to do one of these, you can add customers to an audience after a Stripe purchase. You can add or update contacts from Squarespace with form submissions, add Calendly event invitees to your audience. All kinds of different pre-built journeys are here for you to use. The Welcome New Contacts pretty much covers all of the new contacts that are coming into the MailChimp database. So select that one. It will send an introductory welcome email welcoming the user, and then after a week of it will follow up with another email describing products or services. So the objective is to nurture relationships. With MailChimp automations these journeys enable you to see an average of 93% increase in open rates when using these automations compared to bulk email. So click on the top right to use this journey. Select your audience and click continue. The prebuilt journey appears, and it already has two emails in the journey, so it has a starting point where contact signs up to receive emails, and then an exit point. My plan with MailChimp is an essentials plan, which allows up to four journey points. So we have maximized the number of journey points with this journey. If we wanted to add more contact points, journey points, we would upgrade to add more. So let's take a look at the starting point. Click on the three dots at the top right and select edit. You can also include imported contacts. So not just contacts that came in through a subscriber form, a new subscriber for your newsletter or something like that. Also, if you import a list. They can start this journey as well. Save starting point. And so once they sign up they'll receive the first email. Click on the three dots and decide and select the edit button. In this edit area, you're able to see the name of the email, which is we're here to help you get started. You can rename that. The to and from, the subject line, which you can also edit and the schedule. The schedule section enables you to send it any day of the week that they sign up or if you prefer just weekdays and not on the weekend, you can deselect Saturday and Sunday. What time of the day would you like to send it out? You can send it as soon as possible or select between the business hours of nine to five. The next step is to create your email using the classic builder. You would select a template and welcome them if you already have a saved template to welcome, which I already have one in here. I'm going to select that so we can build off of it. So my welcome email welcomes them to the business, has a link for them to visit the store, also see the specials and thanks them for visiting. I'd like to take out these two extra blocks, so I'm going to delete those. And now the email is ready. You can preview and test just like you did with templates or you can, if it's ready to go, you could save it as a new template if you've made some modifications to it or you can save and return to journey, which I'm going to do. So now we have the first email set up. We have a one week delay before it sends the second email to that group. Now you can modify this delay by going into edit. I could put two weeks if we want them to wait two weeks before receiving it. If I want five days in between, I could do that. You can also do hours and select save. Normally for a new welcome journey it's good to have about a week, between five to seven days between emails. If they've already gone through journeys and you're doing a drip campaign to just keep them in touch with newsletters and information some infographics and things like that, every four to eight weeks is fine for that type of journey. Next, create an email. This one is check out our products. So I'm going to go in again and select which email will be sent. I'm going to check my saved templates, because I know we've had some sale and bike sale, different type of sale emails that will work for this purpose. So I'm going to put the Saturday sale as my template and that will enable them to learn more about the products, mountain bikes, beach bikes, helmets and also to save a certain percentage off. Let's save and return to journey. Now that we've selected that email for the journey. And once they've received that email then the contact will exit. When all of the emails have been set up along with a delay time in between and the starting point you're ready to turn on the journey. So click on, turn on. And this enables the new journey to be active since December 16th. It will tell you the number of people who have started it, who are in progress and also who have completed the journey. At any time if you'd like to edit the journey, you can go in by clicking on the journey name and you can press pause and edit. When you do that, you can go back in and you can update any of the information that you'd like to. The emails, the delay, anything that you'd like and then you can turn it back on to continue. So you'll receive the green active bar when it's active and successfully set up and you'll be able to view reports on it. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to understand MailChimp journey analytics.