It’s a really great time to be a web designer. HTML5 and CSS3 – the latest versions of the core technologies behind a majority of web pages – are finding greater support in contemporary browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome to name a few). It’s now so much easier to design elegant interfaces that load faster, and that means a better user experience on web apps like MailChimp. (more…)
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Archive for the ‘MailChimp Labs’ Category
Refining the MailChimp Interface with CSS3
Monday, February 15th, 2010Delivery Doctor takes the mystery out of spam filters
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Our inbox inspector will tell you if your email will get blocked by spam filters.
But diagnosing the exact reason your email was blocked can be extremely difficult.
The only way to really figure out why your message was blocked is to systematically test each variable: change your subject line, and send another test email. Go check all your test accounts. Did it get blocked again? Well, change this link. Still blocked? Change another link. Wasn’t your links? Swap out the images. Not it? Change your content. Over and over, till you find the culprit. Then, do all that again for the next spam filter. Complete p.i.t.a.
So we automated all that with our new Delivery Doctor tool. Push one button, and we’ll automagically slice and dice and analyze your email and run dozens of tests until we find the root of your block.
Then, we tell you what to fix…
Geolocation in MailChimp
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
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…
Project Omnivore: Declassified
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.
The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.
This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…
Subject Line Suggester from MailChimp
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
The nerds in MailChimp Labs just unveiled a new experiment called the Subject Line Suggester. It’s kind of like Google’s Keyword Tool, but for email marketing. It’s a free feature for all MailChimp users.
You basically enter some words or phrases that you were planning to use in your subject line, then MailChimp will compare it to all subject lines ever used in our system, their resulting open rates, and then tell you how they performed.
For example, let’s say you want to send a holiday campaign, with the subject line “Holiday Gift Ideas:”
When you create a campaign, look for this link!
Hmm, maybe you’d like MailChimp to suggest other words or phrases…
Using Google Forms to Create a Custom Signup Form
Friday, July 31st, 2009In MailChimp v4.2, we’ve added a number of list import options, including Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google Forms. Google Forms is a powerful and free tool that you can use to quickly and easily create a custom signup form that links directly to your MailChimp account.
To begin, you’ll want to head over to Google Docs and login using your Google account information. Then, under the New Document menu, select Form. Go ahead and give your form a name and then include some information as to what the signup form is for or about.
From there, you’ll begin adding fields. By default, the blank form starts out with two “Sample Questions” for you to modify. For this example, we just added a separate field for First Name, Last Name and Email Address, and went ahead and made them all required fields. It’s also important to ensure that you select “Text” for the Question Type.
Filters Allow You to Limit Google Analytics Data to a Subdirectory
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
If your site came before your blog, you probably installed WordPress into a subdirectory like we did at http://www.MailChimp.com/blog.
When you log into WordPress and look at the dashboard for your awesomely new WordPress Analytics Plugin, you’re probably wondering how you can limit the data to only your blog traffic.
Here’s how we did it at MailChimp…
Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009We’ve been busy. In addition to all the new MailChimp v4.2 features we just launched, we’ve also been working with the folks at Crowdfavorite to build an awesome new (and totally free!) Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress.
In a nutshell, it uses the power of Google Analytics to tell bloggers what kind of an effect they’re having on overall website traffic. We’ve made it super easy to tell if your blog posts (and email campaigns) are driving traffic to your website — it’s all embedded right in your Wordpress Dashboard!
MailChimp v4.2 Sneak Peek
Friday, July 3rd, 2009Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new features we’ll be launching in mid-July with MailChimp v4.2:
Re-brandable Campaign Reports – Ever need to give someone access to an email campaign’s stats, but you don’t want to give them full access to your MailChimp account? Setup a re-brandable reports page w/your own company logo and color scheme, then send it to them.
Keychain Account Management – Do you manage tons of MailChimp accounts? You’ll be able to setup a “master keychain” account, with “keys” that let you quickly log in to each account w/out digging through all your sticky notes for those pesky passwords.
Twitter Tracking for EepURL – We launched our twitter integration a little while back with our own little URL shortener. The first thing people asked for was a way to track tweets and re-tweets about their campaigns in MailChimp. Done!
Subscriber Activity History – If you’ve got our optional AIM Reports module installed, you’ll be able to drill down to individual subscribers and see every campaign they’ve opened or clicked.
“Hide-this” Merge Tag – We’re introducing a merge tag that you can place around content that you want to hide on your public campaign archives. For example, unsubscribe links, the recipient’s contact or username info, salutations, your CAN-SPAM required address, telephone, etc.
Automagic Table of Contents – If you write really long newsletters (such as through the RSS-to-email campaigns), you can insert a merge tag where we’ll automatically find all your content titles, then build a linked table of contents at the top of your message. No more pesky anchor tag coding!
101 Free HTML Email Templates – We’ll be offering some desktop software with a boatload of free HTML email templates that you can use w/MailChimp. We already have a great template designer, but this is for people who want even more (pre-built) variety. Stay tuned for details!
Easier List Setup – We’ve redesigned the entire list setup process to make it easier and faster. Instead of a 5-step wizard, think more “1-page-done.”
Deeper CRM integration – In response to user requests, we’ve beefed up our integrations with Salesforce and Highrise, so that we pass more data back to those CRMs from MailChimp. For example, you’ll be able to see campaign history and stats in Salesforce for each recipient.
Custom redirect URLs for signup forms – Some of you would rather design and host your own opt-in landing pages rather than customize the MailChimp ones. So we added the ability for you to enter your own custom URL that we’ll redirect people to after signup.
Ecommerce360 Data added to B.A.R.F. – We’ve added some data from Ecommerce360 into B.A.R.F. reports, so retailers can more easily compare results between campaigns.
And that’s not all. We’ve got a few more amazing features we’ll be announcing (some of them in MailChimp Labs) on top of all this. Stay tuned for launch around mid-July!
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!
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