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Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Celebrity Apes T-shirt

Published September 1st, 2010 by Ben

When we heard that our friends at Chopping Block were planning a “celebrity apes” t-shirt, we of course told them that they had to include Freddie, the world-famous MailChimp mascot and universally-recognized symbol of “awesome email,” among all those icons:

celebrity-apes-chopping-block

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Smarter Bounce Management Rules with Engagement

Published September 1st, 2010 by Ben

One of the hardest, dirtiest jobs we ESPs have to do is manage bouncebacks. We send a few bajillion emails out, and a kajillion bounces inevitably come back. Now, we have to scan every single one of those complicated email headers to figure out what type of bounce it was, then decide what to do with it. If we get a “hard” bounce, that usually means the account we tried to deliver email to doesn’t exist (and so we should clean the member from that list). If we get a “soft” bounce, that usually means the account exists, but we should try again later. Not to mention FBL parsing, and simply filtering out the spam that we get before we can even get to the bounces. It’s like sorting through a dumpster to find recyclables or something. Not very glamorous.

It would be all fine and dandy if people would follow delivery status notification best practices and guidelines. But they don’t. Sometimes this is a reaction to spam, and sometimes it’s just ignorance.

For example, some server admins insert snarky messages in their email headers, like “We don’t want your message. If you send email to us again, we’ll report you.” Well, that’s their prerogative and all, and we’re happy to never send to them again, but if they simply hard bounced the email, we’d be able to clean it from the list faster.

Then there are some ISPs who are downright deceptive with their bounceback codes…

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Blaine’s Cross-Country Motorcycle Trip

Published August 31st, 2010 by Ben

Blaine, from the MailChimp customer support team, is on a cross country vacation. He’s traveling with friends and family by motorcycle.

grandcanyon1

What’s really cool about this is he’s posting updates, photos, and video to his Tumblr blog, and he’s connected MailChimp to his Tumblr’s RSS feed in order to send an RSS-to-email newsletter. All Blaine has to do is post to Tumblr, and the email newsletters go out automagically every day. He never even has to log in to MailChimp.

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Gmail gives engagement priority

Published August 31st, 2010 by Ben

special-offer-guyGotta love Google for continuously innovating with email. Gmail just launched Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts your “important” email to the top. You can read more about it on Mashable:

Gmail Priority Inbox Launches: Your Email Will Never Be the Same

The basic idea is that Gmail will prioritize email from senders that you interact with the most.

Some of our customers are already asking me how this impacts email marketers. How can we get our emails “prioritized”?

First, here’s some information from their support docs that explains how Gmail Priority works…

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In the Lab: Mobile Usability Testing

Published August 27th, 2010 by Ben

We’re working on a new MailChimp website, and have been doing lots of usability tests. Not just on our own website, but on other websites we visit. We’re just using them to do everyday stuff (one test involved ordering Thai food on different mobile devices), and then observing the overall user experience. We’ve learned a lot of peculiar things about mobile devices and mobile users along the way. The difference in performance between Android and iPhone users wasn’t huge, but Blackberry behavior was — profound. Will post our findings soon. I snapped some pictures below of a test we ran on Chad, our lead engineer. As usual, he ruined the curve. Sigh.

mobile-testing
mobile-testing2

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Update on Omnivore, new 3 Strikes Rule

Published August 27th, 2010 by Ben

omnivoreIn January, we announced Omnivore, our massive anti-spam research project that ran 61 trillion email data comparisons using genetic optimization algorithms in order to teach our network how to automatically detect and prevent abuse.

For those of you who don’t know, we built Omnivore in order to prepare for our big Freemium plan that we launched back on September 1st, 2009. We didn’t want to offer a free email marketing service without having a scalable system in place to protect our deliverability (not to mention the sanity of our Compliance Team).  Good thing, too.

In just under a year, MailChimp grew from 85,000 users to over 430,000. We couldn’t have grown 5-fold like that without Omnivore.

Here’s an update on what we’ve learned so far…

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Another Way to Use Segments

Published August 26th, 2010 by Juliana

You probably already know that MailChimp has lots of ways to segment your lists and send a targeted campaign, but did you know you can also create a segment under the lists tab?

liststab

By creating a segment under lists, you can see everyone who fits a certain segment’s criteria without having to create or send a campaign.

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So What’s up with Windows Phone 7?

Published August 25th, 2010 by amro

Courtesy Microsoft

Courtesy Microsoft

We recently attended a Microsoft event hosted by @glengordon on Windows Phone 7. Microsoft showed off a prerelease version of Windows Phone 7. And it looked pretty good. That said, it wasn’t without its shortcomings.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft pulled an unMicrosoft and ditched the cruft of Windows Mobile <=6. You still create apps for Windows Phone 7 using .net — specifically Silverlight or XNA, their Flash competitor and game development toolsets. The basic tools are free. Good move.

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SXSW 2011 Panel Voting

Published August 25th, 2010 by Amanda

sxsw-panel-pickerVoting is underway for SXSW 2011 panels, and this blog post is a shameless plug to drum up support for our MailChimp guys and gals who need your votes. Since SXSW is a community-driven event, the staff and organizers rely on community input to help gauge sentiment for the panels they’ll ultimately select. That being said, I’ll give a quick run down of MailChimpsters who’ve submitted panels, and link directly to where you can give them your thumb’s up.

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