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MailChimp v4.2 Sneak Peek

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new features we’ll be launching in mid-July with MailChimp v4.2:

Re-brandable Campaign Reports - Ever need to give someone access to an email campaign’s stats, but you don’t want to give them full access to your MailChimp account? Setup a re-brandable reports page w/your own company logo and color scheme, then send it to them.

Keychain Account Management - Do you manage tons of MailChimp accounts? You’ll be able to setup a “master keychain” account, with “keys” that let you quickly log in to each account w/out digging through all your sticky notes for those pesky passwords.

Twitter Tracking for EepURL - We launched our twitter integration a little while back with our own little URL shortener. The first thing people asked for was a way to track tweets and re-tweets about their campaigns in MailChimp. Done!

Subscriber Activity History - If you’ve got our optional AIM Reports module installed, you’ll be able to drill down to individual subscribers and see every campaign they’ve opened or clicked.

“Hide-this” Merge Tag - We’re introducing a merge tag that you can place around content that you want to hide on your public campaign archives. For example, unsubscribe links, the recipient’s contact or username info, salutations, your CAN-SPAM required address, telephone, etc.

Automagic Table of Contents - If you write really long newsletters (such as through the RSS-to-email campaigns), you can insert a merge tag where we’ll automatically find all your content titles, then build a linked table of contents at the top of your message.  No more pesky anchor tag coding!

101 Free HTML Email Templates - We’ll be offering some desktop software with a boatload of free HTML email templates that you can use w/MailChimp. We already have a great template designer, but this is for people who want even more (pre-built) variety. Stay tuned for details!

Easier List Setup - We’ve redesigned the entire list setup process to make it easier and faster. Instead of a 5-step wizard, think more “1-page-done.”

And that’s not all. We’ve got a few more amazing features we’ll be announcing (some of them in MailChimp Labs) on top of all this. Stay tuned for launch around mid-July!

Tracking Twitter Tweets about Your Email Campaigns in MailChimp

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

As you probably already know, every time you finish a MailChimp campaign and send it off, you can post a link to the campaign archive on twitter, facebook, and other social networks (details):

social-share

In order to make this work on twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Well, ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted about their email campaigns, and then sticking all those stats into MailChimp.

So we did that. It’ll be going live mid-July, with MailChimp v4.2.

Here’s a sneak peek:

tracking-tweets-about-email-marketing-campaigns

  1. How many people tweeted about the campaign
  2. How many people re-tweeted
  3. Who the tweeters are
  4. Timeline of tweetage from original tweet

We’re extremely excited about this integration because we’re seeing more and more of our customers (nearly 10% now) using Twitter in conjunction with their MailChimp campaigns. Now you can see how they’re intertwined!

Growing

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Some superfluous fluff: MailChimp continues to grow. We’re finally putting together our expanded office space on the 3rd floor…

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Using Twitter To Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

twitterbird-kachingI recently asked a bunch of email marketers how they judge success for their email campaigns. One of the answers that really stood out was from Amit Gupta, who sends the Photojojo newsletter (you must signup for his awesome newsletter immediately).

Amit says to measure the success of his email campaigns, he compares sales to re-tweets

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Independence Day Email Headers Live

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Our design team just posted a collection of Independence Day (or “Thanksgiving” as it’s known to the Brits) header graphics that you can use for your email templates. They’re available under the campaign builder under “July 4th.”

july-4th

And don’t forget our iStockphoto integration, where you can buy July 4th related graphics for your email campaign’s content. Beautiful, royalty-free photography for just a buck!

july-4th-istockphoto

Surveymonkey’s new “create chart” feature

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Whoah, I just noticed a new feature in SurveyMonkey. Thought I’d share it with everyone else out there, in case you didn’t see their announcement.

A little while ago, we posted a survey link to Facebook, Twitter, and The Jungle. I was looking at the data today, and noticed a new “create chart” link:

create-chart-link

I actually jumped in my seat a little from excitement. I mean, normally I’d have to download the data to Excel (and I never do pick the correct export options) then generate my own charts. But now, they’ve gone and made it a single-click link. Woo-hoo!

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DKIM Sees Significant Growth

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Here’s an article from Cisco about DKIM uptake.

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Point of the article is to say that yes, more and more people are adopting DKIM, so that’s good for the cause (visit Online Trust Alliance).

Juicy deliverability morsel from the article: “Google and Yahoo! have announced that messages with valid DKIM signatures, where the domain has established a good reputation with them, are less likely to be classified as spam.” And a quick reminder to our own customers that yes, DKIM authentication is baked into MailChimp.

Never Use MailChimp’s WYSIWYG Again

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

owl_orlyLast week I was in Boston for IRCE2009. I ran into quite a few MailChimp power users, and it was awesome talking about how they use MailChimp, and what they’d like to see in the near future.

Some of their feature requests are actually already live (they just didn’t know about them yet). So that will be the subject of the next half-dozen or so upcoming blog posts from me: Oh really? MailChimp Does That?

For example, one person asked me if we could make our campaign designer window a little bigger, so there’d be more room to code his HTML.

Actually, we can do better than that…

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Stumbleupon - the gift that keeps giving

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

We recently launched Pictaculous, another nifty little MailChimp Labs experiment. We’re not doing any formal marketing at all, but somehow it got picked up by Stumbleupon.

If you’ll recall, Stumbleupon was a service that got bought by eBay for $75 million, then sold back to its owners (check out this 2007 article predicting the “synergy” between the two companies from Mashable). Like a lot of people, I pretty much thought StumbleUpon was dead after the acquisition. But we got a pleasant surprise from this Google Analytics report for Pictaculous.com:

analytics-pictaculous

Pretty much all that traffic is from Stumbleupon. The first spike was about 3,000 visits. Nope, not large by any means, but notice the 2nd spike, where we got +8,400 visits? Over 7,000 of those came from StumbleUpon again. It’s the gift that keeps giving!

BTW, how’d we get “stumbled” in the first place? Not sure, but the day before the first spike, we sent out this MailChimp newsletter where we formally announced Pictaculous (look for the iPhone in the side column). Go figure. Email marketing must work!

Chimpy New Login Page

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

In case you didn’t notice, we changed the MailChimp login page a little just before Fathers Day…

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http://www.mailchimp.com/nonrestrictiveocean.php