Our takeaways from Intuit Mailchimp’s Email Marketing Certification
The Email Marketing Professional Certificate by Intuit Mailchimp on LinkedIn Learning covers the decisions behind an email campaign, from audience selection and content to reporting and list maintenance.
Our team’s view: it’s a useful introduction for newer marketers and a refresher for teams already sending campaigns. Some older lessons need updated context, but there is plenty to apply to everyday work.
What the certificate covers
The learning path includes three courses and about 2 hours and 29 minutes of video, at beginner and intermediate levels.
Course | Instructor |
Email Marketing: Strategy and Optimization | Virginia O’Connor |
Email and Newsletter Marketing Foundations | Megan Adams |
Email Marketing Strategy: Warm Up a Cold List | Patrick Rauland |
Completing the courses and passing the final exam earns the professional certificate endorsed by Intuit Mailchimp.
Start with the audience and the goal
The strategy course connects email to the customer’s experience. A new subscriber, a potential customer, and a returning customer may need different messages.
For our team, that means answering three questions before building a campaign: Who is this for? What do they need? What should they do next?
An event invitation might aim for registrations. A follow-up might share a recording. A newsletter might help someone solve a problem. A clear purpose makes both the message and the result easier to evaluate.
Make the content easy to act on
Our takeaway from the content lessons and quiz is straightforward: the subject line should match the message, and the next step should be easy to find.
Keep the opening short, use a recognizable sender, and write a specific call to action. “Reserve your seat” tells readers more than “Click here.”
Segmentation should make the content more useful, too. Someone who attended an event may need different follow-up information from someone who missed it. Personalization works best when it improves relevance.
Choose a schedule the team can maintain
The cold-list course emphasizes a sending schedule that fits the business and sets clear expectations.
Our takeaway is to plan a realistic calendar with an audience, topic, purpose, and owner for each send.
Existing content can help. A blog post, customer question, or event recap can become a useful email. The team still needs to adapt it so the message gives subscribers a reason to read.
Test one change at a time
The foundations course introduces A/B testing by changing one variable. Start with a specific question, such as whether a clearer subject line leads to more useful engagement. Compare similar groups and agree on the success measure before sending.
Changing the subject line, layout, offer, and timing together makes it harder to understand what caused the result. Small response counts also call for caution before declaring a winner.
Look beyond open rates
One of our strongest takeaways is to measure what the email was meant to achieve: registrations, inquiries, purchases, replies, or another clear goal.
Open rates need context. Apple Mail Privacy Protection can register opens without someone reading the email. Automated activity can also inflate clicks.
For our team, a useful report would show campaign outcomes alongside engagement, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes. We’d include counts as well as percentages. A higher click rate after removing inactive contacts does not necessarily mean more people clicked.
Define what inactive means for your audience
The cold-subscriber lesson considers both time and sending activity, including seasonal businesses.
That matters because six months of silence means something different for a weekly newsletter than for an annual event.
The quiz also reinforced a useful distinction: someone who has never purchased is not automatically disengaged. They may still read, click, reply, or recommend the business.
Define inactivity around the sending schedule and customer cycle, using several signals rather than open rates alone.
Give reengagement a clear end point
Reengagement was one of the most practical topics for our team. The course describes a sequence for reconnecting with inactive subscribers.
For people who previously opted in, our approach would be to:
Remind them who we are and what they signed up for.
Share something useful.
Ask what they want to receive.
Give them a clear final opportunity to stay subscribed.
People who respond should leave the inactive group. For those who remain inactive, choose the appropriate cleanup action. In Mailchimp, archiving removes contacts from active marketing while preserving their data; permanent deletion is a separate decision.
Pros
Manageable length. About two and a half hours of video makes it approachable.
Broad coverage. Strategy, content, reporting, and list maintenance are covered together.
Practical exercises. The reengagement planning challenge helps turn the lessons into a plan.
Useful for team discussion. The material gives us clear questions to ask when reviewing campaigns.
Cons
The lessons vary in age. Although the learning path listed a September 2024 update, the individual courses were released in 2018, 2022, and 2024.
The reporting advice needs context. The older foundations lesson emphasizes open rates, while the newer strategy lesson addresses privacy-related limits. We’d prefer consistent guidance throughout.
Advanced specialists may want more depth. We see this as a foundation or refresher. The certificate alone does not demonstrate campaign results.
Our recommendation
We’d recommend this certificate to newer marketers, small business owners, and teams looking for a more organized approach to email.
For our team, its value is in applying the lessons: improving a welcome email, creating a more useful segment, planning reengagement, or making reports clearer.
Choose one improvement to put into practice after finishing.
Learn more
Explore the Email Marketing Professional Certificate by Intuit Mailchimp on LinkedIn Learning.
For more guidance, visit Mailchimp’s marketing resource library.
