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Why did my open rates change?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

What’s a good, average open rate? Our customers ask us that question all the time. So much so, that a few years ago we analyzed close to 300 million emails and posted our findings to ChimpCharts. Next, we embedded that data right into your campaign stats:

learn more about industry comparisons

learn more about industry comparisons

But I send a lot of campaigns. Because I use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool wired up to this blog, I send almost daily. And I look at my stats all the time. So I already know my average open rate, and I already know my click rate, and I already know that I’m usually a few percentage points above industry average (c’mon, step it up a little Internet & Software industry!).

Nowadays, I find myself seeking anomalies in my stats instead…

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Automagic Email Translation in MailChimp

Friday, February 5th, 2010

auto-translate-checkboxNow you can now simply check a box in MailChimp, and we’ll automatically translate your email content for you with Google Translate. How do we know which language your recipients speak? That’s actually the easy part. We’ve been detecting your subscribers’ language preferences and then auto-translating your signup forms for quite some time.

Now, we’ll handle your email content too. Here’s how you do it…

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Delivery Doctor takes the mystery out of spam filters

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

delivery-doctor-thmOur inbox inspector will tell you if your email will get blocked by spam filters.

But diagnosing the exact reason your email was blocked can be extremely difficult.

The only way to really figure out why your message was blocked is to systematically test each variable: change your subject line, and send another test email. Go check all your test accounts. Did it get blocked again? Well, change this link. Still blocked? Change another link. Wasn’t your links? Swap out the images. Not it? Change your content. Over and over, till you find the culprit. Then, do all that again for the next spam filter. Complete p.i.t.a.

So we automated all that with our new Delivery Doctor tool. Push one button, and we’ll automagically slice and dice and analyze your email and run dozens of tests until we find the root of your block.

Then, we tell you what to fix…

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TimeWarp: Schedule email campaigns by recipient timezone

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

mailchimp-timewarpThanks to our built-in geolocation service, we can pinpoint the approximate location and timezone of your subscribers.

Which means you can now schedule your MailChimp campaigns to automagically deliver based on each subscriber’s timezone.

No more timezone differences! 9am means 9am now, whether you’re on the east coast or west coast. Or anywhere on the globe, really.

We call this new feature TimeWarp, and here’s how it works…

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Geolocation in MailChimp

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Geolocation tracking added to MailChimp

Geolocation tracking added to MailChimp

We’ve been scheming at this TimeWarp idea for a long time now. But in order to make that work, we first had to get geolocation data for our users’ subscribers. That took a while to collect and add to our system. For the uninitiated, here’s an article from ReadWriteWeb where they dream about the possibilities of a geolocation-enabled twitter. Here’s one trendy way twitter ended up using geo, and here’s a fun article on how Foursquare got kind of catty over Yelp’s entry into geo.

So geo’s kind of a big thing. Apparently. We just needed it to make email marketing a little better.

Anyway, after we got TimeWarp working, we decided to add geolocation as a segmentation option too. So you can now send a targeted campaign to subscribers inside a 150 mile radius around any point on the globe.

Here’s how that works…

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MailChimp v5 is Alive

Monday, February 1st, 2010

MailChimp v5 officially went live across 240,000 accounts at 1am ET this morning. We’ll be blogging about it all in more detail shortly, but here’s a list…

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Project Omnivore: Declassified

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

iStock_000000051702XSmall

In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.

The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.

This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…

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New Social Share Tag for RSS Campaigns

Monday, January 25th, 2010

We recently introduced a new RSS-to-email merge tag: RSSITEM:SHARE

Using this tag allows your subscribers to share individual articles in your RSS feed, as opposed to sharing the entire email newsletter. So if your code looks like this:

rss-item-share

your final emails will look like *this:

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A/B Testing Email Ads

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

I’m pruning some bookmarks from my browser this morning, and came across this article on Clickz:

Tips for Selling Ads in E-mail by Jeanne Jennings.

Very useful stuff, if your master plan is to become the next FlavorPill, Thrillist or DailyCandy (purchased for $125M).

One of Jeanne’s tips is to allow your advertisers to run A/B tests within your campaigns. You probably know we’ve got an automated A/B testing tool, but did you know that if you use it in conjunction with our dynamic content merge tags, you can actually A/B test your content and creative (even your entire email design, if you wish)?

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MailChimp for the Blackberry

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

minichimp-blackberryEric Muntz created MiniChimp, which lets you view MailChimp campaign information on your BlackBerry: “Quickly view your campaigns and crucial stats including unsubscribes, complaints, opens, clicks, forwards and more.”

He’s looking for users to help him test it out. Interested? Here’s a tour.

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