If you’re using email marketing, you know it’s the channel with the best ROI for your company. After all, your customers expressed interest in you to the point where they handed over a portion of their inbox. They gave you permission to invade their space. That’s no small thing, and you should wield your power wisely. So how do you grow that group of loyal customers, and find even more true believers like them?

For starters, you make it as easy as possible for them to share—well, whatever it is they love about you—with their friends. Social networks are pretty good at that "sharing" thing. It’s with all this in mind that we’ve paired up with Twitter to help people tweet more relevantly to curated audiences (specifically, to their email subscribers). It’s an integration with a new Twitter feature called tailored audiences. With it, any paid MailChimp customer who is also a Twitter Ads user can export a list to Twitter and send targeted tweets to that list.

Exporting to Twitter Tailored Audiences

To get started, connect a Twitter account to your MailChimp account.

With the Twitter integration, you can either use a single Twitter handle for your entire MailChimp account, or, if you’re an agency (or you just manage multiple lists within a single account), you can associate Twitter accounts on a per-list basis.

 

Once connected, you can export any list or segment size with a minimum of 5000 subscribers. For privacy reasons, Twitter isn’t directly matching email addresses. Instead, they’ll compare cryptographically hashed representations of email addresses. Basically, the more subscribers you have in your list, the better odds of Twitter being able to match those subscribers with a Twitter account. After setting this up, when you view your list of subscribers, the “Export” button will now have a drop down allowing you to choose whether to export your list as a CSV or as a Twitter tailored audience.

Let’s say your music label, Double Double Records, wants to reach out to members who have purchased your latest single. With MailChimp’s e-commerce data, you can segment based on subscribers who bought the single, then send just those members over to Twitter. You could even go one step further, and use MailChimp’s Discover Similar Subscribers feature to help expand on that list. Think of it as the guy at the record store who goes, "Oh, you like that band? Try this band, too."

When exporting to Twitter, name your tailored audience so you can find it easily on Twitter later.

After naming your segment, we’ll start the export process and email you when it’s complete.

Creating promoted content

Once Twitter has your list of subscribers, they’ll begin the process of matching those encrypted email addresses. Depending on how many subscribers you send over, it can take between 2 and 5 hours for Twitter to match email addresses to Twitter accounts. After you’ve given it the appropriate amount of time, you can log into your Twitter Ads dashboard and create an ad these members will see.

 

The tailored audiences feature is available for either promoted tweets or promoted accounts. As you run through the standard Twitter campaign creation process, under the Targeting heading, you can choose your tailored audience. Click  Lists to choose the list of subscribers exported from your MailChimp account. You can either type in the name of the tailored audience or browse all available exported segments.

 

Now, Double Double Records can promote their artist’s upcoming tour to Twitter members who have recently purchased the single. Those people cared enough to buy a record, so chances are they’re going to want to see the artist when she comes to town. And here’s the other thing: Remember the part about making it easy to share with their friends? This makes that really easy.

Privacy

Because Twitter is matching accounts based on email addresses, it’s likely that the number of matched accounts will be smaller than the total number you exported from your account. Twitter members also have the option to opt out of this feature by unchecking "Promoted Content" within their account’s preferences. It’s also important to mention that, for privacy reasons, Twitter will never see the actual email addresses you pass over to them.

Lead Generation Cards

In addition to using Twitter to send relevant content to your subscribers, you can also use Twitter to help you grow your MailChimp list. In May of last year, we integrated with Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards so you can create tweets that allow other Twitter users to join your MailChimp list just by clicking a call to action embedded in your tweet.