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:”

Hmm, maybe you’d like MailChimp to suggest other words or phrases…

Click the “research” link:

and on the next screen, enter some of your words:

Notice I didn’t enter the exact phrase. I only entered “holiday gift” to keep it a little broad. Hit “search” and wait.

MailChimp will then tell you how those words have performed in the past. As you can see from the screenshot, you might want to check out “Holiday Gift Guide” instead, because it performed better. Or, maybe you should consider using our patent-pending A/B testing tool to experiment with both subject lines.

Notice we don’t give you exact numbers on open rates. We give you nice, pretty little stars. We’re not going to open a can of worms by promising that the word “Free” will give you +40% open rates. The idea here is to simply give you more — well, ideas.

Now keep in mind, this is only our first stab at predictive reporting. It took months to generate this data, using our in-house supercomputer, some genetic pairing science, and Amazon EC2. Actually, we were doing something else entirely with our experiment, but this happened to be a cool byproduct, so we added it to our app.

Point is, we’re far from complete, and it’s far from perfect, but this’ll get better as more people use it and send us feedback.

Be sure to check out some of our other experiments over in MailChimp Labs

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.

Once you have your fields created and organized the way you want them, you can work on changing the visual design of the signup form. Google Forms is pretty limited in this aspect, but they currently provide 69 different stock themes for you to choose from.

Since we’re creating a signup form for our burgeoning Picnic Club, we went with the “Picnic” theme. To see how this will look once it’s published, just click on the link at the very bottom of the Form Edit page. This will open a preview of your published form in either a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your browser set up.

The second part of this tutorial is setting up MailChimp to import your signup form into a new list. First, login to your MailChimp account and click the Account link at the top left. This will take you to your account settings, and you want to click on Integrations.

Click on the first option: Google Analytics, Contacts, Docs and select Authorize Connection. This will take you away from your MailChimp account and over to Google (very briefly), and you will need to click Grant Access.

Once you click Grant Access, you’ll be taken back to your MailChimp Integrations page. You’ll see a green dot for your Connection Status, but may see a yellow dot representing Data Status. This is fine for now.

The next step is to head over to your Lists, and you want to click the huge orange button to Create a New List.

On the first page, you’ll need to go ahead and set up all the basic information, such as Sender Name and Permission Reminder. Next, select the Import My List option, and then select the source that you want to import from. In this case, Google Docs.

A dialog box will appear, telling you that MailChimp can connect to your Google Docs account. Just select the appropriate Form from the pull-down menu, and proceed with list import.

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…

First you’ll need to log in to Google Analytics and find your site in the “Website Profiles” list.

1. Adding a New Profile

Then, click +Add New Profile next to the web site that has your blog attached to it.

Add a New Profile to Google Analytics Account

You’ll arrive at the Create New Website Profile page. Make sure you select Add a Profile for an existing domain. Then check to make sure your main web site is selected in the “Select Domain” box.

Create a New Profile

Give your new profile a meaningful name. How about “Name of Your Site Blog”? Click “Continue” to save the profile and let’s see how the magic filtering happens.

2. Create a Filter for Your New Blog Profile

Now that your new blog profile is created it’s recording the same exact data as your web site. Don’t worry! We can filter the current data to only include your blog (aka “The Magic”).

Find and click the Edit link for the new profile you created.

This page contains all of the settings for your new profile, but we’re only interested in one area: Filters. Look for the Filters Applied to Profile section and click +Add Filter.

Profile Settings Page

Make sure Add New Filter for Profile is selected and give the filter a descriptive name, like “Blog Traffic.”

The filter type you want to select is labeled “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”  and you’ll want to use Google’s example as a baseline for finding the subdirectory. Something like “^/blog” where “blog” is the name of your main WordPress directory.

Your new profile has been added.

Save your changes and head over to your WordPress Admin.

3. Use Your New Profile in Analytics360 for WordPress

After you log in to WordPress, look under the Settings menu for Analytics360 and click over to your Analytics360 settings.

Under Step 2, you’ll want to select your new profile from the “From now on track:” select box. Click “This One!” to activate your new blog profile for Analytics360.

Your Analytics360 Settings in Wordpress

What gives? There’s No Data?

It’s going to take about 3+ hours for some data to start rolling in, like when you setup Google Analytics for the very first time. It’s actually best to give it a full 24 hours, so you’ll at least get a full day’s data in your Analytics360 Dashboard.

Be patient! All is well in the world of WordPress Analytics now.

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!

You don’t have to be a MailChimp customer to use or benefit from this plugin. But if you do happen to have a MailChimp account, we’ll mash in your MailChimp campaign stats too, giving you a bird’s eye view of the cause and effect of all your hard work.

It’s so cool that words don’t do it any justice. You need to watch this video, then download the free plugin now:

UPDATE (07/21/09): Check out this little tip on segmenting your GA blog traffic reports from our own Stephen Martin

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!

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!

Snap a picture of something colorful:

Email it to colors [at] mailchimp.com, and then wait for a reply:

We’ll email you the hex colors, suggested color themes from Kuler and COLOURlovers, and we’ll attach an Adobe color palette file.

If you’re curious, here’s the backstory…

I saw a really cool billboard the other day, and snapped a picture of it on my iPhone:

Is that She Hulk? I dunno.

But I liked the colors, and I wanted to save it for future inspiration. Then I thought, “it’d be cool if I could send this picture to MailChimp, and the monkey could tell me the hex-values for all the colors in the pic.” I mentioned it to Chad, our lead engineer, and he worked with Aarron (UX Lead) and James (Web Designer) to build Pictaculous.

What I love about it most is how we’re using what we learned from this previous experiment with Mechanical Turk, and this experiment with the Automagic Email Designer. I also love the fact that we were showing it to Josh, our video dude, and before we finished our little demo, he said, “Oh yeah and it sends you some kind of Adobe color palette as an attachment?” Chad just looked at him and said, “Good idea. I can do that.” See, I was once a lowly Industrial Design intern at a major appliance company, and one day their “skunkworks” engineers stopped by the design studio and showed us some prototypes. Being an extremely stupid kid who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, I spoke out of turn and guessed out loud what that gizmo did. I was totally wrong. Not just wrong, but bass-ackwards. The other designers looked at me like my stupidity was contagious or something, but the engineers just looked at each other, and said, “that’s not a bad idea, let’s go try that!” and literally ran out of the room. I thought to myself, “I need to switch departments.”

They never did like my idea of an always-on, melted Velveeta cheese dispenser for their refrigerators though.

Anyhoooooo…

There are many tools out there that will analyze the colors of an uploaded picture, but the beautiful thing about Pictaculous is you can snap pictures from your mobile device, then get your results within minutes. All while you’re on the go. Think about it. When are you always inspired? When you’re out hiking, shopping, at the bookstore, on vacation, etc.

Finally, it’s slightly buggy. That’s why it’s a Labs experiment. We’re experimenting with technology that we’d never trust inside the MailChimp application (yet), like Flash-based file uploaders and such. So we know there are Linux and IE issues here and there. But for the most part, people have been sending us great feedback.

Try Pictaculous!

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

Basically, we came up with over 700,000 HTML email template options, and we’re narrowing it down using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Here’s how…

As you know, MailChimp has never offered “pre-built” HTML email templates.

Our philosophy has always been to give you nice, modular layouts, plus powerful design tools like our automagic email designer, header designer, and magic color picker to help you build your own beautiful template. Think “photoshop for email” instead of, “microsoft word stationery.”

But our customers have been asking us for more choices. They don’t necessarily want fully pre-built templates. They just want more choices that can help them get started, which they can then customize (instead of starting from scratch). Good point. But we didn’t want to just hire someone to sit here and “come up with a bunch of craptacular templates that can be re-purposed.” We needed something more scalable and automatic.

We have over 100 beautiful header graphics for different occasions (here’s an example for St.Patricks Day). We took each one of them and ran them through a color analyzer (which we developed in the MailChimp Lab) so that we could automatically generate color palettes for your template that compliment each header graphic.

It’s what I was talking about in this post: Color Experiments in the MailChimp Lab.

The initial results were pretty good:

By the way, this technology will also be live in MailChimp v4.1. Basically, whenever you upload your logo into a MailChimp template, we’ll analyze the colors and suggest a few color combinations for the rest of your template.

Anyway, for each header graphic, we found out we could generate roughly 400 color palette possibilities (or “themes”).

We narrowed that down with certain rules, like “Bright #FF0000 red should not be used for titles” and “default body text shouldn’t be bright blue,” and “don’t let the colors for backgrounds and fonts be within x% similarity, or there won’t be enough contrast.”

That narrowed things down to about 200 possible themes per header graphic.

So we went from roughly 700,000 options to around 25,960.

Then we started to apply them to actual email templates. And we were kinda shocked how good they looked, considering they were automatically generated. Here’s a batch:

Here’s another batch:

And here’s a batch that didn’t turn out so good (IMHO):

The results were better than we expected, but we still didn’t want to post them all and overwhelm our users with too many choices.

For the record, I actually did want to overwhelm our users with too many choices (just so that I could write a blog article with a ridiculous template count in my title).

Luckily, our product team is smarter and nicer than me, and wanted to narrow things down a little more intelligently so that we’d have a more usable interface. Party poopers.

They wanted some kind of human review. Sure, we learned a lot about programmatic design harmony in all our lab experiments, but color and design is so subjective.

But how could we possibly review so many email themes?

How to review 25,960 designs in 19 hours

So our engineers turned to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is a “global, on-demand, 24×7 workforce.” It’s composed of “Turkers” who complete micro tasks really, really fast.

They’ve got an API that allowed us to basically post all our design combinations, and ask their users to judge them. Users get paid (think pennies, not dollars) for each time they complete a task.

A typical screen looks something like this:

Turkers would each scroll through 3 options, and tell us which they think is best. For each task they completed, we pay 2 cents. We can choose not to pay a Turker if we think he’s cheating or gaming the system, which apparently can be an issue.

Reviewing Turk Work

Because of the possibility of cheating, there’s actually a review process where we have to analyze all the results we got back from Turkers, and decide, “this guy gets 2 cents, this guy doesn’t, etc.”

The only issue we faced here was sifting through all the results. We ran just shy of 100,000 tasks through the system, so we got back a HUGE .csv file that showed us how much time each Turker spent on each task, and all kinds of other useful data. FYI, running this large job actually prompted a call from Amazon, where a very, very nice person kindly asked us to please talk to them before running something that big again. Heh. Now we know why. There’s so much data, we’d need a bunch of Turkers to review the Turkers!

Anyway, we’re not inclined to be “strict” and deny anyone a couple pennies for their work. Something about that feels dirty and mean.

So all we did was look for heuristics in the data to tell if someone is cheating. For example, if they review a dozen themes in just a few seconds, and they happened to vote for “Theme #1″ every single time, they’re probably cheating. Or, if we can discern a repeatable pattern, like voting for “1,2,3″ over and over again.

Otherwise, this is completely subjective work, so we’re not going to be harsh.

It’s just that sifting through this data to run these scripts kept crashing our engineer’s desktop computer. It would run for 15 minutes, then just crash. That’s when we remembered the good old Nvidia Tesla supercomputer that we bought a while back (we talked about it in this newsletter), precisely for crunching massive amounts of data (for a certain “Project Omnivore” which we may or may not deny the existence of).

The supercomputer ran it in under 1 minute. Ha.

The results

In total, we found 27 turkers who fit the profile of “possibly gaming the system” and we unfortunately had to reject their 8700 tasks. On the bright side, we approved the 85,000 tasks that the other 503 workers performed.

We’re going to run the remaining templates that were deemed “prettiest” through a “March Madness” style bracket, and we think we’ll end up with around 600 beautiful templates.

Give or take a few hundred bajillion.

If things go well, we might be using some of this technology in MailChimp v4.1, which is launching late this month. I’m sworn to secrecy, so I can neither confirm nor deny that this technology may or may not be used to help you make more beautiful email campaigns. If the experiment doesn’t go so well? Meh. We’ll post it in the MailChimp Lab and use it for something later. Science is dirty business, but someone’s gotta do it!