Keep Your Business Sailing Smoothly While You’re on Vacation

Get ready

Preparation is the name of the game when it comes to making sure you get a real break.

Need inspiration to plan your trip? Check out our new Mailchimp Presents series Wi-Finders, which spotlights micro-entrepreneurs working all over the world.

Once you’ve decided where you’re going and when, relay those details to your team. The more notice you give everyone, the easier it is for them to prepare.

Depending on the nature of your business, you might need to email your customers and let them know you’re going to be out of town. This will prevent them from feeling disappointed or frustrated when they can’t get in touch.

Using your audience dashboard, determine the right people to notify about your upcoming absence—you might want to send a note to your best customers or to a segment of specific business contacts.

This kind of personalized communication will also help your audience relate to you as a person, not just a business.

Send an email to your customers and clients and tell them:

• How long you’ll be gone.
• If you plan to check your emails while you’re out.
• Whether there’s someone else they should contact.
• When they should expect to hear directly from you again.

With a little preparation, our all-in-one Marketing Platform will do a lot of work for you, so that you can grow your business while you're gone. Before you leave the office:

• Schedule emails. Even if you’re not personally emailing anyone while you’re on vacation, you can still send campaigns from your business that promote a product, share news, or tell a story. Create the emails before you leave and schedule them to send while you travel.
• Set up Facebook and Instagram ads. Facebook and Instagram Ads can help you grow your reach on each platform, regardless of whether you’re personally logged in. Simply create the ads, turn them on, and let them do the work while you take a break from social networks too.
• Launch Google Remarketing ads. While you’re away, people might visit your site and leave before they buy anything. But when you build Google Remarketing ads in Mailchimp, you can recapture their attention and bring them back when they’re ready to buy.
• Send a postcard. There are few things nicer than receiving a postcard from someone who's traveling—but you won't want to handwrite a note to each of your customers. Instead, create, schedule, and even automate postcards that will reach them while you're out.

When you create these campaigns before you leave the office, you can reach your audience even when you’re off the grid.

Get set

When the you take time out of the office, it gives your team the chance to shine. Co-workers or employees can take on more responsibility and prove what they can do. Empower them to succeed while you’re gone—that way, all of you can really relax and enjoy your vacation.

Prepare your team for success

Before you catch a beach-bound or ski slope-destined flight, you should make sure your team and your tools are set up to run the show while you’re gone.

Your team will need a few things from you before you go:

• A plan. Delegate specific tasks to specific people and give them the details they need to get the job done.
• A way to get in touch. Whether you plan to check in regularly or only in an emergency, set up an app like Slack to make communication easy.
• Access. Give your people access to the documents and tools you normally use, like stuff in your Mailchimp account, Google Drive or Dropbox.

Fortunately, it’s easy to share access to your Mailchimp account. Before you leave town, create multi-user logins in your account for the people you’re leaving in charge of your marketing outreach. You can even set up levels of permissions so that your co-workers access only what they need.

Automate your work

And whether you have a team or you’re flying solo, you can automate your marketing to keep things going and and take repetitive work off of your hands.

• Turn on abandoned cart emails. People often put stuff in their cart but then fail to check out. When you turn on our abandoned cart automation, you can automatically remind shoppers what they’ve left behind and encourage them to buy it—that way you’ll make more money for your next getaway.
• Set up a welcome automation in 1 click. You don't have to go online to greet every new subscriber—set up a welcome automation to do the greeting for you. Turn on the automation with just 1 click to tell every newcomer what they need to know about your brand.
• Automate order notifications. If someone buys something while you're vacationing, you still want them to have all the information they need about their order. You can make this an instant part of the checkout process by simply turning on order notifications. You can even add product recommendations to bring them back for more shopping.
• Use date-based automations. Whether it's triggered by a birthday, a sign-up anniversary, or a membership renewal, date-based automations will help you build personal relationships with people in your audience (even when you're personally unavailable).

With all of this preparation, you can leave town with peace of mind. But just in case, be sure to download the mobile app on your phone so that you can check on everything while you’re away.

Go!

After a lot of preparing, it’s time to kick back and enjoy the rewards of your hard prep work.

Still, you may want to check in on a thing or two from afar. If you’re going to work on vacation:

• Set time aside. We recommend you use a method called timeboxing to ensure that you don’t get sucked completely out of vacation mode. Give yourself half an hour each morning, for example, to check your email and see how your campaigns are doing.
• Use the mobile app. Perhaps you’d like to work from a beach chair or a ski lodge—the Mailchimp app makes it possible. Check out reports from your various campaigns. Write a new email using the templates you already built on your desktop. You can even turn on automations from the mobile app if you forgot to do so before you left.

Let our all-in-one Marketing Platform handle the work while you enjoy getting rest wherever you are. You’ve earned it!