A little while ago, we posted a survey link to Facebook, Twitter, and The Jungle. I was looking at the data today, and noticed a new “create chart” link:

I actually jumped in my seat a little from excitement. I mean, normally I’d have to download the data to Excel (and I never do pick the correct export options) then generate my own charts. But now, they’ve gone and made it a single-click link. Woo-hoo!

The funny thing is a simple “create chart” was enough to get me excited. But they actually let you choose the type of chart you want (bar chart, line chart, etc). And you can download the image as a PNG (makes it much easier to email to someone). Super big thank you to the surveymonkey guys. Here’s what the chart looks like:

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…

CoTweet’s tagline is “How business does twitter.” And it really does live up to that claim.  If you’ve ever setup a Live Chat or knowledgebase and ticketing system for your company (we use LivePerson), CoTweet is like that — but for twitter.

Twitter was once a disorganized mess for us, with Amanda, Aarron, Lindsay, Jennifer, and myself all logging in to our single MailChimp account, then tweeting to our customers from Tweetdeck, our browsers, our iPhones, etc. There was no way to tell who was “on duty” and watching twitter. When we were ALL on duty using tweetdeck, I’d frequently get locked out for exceeding our twitter API limit by mid afternoon. Grr.

CoTweet lets us connect to our one master twitter account, but still use it as totally separate users.

Here’s a screenshot of the users we’ve setup so far:

Each user can log in and turn their little red switch on so that we’re officially “On Duty.”

When we’re on duty, we get automatic email notifications from CoTweet whenever a customer asks us something. Like this:

I like the fact that it’s in HTML email format (see also: Converting plain-text transactional emails to HTML email), and that it’s also a digest of multiple questions. Getting them one at a time would create a real mess in my inbox.

Which leads to the next problem we had before CoTweet.

When someone posted a question for us, there was no way to tell who was going to answer it, if at all.

Furthermore, some questions are best for Aarron, because he works more closely with the product than the rest of us. Some are better for Jennifer, who manages the customer service team. Some are best for me, because I’ve written some obscure blog article that answers the question years ago, and can point them to the link. But when we were all independently connecting to twitter, there was no way to tell who was going to answer which question. Sometimes, it was a race to be the first to answer. I’d pray that the others weren’t all answering at the same time.

But CoTweet allows us to assign tweets to people:

Check out the side column, where it shows how many tweets have been assigned to me.

Not only will it let us assign tweets to specific team members, it’ll track who ended up answering the question and what they said. Something we couldn’t do when we were all using the master twitter account:

Above, you can see what a slacker I am, and how Lindsay jumped in and beat me to the punch. Thanks, Lindsay!

CoTweet has a neat little feauture called “cotags” that lets you “sign” every tweet you post with a little signature. Since twitter is limited to 140 characters, your cotag should be short. If you visit us on twitter, you can tell who’s talking by looking for the cotags (mine’s ^BC):

Clearing out old tweets

Finally, one really handy feature that I’ve grown to love is how we can archive tweets from our screen. We follow thousands of customers, so everytime they say something to us, it shows up on my twitter timeline. It can get cluttered and overwhelming fast. Cotweet lets me click this little check icon:

and the tweet will be archived. Sort of a way to mark a “ticket” as resolved.

Though I’ve never used this feature (yet) CoTweet also allows you to schedule a tweet for later:

One handy upgrade might be to schedule recurring tweets. For example, we hold a MailChimp webinar every Wednesday at 11am, then 4pm. Right now, it’s up to one of us to log in and announce that. When we do, we’ve found that it’s a helpful reminder for people (judging by the “oh crap, where do I go to watch again?” replies that we get). But we sometimes forget to tweet about it.

Violating Twitter Protocol

I admit there are still times when I’m too lazy to open my browser (that’s pretty bad I know) and log in to CoTweet. Instead, I just click on the tweetdeck icon in my dock and fire off a little tweet.

Sometimes I’ll get a slap on the wrist from Amanda for “violating twitter protocol” (it always makes me laugh when someone at MailChimp says “protocol”). But for some reason, it just feels faster to do it that way.

This won’t be a problem if you’re setting up CoTweet for your support staff, because your staff won’t have access to your master twitter account. Still, CoTweet might want to look into an Adobe Air version of their app as well. Something about it makes it feel more instantaneous. Not just in terms of the app speed, but the ability to see tweets and respond to questions quickly. Tweetdeck has a handy (okay, it’s annoying, but handy if you’re a customer service team) notification window that can play a little audio alert when you get a reply. I can see that being a handy addition to CoTweet.

All in all, we’re really happy with the way CoTweet works, and their support staff is extremely responsive during the private beta phase. If you’re a company that uses twitter, and it’s starting to get a little out of hand, CoTweet can help you manage your brand and manage the customer service experience (ahem, protocol), but still let your staff contribute to your social media efforts in a personal, human way.

Twitter did a much smarter job (imho), by showing restraint and focusing on usefulness. Here’s what I mean…

This is what the old plain-text notification looked like, whenever we got a new follower:

Not all that bad, but if I wanted to know more about this @sugarpixel person, I’d have to click that link, open up a browser, wait for twitter to load, and then read their profile info. After a while, this gets pretty tiresome, so I created a mail filter to just throw all twitter notifications into a folder and mark them as read.

This is the new HTML email version of twitter’s transactional email (click for a full-size version):

This is a huge improvement, because:

• I can see the follower’s avatar, and make a snap (okay, superficial) decision on whether or not I’m interested in seeing their full profile. For example, if they haven’t customized their avatar, and are just using the default twitter icon, I’m not interested. Also, some avatars look spammy (pics of gold, cash, etc), and some look genuine.
• I can see their stats, like followers, updates, and following. As I understand it, some people follow people strictly because they also have lots of followers, so that they can in turn get followers. Or something like that. I don’t have time for games like that, but I do look at the numbers. If someone’s got a ton of followers, maybe they’re interesting, and maybe I’d like to follow them too.
• The design isn’t “heavy.” This doesn’t feel like a ginormous, 200k download. I have no idea what the actual file size this email is, but it doesn’t “feel” gratuitously bloated. That’s very important if you send emails that people potentially receive multiple times every day (like news/fare alerts).
• It’s easy to read and scan. Notice their use of font colors and lots of white space and padding. For example, most text is black, but the numbery stats are lighter gray. Very easy on the eyes.
• Neat that they made the width of the email fluid (instead of fixed size). It’s not necessary, but stuff like this shows extra craftsmanship and design planning not always seen in HTML email.
• They appear to be using Google Analytics to track the traffic from these emails.

More important is what twitter did NOT do, which I’ve seen happen way too often when companies redesign their transactional messages. I’ve seen horrible additions, like:

• 120×600 “skyscraper” banner ads in the side column (”now that it’s HTML email, we can sell ads!”)
• Way-too-large header logos with useless photography
• Fonts and font colors inappropriate for screen reading. For example, HTML emails allow you to use font formatting to distinguish headlines from paragraph text. I’ve seen some companies who make the switch from plain-text to HTML keep using the plain-text tactic of using ALL CAPS for headlines.

If you focus on what your customers want (and how they use your product), HTML emails can make your transactional messages much more useful (and used).

They call it a “cure for writer’s block” but that doesn’t do it justice imho. My problem is the opposite of writer’s block. I can write stuff all day long, but I have no idea if it’s the stuff our customers actually want to hear about. Some customers contact me directly with questions. Our customer svc team gives me topics too.

But Skribit is finally a way for me to see how many other readers are interested in that topic. Suggest a topic for me to write about

So we created this: http://caniuseapurchasedemaillist.com/

If you run an abuse desk somewhere, and you’re tired of answering that stupid question over and over, feel free to link people to it. If you’re not sure why importing a purchased email list into a 3rd party ESP is a bad thing, then promptly turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Thanks.

The keywords, “Great Depression” and “deep recession” got my attention (they appeared in my preview pane), so I scrolled down to read about this report.

The first thing I thought was, “I bet the gray VIEW-A-SAMPLE button got way more clicks than the red BUY-NOW button” Nice idea. Then I wondered what kind of effort they actually put into converting people from “sample-to-trial.”

So I clicked the gray button, read the sample, found the “purchase” link on the sample, and it took me to the shopping cart to purchase. Okay, they put some thought into it. Nice.

Then I went back to the email, and said “What if someone actually just wanted to click the red button to BUY?”

I’m sorry to report that the BUY button failed:

Kept taking me to a “Promo code is not valid” error.

All is not lost. If the link was sent through a redirect script (such as for tracking purposes) their ESP can probably point it to a fixed landing page or something. That’s the beauty of email.

Dear Valued Consumer

Also, I didn’t notice this when I first opened the email, but later, I saw that my FNAME and LNAME were in all caps. Okay, so everybody can merge names into emails now. We all pretty much expect that. But c’mon. Making it ALL CAPS is screaming (literally) that I’m just another dB record to them.

MailChimp customers, if you merge names into your email salutations, please do this:

Dear *|TITLE:FNAME|* *|TITLE:LNAME|*,

to only capitalize the first letter of each name. Here’s a tutorial on how to do that (plus some other cool MailChimp merge tag tricks)

One thing we like to do at MailChimp is buy stuff from our customers. We buy t-shirts, art, candy, coffee, food — anything we can to support our small business users. It also reminds our team of “who we’re serving.” Nah, it’s just cool free stuff for everybody.

Being a car nut, I recently purchased a 1953 Corvette Autoart replica from MailChimp user ZIp-Parts (who we just showcased here).

When I opened up my box, I noticed they packed it with old newspaper. More specifically, the car classifieds section. Nice detail for a car nut. And you bet I actually read what’s for sale in Mechanicsville, VA.

If you sell sporting goods online, why not pack it with your local newspaper sports section? Sports fanatics would probably love reading about your local high school football standings. Sell comics? Use the funnies. Sell collectibles? Use the classifieds.

But when they first came out, it was rocket science. I mean, we’re talking about space age, high tech stuff here. Transistors, aspheric lenses, turquoise opacificier films, and self-powered film modules.

Check out this classic “product demo” of the Polaroid SX-70 (awesome movie for geeks and photography buffs).

They took from 0:55 to 1:28 to explain that basically, “you click a button, and a picture comes out.”

Granted, when this was new, they were talking to “early adopters.” And that’s how you talk when technology is new. It wasn’t a “pack of instant film.” It was an “integral, self-processing film unit, which when exposed…”

But eventually, new technology gets simple, more powerful, and easier to use. You click a button, and it works. Then the whole world can use it. Then, you can make it fun.

Today, most people talk about email marketing like this film talks about the SX-70. It’s complicated, there’s lots of back story, technology, spam laws, best practices, ISPs, and on and on. True.

But at MailChimp, our goal is to make email marketing easy and fun.

We take powerful email marketing stuff like:

• A/B Testing
• Email Tracking & Reporting
• Email Rendering and Spam Checking
• RSS-To-Email

and we make it easy.

You just push a button, and it works.

We’re even working on making email template design an easy, one-click process. Gentlemen, we have the technology…

Neil Schwartzman from ReturnPath asks, “Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?”

“Now, when an invited guest comes into my home, and I suspect yours as well, they must ring the doorbell, be polite on their way in and during their visit, perhaps bring me a bottle of wine or other consideration, and thank me upon departure…Do you act like a honored guest, or a drunken frat-boy who shows up for 

the fifth time this week with a keg at 1 a.m., pounds on the door, breaking in through a window, vomiting on the couch, and finally passing out on the kitchen floor, and refusing to leave when roused?”

That’s the difference between permission email marketing, and “I-have-a-right-to-email-them” marketing.

If you request permission, send a proper welcome email message (with gift), and send relevant, expected emails to your subscribers, you’re an invited guest.

If you tell your sales team, “Okay, we’re blasting out an email campaign tomorrow, so everybody export your Outlook address books and CRMs and send me your batch of prospects asap,” you are that drunken frat boy.

I’ve been wanting to redesign the MailChimp logo since—well, since I first designed it in 2001. I kinda hacked the logo together really fast in Fireworks (which is just not meant for high-res print).  I think it went something like this. Mark, my co-founder, said: “Yo Ben, MailChimp’s live now. Um, I think it could use a logo.” Me: “Oh crap. Here, I’ve already got a monkey file open (don’t ask) so I’ll put a hat on him and send it over.”

Anyway, our beloved mascot has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years, each one slightly less clumsy than the preceding version, but I’ve never been happy with it.

Until now. That’s because this time, we went out and hired an expert.

Jon Hicks, who is probably most famous for his work on the Firefox logo (check out this interview over at Floating Frog), and most recently the SilverBack App logo, has given us an awesome new MailChimp mascot.

We’re currently working on a fresh new MailChimp website where you’ll see lots of the new branding. But for now, I thought I’d provide a sneak-peek.

Follow the link below to see Jon’s final work, and what led us to the new design.

Like I said, I’d been wanting a new MailChimp logo since 2001. I just hated my original design so much. It was a very sloppy rush job, so the way it was constructed in Fireworks was crap. Scaling it and making high-res versions for print never worked. Any time we wanted to create a banner ad or poster (such as to sponsor an event) I had to re-work the stupid source file. It needed a complete overhaul.

But we never had time. So 7 years went by with the current logo.

Actually, he had a slight nose job around 2005. He went from a 2-dot-nostril design:

to a more modern:

I skipped a couple iterations in between there, but the differences are minor and irrelevant. I mainly changed the nose  because whenever I scaled that horrible, horrible Fireworks file, the 2-dot nostrils would often overlap each other, or spread way apart. Also, if I scaled the logo really big, the hat would come apart. You’d literally see a big giant gap between the brim and the gold badge. Like I said, Fireworks is great for web design, but not-so-great for print.

But we limped along with this design for a long time. Then, as our business grew, and our audience spread out from the “Web designers and creative professionals” niche to a more broad “mainstream” audience, we started to get complaints that our chimp was a little “unprofessional.” This was around 2006.

The comments about MailChimp being “unprofessional” did not bug me one bit. However, I consider myself a scientist, so I love experiments. I’ll try anything just to see what it does for our business.

That’s when we had the idea to remove the monkey altogether, and change our website to look more “corporate and stodgy.”

I replaced the MailChimp logo in our header with this:

In fact, while working on the stodgy new design, I kinda went overboard and started to have some fun with it. I even posted a cheap piece of stock art on the home page, with the headline, “Email a constant headache?” (a little humor directed at a certain competitor of ours):

I’ll never forget how difficult it was for our copywriter to grasp the concept of “okay, we’re gonna take away all the chimpy humor and go corporate.” But we got it live.

Turns out after launching that new website design, our business grew faster than it ever had before. We got huge spikes in signups.

Now, a lot of other stuff happened at the same time (like hiring extremely smart and capable people), but we definitely saw an instant surge in new free trials.

I immediately got some hate mail for removing the chimp (my all time fav: When “enterprise” thinking crushes good design), but I also got some praise. Turns out lots of designers and agencies were hesitant about showing MailChimp to their larger clients. After removing the monkey mascot, we apparently looked “less risky” and the could finally switch over their larger accounts.

FWIW, I was never really 100% positive that removing the monkey is what helped. Perhaps it was removing the overall “cartoony” feel of the site that did it. Needed more testing (there’s that “scientist” side of me again).

Whatever the case, since late 2007 we’ve been adding some unbelievably powerful tools and features to the MailChimp product, like A/B splits, RSS-to-email, Google Analytics integration, ROI tracking, list segmentation, an awesome API, and on and on.  We’re having lots of fun innovating and making powerful stuff (that’s easy to use).

And when you’re doing awesome stuff you can be bold with your branding, and have some personality.

So I thought it was time to revisit the logo.

In my mind, I always thought the perfect example of “Fun, simple, and crazy-powerful” is the Nintendo Wii. It’s a clean design, it’s simple, it’s affordable, and it’s all about the fun. It’s not bloated with 50 graphics cards, and it’s not going to render GT5 Prologue in HD (race fans need to check out that link, btw), but the wii is fun as heck. And adults like it, too.

You can say the same for MailChimp. We’re not bloated with a ton of features you’ll never use. We’re easy to use, but we’ve got some serious firepower behind us (which is why companies like these use MailChimp).

The Nintendo website is a perfect representation of that concept. Clean, lots of white space, and a little slice of fun here and there:

It has cartoons, but it’s not “cartoony.”

They’ve got the right idea.

Anyway, I put together this mockup, and hung it in my office:

It’s the perfect example of how I wanted MailChimp to transform from its old 2-D look to a more modern 3 dimensional character.

I also spent countless hours on one of my favorite blogs: Brand New.

I love that site. For some reason, their example of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s re-branding stuck in my mind:

Maybe it was the problem of, “How can we possibly modernize this old white dude from the south who kills chickens for a living?”

Maybe I was just hungry.

Anyway, I’ve got that picture of Mario on my wall.

And I can’t stop doodling MailChimp, in 3/4 view (instead of the flat, 2D view):

(I do all my design on sticky notes.)

So this is where it stayed for a good 6 months.  On my office wall. Everybody that came into my office would say, “So when are we getting that new MailChimp logo?” or “When are we adding some chimpiness back to the site?”

If you look at my notes, you’ll see that one of my designs was inspired by one of Jon Hicks’ original design ideas for the Firefox logo (and my personal favorite):

Then Aarron Walter, our user experience designer, suggested we just contact Jon Hicks himself.

So I emailed Jon.

Turns out Jon is really busy, so we had to wait about 6 months.

6 months pass, Jon is finally available, and I show him the Mario diagram. I also show him my sticky note doodle, and I ask him if he can “do what Nintendo did for Mario, except we want the style and detail from the Firefox logo you did, but modernize the chimp a little so it doesn’t look like we’re trying to stay within the 16-bit websafe color palette or something.”

If that were a mathematical equation, it would look something like this:

Except that pi has nothing to do with anything. I just like chicken pot pie.

So Jon politely tells me, “I don’t see anything wrong with your MailChimp.” Then I give him an explanation twice as long and confusing as this blog post, and then he agrees to take the project.

So Jon works for a few weeks on and off, and sends us cool doodles from his sketchpad, like:

and like:

It was really fun whenever a new email from Jon arrived in my inbox, because it meant another cool monkey doodle.

Finally, Jon sends us the new MailChimp:

We absolutely love it. And we can’t wait to get the chimp back on our website, and also worked into the MailChimp app. Soon. We’re re-designing like crazy right now.

My favorite part of the new logo is the little hair detail inside his ear:

Yeah, I know it’s odd to focus on hairy little details like this, but I’m weird that way.

Anyway, hope you like the new MailChimp logo as much as we do. We’ll be launching a new public website some time in early October-ish, pretty close to the next new MailChimp point release (v3.3).