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.

We’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.

You see, you have people that really want to know about your Etsy Shop, your products, your process etc. These are your loyal customers and fans. Give them what they want! Make them feel really special by sending them exclusive and useful content. Previews of your new products, special discounts, and an inside look at your handmade process are all great ideas for content.

Email marketing allows you to share your craft and your personality with more people. Plus, with MailChimp, not only is it free for lists with up to 500 subscribers, its also easy, fun and powerful.

If this sounds good to you, here is an outline of all the topics covered in our guide for Etsy Sellers:

Building Your Mailing List
Creating an Attractive Newsletter
Sending Your Campaign
Social Sharing
Pay Pal Integration
Tracking and Reporting
Google Analytics
Autoresponders
RSS-Driven Campaigns
Segmenting Your List

Download MailChimp’s Guide for Etsy Sellers (8.6 MEG PDF)

p.s. Just in case you were wondering, we are in no way affiliated with Etsy and this guide is not intended to imply any endorsement or certification by Etsy of our services. Also, Etsy is a registered trademark of Etsy, Inc. And of course, please consult a physician before attempting any crafty projects.

Segment your list based on customer purchase activity

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

Segment by Products Purchased in the Past

You can send an email to people who’ve purchased a particular product from your store:

Segment by “Big Spenders”

And like I mentioned here, you can now search for segments under the “Lists” area of MailChimp, too.

So maybe you want a list of all the subscribers who’ve spent more than some amount:

you can download that list of “big spenders” and make a new list, or do some kind of external research on them in your own database:

Segment by Amount Spent on a Single Order:

Generate a list of people who’ve spent more than some amount on a single order

Combine Segment Criteria

Or, you might combine segment-by-engagement and send to your most loyal customers who spent good money with you recently:

Add ZIP Code Proximity

If you collect address information, you can even add ZIP code proximity to your segmentation criteria:

Activating Ecommerce Tracking in MailChimp

To make all this work, you need to have our ecommerce360 plugin installed (Magento, Zencart, osCommerce, and Prestashop versions available).

Drupal user? There’s talk of a Drupal/Ubercart plugin here.

After you’ve got your plugin installed, whenever you send a campaign, open up the “advanced tracking options:”

Then check the box for e-commerce tracking:

We’ll automatically tag all your product links with tracking code, and the rest is magic.

Email Marketing ROI Reports

But wait, there’s more! In addition to all the great segmentation options, you should activate our Analytics360 tool to get these handy ROI reports for each of your MailChimp campaigns:

We basically calculate how much money the email campaign cost, and compare it to how much money your campaign made.

You can totally print this report out and leave it on your manager’s desk with a little sticky note that says, “why I deserve a raise.“

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:

• A/B testing (also see: MailChimp’s A/B testing tool)
• Subject line writing tips (also see MailChimp’s Subject Line Suggester)
• Creating a special “holiday email series” (also see MailChimp’s Autoresponder)

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 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.

Here’s a summary of what we found:

Some things we found interesting:

Gmail subscribers seem to be a bit more engaged than the other subscribers. Could be some demographic kinda thing.

Also interesting to see that the number of emails sent to gmail has surpassed AOL. Interesting to me, since AOL has had a head start over gmail, yet Google has caught up in just a few years. Keep in mind this is just emails sent. I have no idea what the “number of subscribers” are at those domains (nor does TechCrunch, but this article is still somewhat interesting).

Oh, and the reason there are no abuse complaint numbers for gmail is not because those wonderful recipients never complain. It’s because we currently have no way of measuring complaints, as gmail has no feedback loop.

In terms of emails sent, yahoo and hotmail are both still significantly higher than gmail and aol.

For all you stats-freaks w/calculators, I’m leaving out a row of data from comcast.net (which represented 8,673,998 emails sent). Frankly, it was so out of line with the others, we’re going to look into that one in more detail. The data set we analyzed was “all emails ever sent from our servers” but excluding campaigns sent to lists smaller than 2,500 recipients.

And if you’re interested in these sorta stats, be sure to check out Chimp Charts, where we post free email marketing data like this quite a lot.

Does this make you wonder what the composition of your own subscriber lists look like? MailChimp users get a free domain performance report for all campaigns.

Want to see if certain subscribers on your list respond better than others? Try some simple list segmentation.

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 provides a one-click feature for subscribers to share their completed email campaigns via the primary social networks. Currently 9% of campaigns (roughly 90 million emails) are shared via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, or Delicious.

To begin, you need to make sure that you have two things: 1. a Facebook fan page, and 2. the HTML code from MailChimp that allows you to embed your sign-up form on a web page.

Step 1. Grab your MailChimp list’s embed code

In your MailChimp Dashboard, click on the Lists tab. Then click on “forms” for the list that you want the subscribes to go to.

Then you’ll select “integration code” from the top menu, which will present you with a link to the Signup Form Embed Code. From here, you’ll simply want to copy the embed code and paste it into TextEdit or NotePad.

Step 2. Add the Static FBML Application

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language. At its core, FBML allows you to embed your application in the Facebook platform. It isn’t quite HTML, but it isn’t quite proprietary either. (Jesse Farmer provides a great introduction to FBML if you’re interested in reading more.) The easiest way to add the application is to search for “Static FBML” using the upper right hand search box on Facebook. It’ll show up as the second search result, and you need to click on “add to page”.

Step 3. Create the Newsletter Signup Tab

Navigate back over to your fan page and select “edit page” from right below your profile picture.

Scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it.

In “Box Title” you can give the tab a name like “Email Signup” or “Newsletter”. Then in the “FBML” section, you’ll paste in the embed code that you copied from MailChimp in Step 1. It’s easy to style your form using basic HTML to give it a look and feel that matches your brand. One suggestion that Return on Subscriber makes (and we agree with wholeheartedly) is adding the following customization:

<form method=”post” action=”http://url.com” TARGET=”_blank”>

at the end of the url to open a new browser tab or window. This is nice thing to do for your user so they can easily find their way back to the page they were originally browsing.

Step 4. Add a New Tab to Your Fan Page Top Navigation Bar

Go back to your fan page and select “edit page” from directly below your profile picture. Then scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it once again. This time you want to select “Application Settings”.

From the Application Settings, you’ll have the option to select whether you want your signup form to appear as a box (in the manner of Fans, Notes, or Favorite Pages), a top navigation tab, or both. As you can see on the MailChimp Fan Page, we have our signup form set up as both a box and a tab. This is a matter of individual preference and will not affect the functionality of the form.

And that’s it! If you have questions, thoughts or suggestions on innovative ways to use this, please leave a comment and let us know!

Time for a little trip down memory lane with this Gmail press release from April 1, 2004:

Search is Number Two Online Activity – Email is Number One; “Heck, Yeah,” Say Google Founders

BTW – A real, “non-PR” story of how Gmail got started is in the book Founders At Work. Great read if you run or work at a startup.

According to the TC article, Gmail gets about half the traffic as Yahoo Mail (36 million uniques vs. Yahoo’s 98 million).

Ever wonder how many people on your subscriber list use Gmail? Just use the Domain Performance stats in your campaign reports: