Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
Everybody wants to embed videos into their HTML emails. The sad truth is they break more often than not. There are promising developments here and there (and Mark Brownlow has a great roundup here).
But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.
It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…
MailChimp is chock full of social features and integrations to make it easier to share with your network. And according to industry benchmark studies, social share links increase both the reach and the click rate of email campaigns. If you’re not using these features yet, you might want to consider checking them out.
We’ve made it super simple to connect MailChimp with Twitter, allowing you to automatically tweet a link to your campaign as soon as you hit the send button. Just go to your Account settings, and click on Integrations. Under Twitter, just click the big authorize connection button and oAuth will take it from there. This is a safer and better way of integrating with Twitter because it means you no longer have to enter your Twitter username and password directly into MailChimp.
In June of this year I decided to set up an offshoot of the MailChimp blog on Posterous. The site bills itself as “a dead simple way to post everything online using email.”
With a full-blown Wordpress blog, in addition to our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you might be wondering why in the world I’d want another site to maintain. The simple answer: the more I use Posterous, the more I love it! — Especially for the particular niche it serves. (more on that after the jump)
Interested in going to Blogworld in Las Vegas but weren’t able to register in time? Why not let MailChimp send you!
We’re giving away one registration, and all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us why we should pick you! Of course you’ll still be responsible for your hotel and travel expenses, but we’ll make sure you can get into the only industry-wide trade show for the blogging and new media communities. You’ll have up to 24 hours, or until there are 150 comments on this post– whichever comes first– to convince us you’re the person most deserving of the free registration. The winner will be announced late on Tuesday afternoon, and we’ll contact you via email. (So make sure you use a valid email address when you comment on this post.)
And of course, if you’ll be attending Blogworld October 15-17 or just happen to live in Las Vegas, don’t forget to find Chief Twitter Officer Amanda and say hello. She’ll have a limited number of MailChimp tshirts, stickers and pins to give away. Keep an eye on the MailChimp Twitter feed as well as our Facebook page for more details during the conference.
Next Tuesday and Wednesday (September 22 & 23) MailChimp will be at the Twitter Conference in Los Angeles.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Tony Robbins will both be keynote speakers at the event. Other presenters will be covering a range of topics, from branding to social gaming, tweeting celebrities and beyond. We definitely look forward to stuffing our brains full of new and interesting information and are also excited about meeting some of our users on the west coast. If you’re in the area and want to say hi, just give us a shout.
As MailChimp’s list of social media features continues growing, it seems only natural for us to attend the Twitter Conference. Especially with our new Twitter Template and our recent research showing that Twitter is being used more frequently than Facebook in email marketing. Oh, and you also know that you can track tweets and re-tweets about your email campaigns in your MailChimp dashboard, right? Hey, and don’t forget about our built-in integration with Twitter and other social sites, mmkay?
In honor of our Forever Free plan, we’re giving away 1,000 MailChimp T-shirts between now and the end of September! These are all new, very comfortable and they feature the original Jon Hicks MailChimp sketch.
All you have to do is stay tuned to our Twitter feed and Facebook updates for a chance to win. As soon as you see the link posted in either of these locations, it means that the T-shirt form is live. Just give us some basic contact info, and your shirt size of course, and we’ll get your new favorite T-shirt in the mail in no time!
It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re located, we will gladly send you a shirt. We love international chimps too!
And in case there’s any confusion, this offer does not include chimp arm covers, bananas, or our models Leif and Stephanie. Oh, and no purchase necessary. Because then it wouldn’t be free.
In MailChimp v4.2, we’ve added a number of list import options, including Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google Forms. Google Forms is a powerful and free tool that you can use to quickly and easily create a custom signup form that links directly to your MailChimp account.
To begin, you’ll want to head over to Google Docs and login using your Google account information. Then, under the New Document menu, select Form. Go ahead and give your form a name and then include some information as to what the signup form is for or about.
From there, you’ll begin adding fields. By default, the blank form starts out with two “Sample Questions” for you to modify. For this example, we just added a separate field for First Name, Last Name and Email Address, and went ahead and made them all required fields. It’s also important to ensure that you select “Text” for the Question Type.
In the latest MailChimp upgrade we developed an easy way for you to add a table of contents to your newsletter.
The * | MC:TOC | * dynamic merge tag works by pulling anything from your email that is formatted as Title text, and displaying it as an ordered list complete with bullet points. Each item in your table of contents is then anchor linked to the corresponding blurb in your email.
To add a table of contents to your email, simply insert * | MC:TOC | * where you’d like the contents listing to appear. In the example screen shots you can see that I added some Title text (”In this edition of The MonkeyWrench”), and then added the merge tag below it.
You can also insert a Table of Contents in either the right or left column of a two-column template and the merge tag will work exactly the same way.
(I’ve used extra spaces between the elements of the merge tag so that it will render correctly for those who subscribe to the RSS-to-Email version of the blog.)
In MailChimp v4.2, you now have the ability to segment your list by ZIP code. When you set up your campaign and choose the list you want to send to, you’ll want to click on the “send to a segment of list” option. Then select Address from the left-most drop down menu and then “is within distance”. (Sorry international chimps, but this feature is currently only available in the US.) Next, a box will appear where you can enter the mile radius you want to send to, and finally, the appropriate ZIP code. The one caveat here is that you need to be collecting address data from your subscribers when they sign up for your list. Click through to learn how.
A little while ago, we launched a “social sharing” merge tag:
When placed, it inserted a large row of social sites that your readers could share your newsletters with. One request we started receiving immediately after launching this was the ability to specify individual social sites (not all of them at once).
You can do that now. Here’s how…
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