Close (X)

Blog

Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Archive for the ‘Emarketing, Business’ Category

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…

(more…)

How to grow your email list in 3 easy steps

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

We get this question a lot: “I just started my business, and I want to use email marketing because it’s cheap, but I don’t have an email list yet. If buying an email list is so bad, how am I supposed to grow my list from zero when nobody’s heard of us?”

My answer? Buy your traffic, not your list:

grow-your-list

(more…)

Milestone: 19,000 MailChimp API Users

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

A couple years ago we had to decide between hiring a sales guy, or investing in MailChimp’s API by hiring a programmer. At the time, it was a really tough decision for us to make.

But I’ll let you in on my little management secret for making big decisions like this…

(more…)

How To Create an Email Marketing Plan

Monday, November 30th, 2009

thm_emailplanSo, you’ve decided to do some email marketing. That’s great! Email is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools for generating interest and sales for your business. It provides a wonderful opportunity for your company to speak to an audience who is actually listening (they’ve opted-in to receive emails from you, essentially saying, please send me information!).

But, how do you create email communications that succeed?

(more…)

Pruning Your Email List – Stats

Monday, November 30th, 2009

A little while ago, Mark wrote about how to use MailChimp’s new subscriber engagement tracking to reactivate inactive subscribers. But I’ve been hearing from more and more customers (mostly publishers using jargon like “qualified paid/non-paid circulation” ) that they’d rather just “delete the deadwood” from their lists altogether.

Rick Whittington just posted a great case study on his blog about how he did this very thing for one of his clients. He also details how it all affected their subscriber count and overall email performance.

(more…)

Triggered Anniversary Email Idea

Friday, November 13th, 2009
Triggered Anniversary Email from a camera?

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.

How To Market Your Etsy Shop with MailChimp

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Market Your Etsy Shop w. MailChimpWe’ve just posted a 36-page guide for Etsy Sellers that takes you through everything you need to know about marketing your Etsy Shop with MailChimp.

I know you might be thinking, ‘But, Amy, I make things by hand. I’m all about the DIY movement. Why would I do email marketing?’

I’ve got good news. Creating your own email newsletters is totally DIY marketing. Plus, it is actually really effective. Unlike paid advertising or annoying SPAM emails (which we hate) your newsletter is sent only to a list of people who have asked (by signing up) to receive it.

(more…)

Target Emails by Purchase Activity

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

You can now segment your MailChimp lists based on purchase activity (product purchase, amount spent, or product category):

segment-by-ecomm360

Segment your list based on customer purchase activity

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

(more…)

Smith-Harmon’s Holiday Email Guide

Friday, October 16th, 2009

smith-harmon-holiday-guideSmith-Harmon is one of the most famous email design agencies around. I’ve talked about some of their design tips in seminars and here in the blog (like this article about 250px boxes). They design emails for companies like Intuit, Costco, Williams-Sonoma, and Pottery Barn. They know a thing or two about email design trends.

So if you’re thinking about revamping your email marketing for the holidays, you might want to check out their free PDF Guide: Get Ready for the Holidays”

Their guide covers a wide range of topics, including:

If you like their tips, you should also bookmark their Retail Email Blog, where they cover all the trendy topics in the world of email design.

Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

We recently analyzed all outgoing email traffic from the MailChimp servers to see who the major email providers are, and to identify trends (analyzing gobs of email data is what we do in our pastime here). So we though we’d share our findings:

Major email domain market share

Major email domain market share

Yahoo and Hotmail are tops, but Gmail is on an upward trend (related study: Gmail Users More Engaged?). AOL has some work to do, and Comcast is pretty flat.

BTW, if you like email marketing stats, or need data to print and show to your clueless boss, bookmark MailChimpCharts and EmailStatCenter.

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