Happy anniversary email -- from your camera?

Everybody knows by now that you can use email autoresponders to send a birthday greeting to your customers (here’s a tutorial on sending belated birthday autoresponders). But why not pick a big-ticket item from your store, and send a triggered “happy anniversary” email? While you’re at it, throw in some useful tips for the customer, some feedback/social links, and upsell opportunities (in that order).

Click the thumbnail to zoom in on an example I put together in a few minutes.

No need to do this for every item in your store (that’d get annoying fast). Just pick one or two big ones, setup the autoresponder, then just put it on autopilot.

Related: Target emails by purchase activity, MailChimp Autoresponders, MailChimp API. This blog post inspired by this article from Loren McDonald.

Yes, you can do this with Autoresponders, Segmentation, and some API tweaking…

Let’s create the Autoresponder campaigns first:

1. Setup your autoresponder rules

Click on the “autoresponders” tab:

Next, if you want the first coupon to go out one week after signup, set the autoresponder up like this:

Notice I’ve created a list in MailChimp for all customers who’ve opted-in to receive email offers from me. The list name is “Good Eat’n Customers.”

2. Design the autoresponder

After the autoresponder settings are saved, click the “create email” button:

and MailChimp will walk you through all the normal steps of designing your campaign.

During this step, you might choose one of our built-in coupon templates, like this one:

then customize it to match your brand.

Once that Autoresponder is activated, you can create the next one.

There’s a slight catch though, which I’ll detail in a minute.

3. Create the 2nd autoresponder

So we’ve setup the first autoresponder to go out one week after people subscribe to my list. Now I want another one to go out one week after that, to anybody who didn’t use the coupon in the first one.

I’ll call this one the “coupon followup.”

Similar steps, but this time we’ll use segmentation.

First, setup the autoresponder to go out 2 weeks after signup:

4. Send to segment of list who didn’t use first coupon

For this autoresponder, after you click the “create email” button, you’ll select a segment of your list.

Ideally, you’d use the MailChimp API to pass data over to a hidden field in your MailChimp list, such as “used coupon.”

Another way I can do it is to send this to people who NEITHER opened or clicked my previous campaign (note the “match all” pulldown at the top):

So this tells MailChimp to send the followup email 2 weeks after someone signed up for the list, but didn’t open or click the first offer.

The catch:Okay, so here’s the catch I mentioned earlier. Since I’m doing all this in one sitting, and since the 1st autoresponder never even got sent yet (it’s a week away), no campaigns are listed here. So technically, I’d need to wait for that first autoresponder to send out to people in order for it to be seen in the options above. Or, as I did in the example screenshot, you can just set it to go out to people who haven’t clicked/opened any campaign (in this case, it means the same thing).

Quick Idea: Add A Survey!

One way to stay in touch with your customers is to send a quick followup survey after they make a purchase on your website. While I wouldn’t want to get a survey after every single little book I buy from Amazon.com (that would get annoying fast), I would and do participate in surveys on big-ticket purchases, like furniture from Crate and Barrel.

If you’ve linked your e-commerce cart to your MailChimp account, you can send an autoresponder to a segment of your list based on their purchase activity.

That autoresponder could be a survey with questions about the item they bought, how the shipping was, etc.

I’ll post more on survey integration with MailChimp shortly!

Thing is, we really can’t let people attach ginormous 2-meg files and then send out to 50,000 people on their list. It’s not an optimal experience for the recipient (let alone the ISPs out there) and the bandwidth costs would be ridiculous.

We used to tell people to take their file and upload it to their own web server, then come back to MailChimp and link to that file.

But now we have a way to do all that from inside MailChimp…

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say I’m working on an email and I want to place a link to a white paper.

First, just highlight the text:

BTW: I personally think it’s good netiquette to indicate the size and type of the file they’re about to download. How many times have you been caught off guard by a 50-meg PDF download?

after highlighting the text, click the “insert link” button in MailChimp:

then select the “upload” tab:

and upload the file from your computer.

We’ll host the file for you totally free (each file must be less than 10 megs) on our CDN servers, and track how many times it was clicked.

And if you’ve got your AIM reports installed, we’ll even show you WHO clicked the link (try that with an old-fashioned attachment).

By the way, all your uploaded attachments are accessible if you click the “insert link” button, and then the “browse media” button:

you’ll see your uploaded files here:

If you know the secret code, it unlocks some cool discounts on useful stuff…

Okay, there’s no secret code. You just click the links to get our partners’ promo codes. But secret codes would be cool, cuz then we could do decoder rings.

The discount codes are cool nonetheless.

Anyway, you can get very special discounts from our friends at Eventbrite, Squarespace, Moo cards, Batchbook CRM, iStockphoto and more here:

Unlock special discounts from MailChimp partners

To turn them on, go to your Account Settings -> Contact Info

and check the boxes for the alerts you want.

You can also get alerts via RSS using Chimp Chatter, and you can access stats about campaigns on your iPhone.

364 new HTML email templates for the holidays added to MailChimp

A little while back, we partnered with TemplateZone to provide MailChimp customers with 101 free HTML email templates. It was downloaded over 25,000 times, so we think people are liking this application.

We’re excited to announce that they just added 364 more holiday templates for MailChimp customers, completely free!

All you have to do is go download the holiday add-on pack and install it…

What’s the difference?

Some of you might be wondering why you’d use TemplateZone’s templates instead of the built-in templates already inside MailChimp. The answer is more control. Unlike MailChimp, which is a web application, High Impact Email is desktop software, so it’s easier to handle image-heavy designs with, saaaaaay, diagonal text:

Or designs that have fancy masking:

where you can upload, resize, and crop your own image into the background:

there are some templates that allow you to drop in your own product photos, and text overlays:

How it works

If you’ve never used TemplateZone’s High Impact Email software before, here’s how it basically works:

1. You download and install the MailChimp-specific TemplateZone software on this page (it’s PC only, but Mac users have 600+ template options detailed here)
2. If you want the holiday pack, install that as well.
3. You’ll need to link the software to your MailChimp account. The software will walk you through that during setup.
4. Pick a template, and customize it within the software.
5. Pass it over to MailChimp.
6. Log in to MailChimp, go to the Campaigns screen
7. Open the campaign you just created in TemplateZone, and hit Send.

Here’s a video tutorial:

Segment your list based on customer purchase activity

There are several different ways you can use this new segmentation feature…

Segment by Products Purchased in the Past

You can send an email to people who’ve purchased a particular product from your store:

Segment by “Big Spenders”

And like I mentioned here, you can now search for segments under the “Lists” area of MailChimp, too.

So maybe you want a list of all the subscribers who’ve spent more than some amount:

you can download that list of “big spenders” and make a new list, or do some kind of external research on them in your own database:

Segment by Amount Spent on a Single Order:

Generate a list of people who’ve spent more than some amount on a single order

Combine Segment Criteria

Or, you might combine segment-by-engagement and send to your most loyal customers who spent good money with you recently:

Add ZIP Code Proximity

If you collect address information, you can even add ZIP code proximity to your segmentation criteria:

Activating Ecommerce Tracking in MailChimp

To make all this work, you need to have our ecommerce360 plugin installed (Magento, Zencart, osCommerce, and Prestashop versions available).

Drupal user? There’s talk of a Drupal/Ubercart plugin here.

After you’ve got your plugin installed, whenever you send a campaign, open up the “advanced tracking options:”

Then check the box for e-commerce tracking:

We’ll automatically tag all your product links with tracking code, and the rest is magic.

Email Marketing ROI Reports

But wait, there’s more! In addition to all the great segmentation options, you should activate our Analytics360 tool to get these handy ROI reports for each of your MailChimp campaigns:

We basically calculate how much money the email campaign cost, and compare it to how much money your campaign made.

You can totally print this report out and leave it on your manager’s desk with a little sticky note that says, “why I deserve a raise.“

They included some beautiful new holiday templates, plus some new themes like “Environment” (for all the green and earth-friendly businesses we’re seeing in MailChimp) and “Functional” for use in very specific applications, like, say, Autoresponders.

What’s cool is that since we’re using our new Template Design Language, some of the templates have some unique MailChimp features baked right in. I’ll show you what I mean…

To find them, create a campaign. When it’s time to pick your template, go to the “Gallery” tab:

You’ll notice a pulldown menu where you can sort the template by category:

Under “Holidays” you’ll notice some elegant options, like:

Mmmm, turducken (what the heck is a “turducken?“).

Under the “Functional” category, we have new templates that you can use for very specific cases, like an annual autoresponder when it’s time to come in for a checkup:

Under the “Environment” category, you’ll find this template:

Let’s take a closer look at this one.

In the right column, you’ll notice a series of tips. We’re using MailChimp’s nifty ability to create addable content blocks:

Just keep clicking the little “+” icon, to add more tips.

Yes, Style and Versatility

I know this template is called “Live Green,” but this particular template is actually versatile enough to be used for other applications.

Like, saaaay, a plumber’s newsletter.

Let’s use the iStockphoto integration in our image gallery to search for “plumber” pictures:

and plop it into the left column of our template:

After that, I can tweak the colors, fonts, and other styles to match my brand.

Exportable for Template Hackers

Here’s a power tip from Fabio (yes, that’s his real name). He’s one of the DesignLab scientists who contributed a bunch of these templates, and is working on many more.

“Most of these pre-built templates are kind of rigid, but if you’re handy with HTML/CSS, you can take any one of them and export the code in order to tweak it exactly the way you want:

Tip: You’ll want to brush up on our Email Template Language (here’s a handy video tutorial).

Then, re-import your custom template back into MailChimp by clicking this button:

just copy-paste your code into our template editor and hit save:

We hope you find these useful. Stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot more email template announcements to make!

We’re really excited about this one, because it’s our first integration-via-bookmarklet we’ve ever tried.

1. Installing your bookmarklet

Log in to MailChimp,click on the Account button, and go to the Integrations Panel (marvel at all the integrations):

Whoah, that's a lot. Go to mailchimp.com/extras to see even more integrations with MailChimp

At the bottom, you’ll see “GoToMeeting.” Expand it, and you’ll see a link to a bookmarklet.

Drag the bookmarklet into your browser's bookmarks bar

Drag that link into your browser’s bookmarks bar:

Ok, now you’ve got our bookmarklet installed.

2. Passing webinars over to MailChimp

Next time you’re logged in to your GoToWebinar account, go to the “My Webinars” page:

and then click that Bookmarklet you just installed in your browser.

That’ll grab the list of webinars on this page, and pass them over to MailChimp.

If you have multiple webinars, we’ll ask you to pick one:

Then we’ll open up a special GoToWebinar template in MailChimp (note that this template is actually hidden and inaccessible from our template options, unless you specifically pass GoToMeeting data via the bookmarklet) with your links ready to go:

While you’re here, you might want to edit the email design a little.

Maybe you can pick a different color palette, or use our iStockphoto integration to find some good pictures.

Hmm, think I’ll change the title of the event to “MailChimp Secrets” and search for “whispering monkeys” (get it? secrets?):

and insert the image into your invitation:

Because EVERYTHING is better with monkeys

Or you might even want to switch the template to one of your own saved versions. Click the “change template” link:

and we’ll stick the GoToWebinar content into one of your saved template designs like this:

Important note for template designers: MailChimp looks for a content section in your template called “main.” All of MailChimp’s default templates have this. But if you’re an advanced coder who’s using the MailChimp Template Design Language to build your own templates, you’ll need to have an editable content region called “main” in order to pass GoToWebinar data here.

Here’s a quick YouTube video on how to do all this:

Obviously these subject lines are a little obfuscated, but you can get a lot of ideas from this tool…

Sell it to me Straight

Subject lines with “Happy Thanksgiving” didn’t perform quite as well as a presumably boring “Thanksgiving from ____”

Avoid Writing a Turkey of a Subject Line

And the mere mention of “turkey” just seems to make open rates plummet. Maybe we’re all not-so-thankful of turkey after Thanksgiving?

Do “Sales” Really Work?

And look at “Thanksgiving Sale” One miserable star? Probably an overused phrase. Or is it? Let’s run the word “sale” through the subject line suggester:

Look at that. The phrase “Sales Ends Friday” got a 5 star rating! So maybe a generic “sale” subject is not as good as a more specific subject line with an ultimatum. On that topic, you might want to look at Mark Brownlow’s really detailed study of Amazon’s “salesy” subject lines.

Next: Testing Your Ideas

So the Subject Line Suggester is a great way to get ideas (ideas that had great open rates) for your email campaigns. After jotting down some different ideas, you may want to create an A/B Subject line test in MailChimp.