Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
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:
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:”
Then, whenever they send their emails, they pick a winner and use this dynamic content merge tag in their campaign:
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…)
This 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…
Unless 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.
MailChimp 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.
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.)
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.”
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!
Last 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…
MailChimp user Shawn Smith is the creator of Shawnimals. His little plushie characters are sooo darn cute. A little while back, we actually purchased his wee ninja t-shirts for our entire office.
We’ve all doodled crazy creatures before (right?) but not many of us get to keep doing it for a living when we’re “grown up.” But Sensei Shawn is livin’ the dream. He doodles, makes plushies, and has his own Nintendo game (Ninjatown for Nintendo DS).
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