Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!

“After being asked to design some iPhone® applications, I started to search around for design tips and information. There were PSD files, stencils and other paper prototyping tools available, but I’ve always sketched my ideas first. After printing out wireframe templates on sheets of paper (and ultimately losing my sketches), I decided to design my own sketchbook.”

Turns out Steve’s also using MailChimp, along with our Paypal integration, autoresponder tool, and social networking in a pretty unique way…

MailChimp’s PayPal integration

First, Steve linked his PayPal account to a MailChimp list (here’s how to do that), so that anybody who purchased a book from him was added to the list.

Does buying a product from you mean that people automatically want email marketing from you? Not necessarily. But check out how Steve is using the list…

Request Feedback

For a while, Steve didn’t send any messages to this list at all (he was too busy packing and shipping sketchbooks!) The email addresses were just collecting in his list. Finally, he had some time to put an email campaign together. No, it wasn’t a sales offer to buy more sketchbooks.

It was a request for feedback. He genuinely wanted to know how customers liked his product.

Here’s what the email looked like:

And here’s what I thought was really smart about his design:

1. Archive Toolbar: Steve gets orders from all around the world. So he’s turned on MailChimp’s free archive toolbar, which provides instant translation options (using Google Translate). The archive toolbar also lets viewers get to previous newsletter issues, or to share it with others.
2. Permission Reminder: Since it took Steve a while to send this first email out, the first thing he wrote at the top of his message was a quick permission reminder. People forget stuff. You need to remind them (and the other secret people that are reading your emails) how you got their email address.
3. Feedback Link: Steve doesn’t try to sell you stuff. Not on his very first email communication to you, at least. Instead, Steve asks if you have any feedback. What’s beautiful about this is that he’s using a free Wufoo form (see also: MailChimp integration with Wufoo).
4. Social Sharing: Yeah, we all know social sharing links are the next big thing in email (MailChimp has got more social integration options than just about anybody out there), but I rarely ever see any links to flickr.  Steve’s actually asking customers to post pictures of themselves using his product. Brilliant idea! Wishing we used this during our big tshirt giveaway.
5. Friendly closing. Sometimes the hardest part of a newsletter to write is the ending. Nice touch how Steve thanks his customers for their support. BTW, check out this handy list of letter endings.

Great Stats, Feedback, and More Followers

According to Steve, he got tremendous amounts of feedback and suggestions for improvements (which he’s working into future editions), and his twitter followers doubled after this campaign.

On top of that, his email campaign stats were phenomenal (74% open rate, 13.3% click rate):

Automation

Hmm, since the followup email worked so great, why not just automate all this? MailChimp’s autoresponders are perfect for this.

Steve turned his manual followup email into an autoresponder campaign that goes out 2 weeks after every new purchase:

The Cost of all this Awesomeness?

It was all free. For now, App Sketchbook is just a one man operation (well, his daughters help pack envelopes sometimes), so everything he’s using is free. Paypal, Wufoo, Twitter, Facebook, and flickr are all free. And thanks to MailChimp’s Forever Free plan, even his email campaigns are free, at least until his list goes over 500 subscribers (which he’s fast approaching).

Maybe we’ll cut you some kind of employee discount, Steve.

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’ve always been an advocate of small prizes and giveaways in newsletters, but sometimes picking a winner and notifying them separately can become a real chore. This is a pretty big timesaver. Nice!

For a full list of merge tags you can use, check out our merge tag cheatsheet.

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).

Ben: I doodled ninjas and monkeys all through middle school (ahem, okay I still doodle monkeys), and I think the dream for a lot of people is to some day see their characters come to life on TV, movies, or in video games.  How’d you do it? How’d you get your work “found?”

Shawn: I’m as surprised as anyone honestly. I was a game reviewer and hardware editor for EGM in my former life, so I have a lot of friends in the industry.

Long story much, much shorter: Been drawing and designing and making my whole life, and after developing the idea and characters of Ninjatown I got hooked up with a friend of a friend who is Jeremy Pope who came up with the genre for the game and the rest is history. SouthPeak, the games publisher, green lit it, and we got to work.

Ben: Just curious. You use MailChimp for a lot of product announcements, general news, and these fun little Chronicles of Professor Fliggins discoveries. What kind of stats or metrics do you use to measure success?

Shawn:  Certainly ‘Opens’ help us measure, but click rate is the biggest thing for us at the moment since we can only show so much in a newsletter. Ultimately we want our customers to buy our products, but in order for them to become true fans, they need to get into our worlds, read the stories and enjoy the characters and illustrations. By making educated decisions on where to send them, we can then measure how long they stay there reading, or, if not, where they navigate to instead or bounce to. After that we can analyze that click rate data and match it up where our orders are coming from [Ben - see MailChimp's ROI tracking feature]. Interesting results sometimes emerge, or confirm our suspicions.

Observations from Ben:

The Chronicles of Professor Fliggins is a fascinating idea. It’s a fictitious blog written by a professor who documents all the strange creatures he discovers on a mysterious island. The creatures that he catalogs are plushies that you can buy online. You can follow the blog or subscribe to email announcements to hear when a new discovery has been made. It’s a fun, creative way to say, “Ok, I just made a new plushie. Go buy one now, please.”

The blog is a gold mine for doodlers and illustrators. Check out the tools the professor uses, like this Expandable Monocular Discoverator:

and this Gingerfizz Kerchief Dirigible:

Brings back memories of drafting exploded diagrams back in my Industrial Design classes (T-squares and lead pointers anyone?).

And you gotta love how the antique-serif’d “close X” link on the bottom of his modal windows matches the old-timey blueprint look:

Even the “loading” animation is an old fashioned clock:

On the Shawnimals.com homepage, there’s a cute little character waving visitors toward the subscribe form:

You’ll also notice he includes a link pointing to his MailChimp UN-subscribe form. That’s something not a lot of people know even exists in MailChimp (you’ll find it in your list form design process).

Shawn uses MailChimp’s interest groups functionality on his signup forms to learn where his subscribers are hearing about him:

Using the interest groups and MailChimp’s list segmentation, you can send targeted emails to subscribers based on how they found you.

Overall, lots of great ideas for other artists out there for using email marketing to stay  in touch with their fans. I’d love to see Shawnimals automate his email updates by switching over to MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool, so that as Professor Fliggins blogs about new creatures, the subscriber list gets automatically notified.

If you’re into illustration (and monsters) be sure to also check out MailChimp user Steamcrow.

From there, Brian began building for a local gallery and designing custom portraits for families and businesses. In 2006, Brickworkz LLC was formed. Brian spent the next two years taking the show on the road to various LEGO-related events, capturing his completed works online. By 2007, online visitors from countries like Israel, Hong Kong, Ireland, Canada and England were requesting Brickworkz art.

In late 2007, Brian received a call from a collector in Ohio who commissioned him to design the World’s Largest LEGO Image, breaking the Guinness World Record.  After months of planning and building, they achieved their goal: a full-scale 18-wheel tractor trailer spanning more than 44 feet and made with over 1.2 million LEGO bricks.

Today, Brian uses Brickworkz not just as a creative outlet, but as a way to reach the community and share his story (and artwork) with children in schools, teaching children about the importance of creativity. LEGO mosaics by Brickworkz can be seen in the offices of Fortune 500 companies as well as private residences in the U.S. and abroad.

Why MailChimp?

“My list started growing beyond what was appropriate (or possible) to BCC, and I wanted an easy way for visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe. I was wasting a lot of time managing my email list, and wanted something easy, yet full of options. MailChimp had everything right from the start, so it was easy for me to build what I wanted and get what I wanted quickly.”

Sign up for Brickworkz’ News From the Studio or view past issues from the archive.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for some new ugly shoes at Zappos, and came across these babies (click the screenshot to the right). Not quite ugly enough for me, but close.

So yes, I’d love to be notified when they offer other shoes from that particular brand. Maybe their next lineup will be uglier. Therefore the little email signup box at the bottom is very useful to me, because c’mon—I’m not going to browse Zappos every day looking for shoes.

Many e-commerce shopping carts (like Magento) now come with built-in RSS feeds for inventory alerts. But who uses RSS? You’ll want a way to convert that RSS feed into email.

MailChimp users can do this easily with our RSS-to-email tool. I wouldn’t do it per-SKU. Perhaps a separate email list per brand or product category. Maybe pick only your most popular brands, at that. When people subscribe to that list, they’ll automatically receive an alert whenever the RSS feed is updated.

You can do that with MailChimp’s Autoresponders.

Just build your signup form with a date field like this:

Then, build a series of autoresponders that build up to that due date like this:

Notice that in my signup form, there was a checkbox for “send me free planning tips.”

So when you build the actual autoresponder email, you can target only subscribers who asked for the free tips:

You can actually do this for any big future event, like baby due date, “when you plan to purchase” dates, and even annually recurring dates like birthdays and anniversaries.

If you publish news every single day like they do, you probably don’t have time to sit down and write daily email newsletters. Which is why Secrets uses MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool to automatically take content that they publish to their website, and turn it into daily emails:

Each section of their site has an RSS feed. So they’ve setup separate lists in MailChimp so that readers can subscribe to the section they like:

• Secrets of the day
• MNSpeak
• Weekly events and discounts

Some go out daily, some go out weekly:

The part we love about all this is that they can set all this up once, and then they never have to log in to MailChimp again.

That’s why we created our RSS-to-email tool in the first place.

Their different authors can log in to their own publishing system with their own levels of permissions and workflow setup there. All they have to worry about is writing great content, and hitting their publish button.

Behind the scenes, MailChimp takes care of delivery and tracking.

And unlike other RSS-to-email tools, MailChimp lets you totally customize your email templates (here’s an advanced tutorial).

And if you sell advertising in your email, we give you amazing reports that measure your ROI, geomaps to show you where people are opening from, and clickmap overlays to show you exactly what people clicked on.

What about all those mobile users out there? MailChimp has amazing mobile support. We’ll automagically generate mobile versions of all your campaigns, so that again—your authors can just focus on content.

Before turning the autopilot button on though, you can test your emails in our inbox inspector, and run automatic A/B split tests.

Kudos to the smart folks at Secrets of the City for also using Twitter and other social media in their mix:

because it’s a great way to get closer to your followers–um–readers, as this touching story from Jon Swanson, another MailChimp user, demonstrates.

See also:

Newspaper as a platform: Guardian Launches API

Import by URL – another way to automate publishing in MailChimp

MailChimp API – seamless integration between MailChimp and your internal publishing system and database

MailChimp’s blog plugins

Youcalc, the same folks who make plugins and widgets for Basecamp, Salesforce, Highrise, and other CRMs, has created a stats mashup widget for MailChimp.