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Archive for the ‘Email Design’ Category

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Gearing up for Halloween at MailChimp

Friday, October 16th, 2009
I vaaant to send your EEEmail

I vaaant to send your EEEmail! MailChimp Halloween poster

We’ve got some cool stuff planned around this Halloween (in addition to the cool vampire-chimp poster to the right).

A little while back, we launched our new HTML Email Template Language. This makes it super easy for web designers to code their own emails, then load them into MailChimp as built-in templates for their clients.

To showcase how cool this is, we commissioned some well-known artists and designers to create some spooky Halloween email templates for all our customers. Their work has appeared in WIRED and Paste magazines, BoingBoing, SXSW, Threadless, and even a Nintendo game.

Here are a few examples of what’s coming sometime next week…

(more…)

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp News | 4 Comments »

Guide to all the email template options in MailChimp

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

template-thumbnailsWhen we first built MailChimp, it was a single-screen interface. You’d simply copy-paste your HTML code, then hit send. It was so stupid-simple, you might’ve called us the “Basecamp for email marketing” except that Basecamp wasn’t invented yet. Back then, it was just assumed that you had to know how to code HTML in order to send HTML emails. Coding HTML emails by hand was actually the easy part. The hard part was list management and tracking. My point is, there were no templates, no inbox inspectors, no boingy pie charts, and definitely no social integration.

My how things have changed. Nowadays, people want template options. And MailChimp’s got more email template options than anybody. There are email template features in MailChimp that even we forget we built. So I thought I’d put together this guide…

(more…)

Posted in Email Design, Using MailChimp | 9 Comments »

LotusLive iNotes – IBM to compete with Google Apps

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

lotuslive-inotesIf you code a lot of HTML emails, sooner or later you run into nagging little Lotus Notes rendering issues (usually it’s a corporate user with a very old installation). They can be painful, but since so many companies use Notes, you have to design for it. Actually, I kind of like Notes, because it leads to more sales of our inbox inspection tool </ evil>

Well, we just learned from the ZDnet blog that IBM plans to put Lotus Notes in the cloud with LotusLive iNotes. According to the article, IBM appears to be positioning it against Google Apps as “web-based email for the enterprise.” Sounds like yet another email app you’ll have to learn how to design around, but this could be a good thing for email marketers.  Browser-based email programs generally render HTML emails nicely (um, because browsers are built for rendering HTML?) but they do have little idiosyncrasies, like spotty CSS support (we discuss this in point #6 in our How to Design HTML Email guide). We’ll post any special coding considerations we find for LotusLive iNotes here on our blog, so stay tuned.

Posted in Email Design, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | No Comments »

Creating your own email templates in MailChimp

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

MailChimp has a template language that allows you to upload your own HTML email and turn it into a built-in template within our app (there are even Dreamweaver and Textmate plugins!). It’s great for designers who want to setup a MailChimp account for their client. It’s groundbreaking, so we knew we needed an amazing, Hollywood-slick video to show it off:

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp Upgrade, Using MailChimp | 3 Comments »

Using Conditional Merge Tags for Prizes

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

We just noticed LaughYourWay.com using our dynamic content merge tags in a cool way.

In their website footer, they have an email signup box with an incentive to “win an iPod touch:”
subscribe-and-win

Then, whenever they send their emails, they pick a winner and use this dynamic content merge tag in their campaign:

(more…)

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp Customers, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices, Using MailChimp | 2 Comments »

Dreamweaver and TextMate Plugins For MailChimp

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

We recently launched a new email template language that makes it easy to code emails that tie into the MailChimp email design tools. If you are designing emails for your clients, this is pretty huge, as you can create designs that ham-fisted, non-designers can tweak through the design inspector, without having to touch your code. We’ve just made it even easier for designers and coders to rock the email template casbah. (more…)

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp News, Plugins, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 11 Comments »

New HTML Email Template language in MailChimp v4.3

Friday, August 14th, 2009

thm_code-custom-templatesThis weekend, we’re launching MailChimp v4.3. There will be lots of hidden awesomeness, but the major new feature that our customers will notice right away is the ability to upload your own HTML email code, then save it as an editable template inside our app. This is a great feature for web designers who want to upload a template for a client, and create editable (even repeatable) sections within the content area (without letting clients uglify the rest of your design).

We’ll post more details and documentation after everything is live this Monday (August 17), but here’s a sneak peek…

(more…)

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade | 22 Comments »

Images ON in Gmail – If You’re Authenticating

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

images-turned-offUnless you’re totally new to email marketing, you know that most email programs turn images in your HTML emails OFF by default. It’s meant to protect your privacy, but is very annoying to legit email marketers for a variety of reasons. Well, Gmail to the rescue.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

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Posted in Deliverability, Email Design, Emarketing, Business, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 9 Comments »

101 Free HTML Email Marketing Templates courtesy of MailChimp

Friday, July 17th, 2009

thm-101-free-html-email-templatesMailChimp has some built-in HTML email templates with cool automagic powers, but for people who are “photoshop challenged” our templates can be a little hard to understand.

So we asked the guys at TemplateZone to build a version of their HTML email template tool specifically for MailChimp (and to make it free). Since it’s desktop software, it can do a lot of cool stuff that you’d normally have to do yourself (or hire a designer). The software is free (because we love you), and includes 101 HTML email templates for different occasions.

Here’s how it works.

(more…)

Posted in Email Design, MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade | 23 Comments »

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