The great folks over at Practical eCommerce have recently published a short PDF guide called Getting Started in eCommerce. The purpose of it is to provide a basic, unbiased overview to people who are new to ecommerce or are struggling to understand it. The best part? It’s absolutely FREE! So what are you waiting for? (click to download the PDF)
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Getting Started in eCommerce – A Guide
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009Using Twitter To Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
I recently asked a bunch of email marketers how they judge success for their email campaigns. One of the answers that really stood out was from Amit Gupta, who sends the Photojojo newsletter (you must signup for his awesome newsletter immediately).
Amit says to measure the success of his email campaigns, he compares sales to re-tweets…
Stumbleupon – the gift that keeps giving
Monday, June 22nd, 2009We recently launched Pictaculous, another nifty little MailChimp Labs experiment. We’re not doing any formal marketing at all, but somehow it got picked up by Stumbleupon.
If you’ll recall, Stumbleupon was a service that got bought by eBay for $75 million, then sold back to its owners (check out this 2007 article predicting the “synergy” between the two companies from Mashable). Like a lot of people, I pretty much thought StumbleUpon was dead after the acquisition. But we got a pleasant surprise from this Google Analytics report for Pictaculous.com:
Pretty much all that traffic is from Stumbleupon. The first spike was about 3,000 visits. Nope, not large by any means, but notice the 2nd spike, where we got +8,400 visits? Over 7,000 of those came from StumbleUpon again. It’s the gift that keeps giving!
BTW, how’d we get “stumbled” in the first place? Not sure, but the day before the first spike, we sent out this MailChimp newsletter where we formally announced Pictaculous (look for the iPhone in the side column). Go figure. Email marketing must work!
Facebook Vanity URLs
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
In case you missed it, last Saturday at 12:01 AM EST Facebook gave both individuals and fan pages the ability to register their own vanity URLs. The main reason this is awesome is that it allows you to market your Facebook page much more easily. Instead of a long string of letters and numbers, you now have the benefit of something short and tidy. Like facebook.com/mailchimp. During the recent NBA Finals, for example, I noticed brands like Vitamin Water promoting their fan page URLs instead of their main company website in their commercials. And this type of cross promotion is definitely working! Vitamin Water currently boasts over 500,000 Facebook fans.
How do I grow my email subscriber list?
Friday, May 29th, 2009Whenever entrepreneurs ask me, “I just started my business and I want to use email marketing. But I don’t have a subscriber list yet. How do I get one?”
Here’s what I tell them:
- You are the expert at something. That’s probably why you started that business of yours.
- Write a “Top 10 Tips” list about whatever that thing is you’re so good at. Alternatively, you can write a “Top 10 Mistakes” list (fear works great too).
- Put a newsletter signup form on your website, and tell people they can get that top 10 list if they signup for your list. Promise to give more tips in future issues.
Jenn is a great example of this. Read her story here.
Want more tips? See also: Personalizing welcome emails w/freebies, and 5 practical autoresponder ideas
How MailChimp Uses CoTweet
Friday, May 15th, 2009
We’ve been using twitter for quite some time now (you can find us @mailchimp). At first it was supposed to be a way for me to post announcements to our customers about server maintenance. Then it morphed into a powerful tool to stay connected with our users and learn more about them (we follow our followers, print their profiles & hang them on our walls to remember our audience).
Twitter gets messy. Fast.
But as more and more customers started using twitter to talk to us, we had to get more staff involved. We even hired Amanda, our full-time CTO (Chief Twitter Officer). Obviously, giving multiple employees access to one master twitter account can get hairy (like the day 3 of us replied to one question with the same answer).
“How business does twitter”
So we looked into CoTweet (still in private beta). So far, it’s been really handy. If you run a business and use twitter a lot, you should definitely consider CoTweet. There are other reviews of CoTweet out there, but they’re from social media sites, who imho incorrectly describe CoTweet as “an inbox for tweets.” Who the heck wants that? There are other reviews from big companies managing their brand, like this post from Microsoft. Nice post, but not very thorough.
What if you’re a small business using twitter to connect with customers? Is CoTweet right for you? Here’s our review…
Email marketing inspiration from ProFlowers
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Mothers Day is coming, so the flower websites are getting their marketing on. I love this season, because it makes for great direct marketing ideas. Case in point: E-mail Strategies and Tactics Exposed: An Insider’s Look at Exceptional E-mail
From emarketingandcommerce.com
Email: What’s Inside?
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Jessica Tsai has written up a comprehensive piece on email marketing over at DestinationCRM that covers deliverability, authentication, ROI, and getting people to open and click.
Some highlights from the article, plus links to related email marketing resources from MailChimp, are below.
Spam Lawsuits – What’s the worst that can happen?
Sunday, February 15th, 2009If you’ve ever started an email marketing project and dealt with a client (or manager) who told you, “Look, we’re not spammers here, so we don’t have to worry about those CAN-SPAM laws” we’ve created some handy “stfu” documents you can give ‘em. They list big brands who’ve had to pay some huge settlements to the FTC for seemingly simple, innocent mistakes (that a lot of us have made), like:
Yahoo Adding Links to Your Email Content?
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Our friend Tanya (dezignsbyt) started an interesting discussion in the MailChimp Jungle.
It seems YahooMail is automatically inserting links onto products that they find in email campaigns. In some cases, it can produce unexpected and unwanted results. She also provides a little workaround to prevent it from interfering with any of your important links.
It’s kind of a useful and cool feature (inserts map links, financial info, etc), but has anyone out there experienced any problems with their email campaigns from this?
I checked my YahooMail account, to see if I could catch this in action. Saw this in an email from DailyCandy:
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