and he was tweeting at @chrisbrogan and other ESPs (@emmaemail) too, so it seemed like he was trying to be mysterious and get attention or something. Also, “bear in a bar” is obviously a joke-intro, and competitors have been known to make jokes about our mascot (I believe we’ve been called “Mail-Wookie” once), so I decided to take the bait.

I am so glad I did…

I’m not sure if this was a ConstantContact sanctioned “viral” campaign (in which case: mission accomplished), some internal morale-booster, or just a really, really inspired employee.

The trail really isn’t all that difficult to trace, which means they didn’t try hard to hide anything, so it’s hard to say. Either way, it’s great to see another ESP out there having some fun.

Oh, back to the bear.

Follow the path to the pot o’ gold at the end, my friends…

The sad thing about all this?

In that video at the end, Gail is obviously goofing around, but in this video, I’m actually trying.

Then it hit me.

Today is MailChimp’s birthday! (thanks for the reminder, JR). Little Freddie von Chimpenheimer IV is now 8 years old. And if my math is correct, that makes him about 83 in chimpanzee years.

It’s hard for me to believe this, but we launched MailChimp back on August 20th, 2001. The only goal we had back then was to make email marketing less of a hassle. In the old days, you had to hand code all your HTML, tracking links, program your own list management scripts, unsub scripts, etc. You know, stuff a monkey should be doing. You’ve got a business to run. In terms of revenue goals, we just hoped that some day MailChimp would be able to pay for our lunches. “Naaah, that’ll never happen” we thought.

Things have changed over the last 8 years, not just for MailChimp, but for our entire industry. Also, our goals have since grown slightly more ambitious.

Now, MailChimp’s running strong with over 80,000 users all over the globe. On behalf of the entire MailChimp team, I’d like to thank our customers for your business all these years!

Normally, I’m not all that impressed by welcome/thank-you/receipt emails, but this one was a pleasant surprise. Here’s why it was so nice.

1. The price of this monster computer was about the same as a small car.
2. As such, something a little bit more sophisticated than an itemized, plain-text email receipt is a nice touch.
3. The email is actually useful, because it has links to tutorials, resources, help, and training. Not just the expected “here are links to buy even more stuff, please.”

Subject line

Their subject line was well done, too.

“Thanks for purchasing your Mac Pro. Now let’s get started.”

It has all the important elements of a great subject line:

• Blink-of-an-eye reminder of who’s sending it – “Mac Pro = Apple”
• Reminder of how I got on this list – “Thanks for purchasing your…”
• A subtle sense of urgency, plus a hint that there’s something useful inside – “Now let’s get started.”

Email design

The design of the email is as beautiful and thoughtful as expected.

The product photo is the centerpiece (and what a centerpiece it is), and it’s surrounded by helpful looking humans, not just add-on products & services.

And instead of opening the email to a long list of text tips, I get these fun action shots (that have action shots inside them!):

If you look at the full email, notice the soft blue used in the hyperlink is also used in the guy’s t-shirt, the surfing thumbnail, and all the video “play” icons.

And it wouldn’t be Apple without plenty of white spacey gutters.

Since I’m in the email biz, I’m fascinated by really boring stuff like disclaimers in footer text.I figure maybe I’ll learn something. Just in case you could learn something too, here’s what Apple felt the need to say in their footer:

Notice the very bottom text says “this is a transactional email.” You can’t really unsubscribe from transactional emails. But they still included a link to unsubscribe from other “marketing” emails. It’s a very nice touch that gives recipients a feeling that they’re still in some sort of control. If you want a similar option in your MailChimp campaigns, you can use our UPDATE_PROFILE merge tag.

If you sell big-ticket items on your website, consider using MailChimp’s Autoresponder tool to send a sequence of helpful followup emails to your own customers.

You might also make your list’s Welcome Emails more customized, like this.

And check out this video tutorial to see how you can customize your MailChimp templates to look like Apple’s:

We also took things a step further by integrating with iStockphoto, giving you access to over 4.6 million high-quality stock photos for as low as $1 each. We’re still in testing, but here’s a sneak-peek at our “premium image search” screen:

Helping your emails look awesomer.

We use iStockphoto all the time for our own email newsletters (and this blog), because they have strict quality standards, huuuge variety, and their search tool is awesome.

For example, you can even refine searches by color, to match your brand:

How payment works

You’ll basically be able to purchase “image credits” in MailChimp. Kinda like email credits. Buy $5 in image credits, and you can get 5 images from iStockphoto for $1 each. Alternatively, you can buy a larger, higher-resolution image for $3, but I’m not sure you’ll be needing that for email. It’s there just in case, though. You can store it in your image gallery and pull it out for some other project.

We’re super excited about this new integration. We’ll post more about it (along with a few other improvements) as we get closer to launch.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

Turns out I passed all the major spam filters!

My Spam Assassin score wasn’t great (anything over a 5 is DOA but I like to stay well below 3). But that seems to be because of other problems.

In terms of the extremely disgusting alt-text descriptions I used, they don’t seem to have triggered anything at all:

Got any questions you want the MailChimp team to answer here on the blog? Submit them here.

Learn more about MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector:

We’ll clean unsubscribes and bounces on MailChimp, and we’ll give you awesome reports to track your performance.

Freshbooks takes care of your billing, and MailChimp takes care of email marketing. Throw in a little Batchbook CRM, and you’ve got some kind of crazy-powerful “small business web” or something.

Here’s how it works…

Whenever you create a list in MailChimp, the final step asks you where you want to import your list from.

Select the Freshbooks option.

Next, MailChimp will ask you to give us your Freshbooks account API key. Here’s where you can find that in Freshbooks:

Once you plug that key into MailChimp, we’ll import your customer list. Now you’re ready to send email newsletters to all your customers!

We told you it was painless.

Some sketches of more monkey-related monsters to come:

How it all got started

We just asked Chris to swing by, take a look at our “Jon Hicks logo,” and then pretty much gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. Our only request was that in some way, the monsters be monkey related. Oh, and we want at least one upside down monkey hanging from a ceiling somewhere. He went away for a while, then showed up with some paint and got started.

He’s really, really fast.

A close-up of “Chimpzilla:”

a sketch of what the finished project will look like:

We’re super excited about the other monsters he’s got in the works. We hear there will be some 3-D props coming soon too.

If you like Chris’ style, be sure to check him out on Myspace/urbnpop.

If you’re from the Atlanta area, or if you’ve ever driven through the city, you’ll love some of his work on Etsy (particularly the “Big Chicken“).

Here’s a cool video of Chris in action:

We’ll post more of Chris’ sketches over in the MailChimp Jungle photo album.

Rawr!

They use MailChimp’s API and our powerful dynamic merge tags to send these highly customized “transactional” emails.

Here’s what one of their email alerts looks like:

Now let’s take a look at how they use MailChimp’s dynamic merge tags to get this done…

The challenging thing about these transactional emails is that each recipient might have up to 5 different “city pair” alerts setup. Here’s an example where I have three alerts for three city pairs:

I specified three cities I travel to often (in my fantasy land, where I actually have time to travel). Sydney, Portland, and Boston.

I’ve set them up to send me an email alert whenever airfare to any of these cities changes by 20%:

So you might think, “easy enough. just setup the mailchimp database so that each recipient has merge fields, like fname, lname, origcity1, destcity1, price1, origcity2, destcity2, price2, and so on and so forth.”

Problem is, if one of the city pairs got updated pricing (let’s say ATL-BOS airfare dropped 25%) but the other city pairs didn’t change, the email would need to ONLY list the ATL-BOS information, and NOT the other two city pairs. Basically, you want some conditional statements that say, “If an update for a city pair exists, include it. Otherwise, leave it blank.”

Dynamic content merge tags

Here’s how they do it.

This is what their email looks like in the MailChimp campaign builder:

You’ll notice 5 different “blocks” of content, where a possible city-pair alert would appear.

They’ve coded each of those blocks with our dynamic merge tags like this:

There’s a lot of formatting code in there, so let’s distill it down to the important merge tags:

So for each block, they say IF there is a price update, then insert it along with its price and savings amount.

If there are no updates, the other blocks will not show up.

This conditional logic is exactly what our dynamic merge tags are for. You can also use conditional merge tags in your A/B test campaigns to swap out and A/B test your email’s content and designs (here’s a tutorial on how to do that).

For a complete list of MailChimp merge tags (and what they all do), see our merge tag cheatsheet.

Refresh Database via API

But remember how they send these updates 3 times a day?

That means they have to wipe everything in MailChimp clean 3 times a day, then re-populate the list with new data for each member.

If you’ve ever created a list in MailChimp, you know that’s no easy task.

Unless you’re using the MailChimp API to sync your member info.

3 times a day, Farecompare connects to MailChimp and performs a member update to refresh all their fields and replace them with the most up-to-the-minute airfares.

Turn off click tracking and use Google Analytics

There’s one important thing to note here. This is a really, really smart hack of MailChimp. Since it’s a hack, there are some compromises. For one, click tracking is not going to be very useful to you if you’re constantly wiping out your database through the API and then replacing all your recipient merge fields. There are more hacks to get around that issue, but we strongly recommend you simply turn off all click tracking, and use our Google Analytics integration instead to track your clicks:

In this type of daily transactional campaign, looking at your campaign stats every day in MailChimp is a little unrealistic anyway. You should just log in to Google Analytics to see how your daily alerts are driving traffic to your website and resulting in conversions.

Who’s this for?

If you run an e-commerce site and you send transactional alerts of some sort (price or inventory alerts, for example), and:

• you want to measure opens, clicks, and conversions,
• AND the alerts will all follow the same standard template

then setting up this kind of MailChimp campaign is perfect. You will need to have someone on staff who can work with the MailChimp API. Or, you can contact a programmer in the MailChimp Experts directory.

Just search for “MailChimp Academy” in the iTunes store, then hit subscribe (or, this link should go to it directly in iTunes).

You’ll get new MailChimp tutorials as we add them, and you can sync them with your iPod or iPhone, and learn MailChimp on the go!

Behind the scenes

We’re adding more and more videos to the MailChimp Academy every week. Here’s how it all works, if you’re curious.

Josh is our new full time “video guy” aka “Minister of Education.” Here’s a picture of him at work. Those are his real arms by the way. Try not to talk about them or stare at them, because he gets kind of sensitive.

Josh even disassembled a bunch of leftover cubicles in our office to create his own makeshift soundbooth:

Anyway, Josh is working closely with MailChimp co-founder Dan Kurzius to get as many tutorial videos as possible uploaded. Dan oversees the customer service team, who tells him where people are asking the most questions and need help. We also comb through our live chat transcripts (over at LivePerson.com) to find common questions. Dan also hosts our webinars, and knows where people seem to ask the most questions.

Then he takes all that info to Josh, and they discuss making “pretty moving pictures.”

Josh takes Dan’s suggestions, writes a script, and records a bunch of video with Screenflow, then the audio. Then he mixes it all up on his Mac with After Effects, and posts them on Blip.tv.

Most how-to videos are dead-boring. So we’re trying to make ours a little fun (we’ve got a reputation, afterall). So if you’re watching one of our videos, and you hear some funny voiceovers, sound effects, or if you see some random unicorns flying around the screen, now you know that’s Josh.

Anyway, we started the MailChimp Academy series by posting general overview videos of each major MailChimp concept: list management, creating campaigns, and reports.

Now, we’re going to be inserting more detailed videos in between.

And don’t forget, many of our how-to videos are peppered all over the MailChimp application. Just look for the little “Show me” video icons:

Stay tuned (pun intented) because we’ve got more coming.

And if you have any suggestions for MailChimp training videos you’d like to see, comment below.

Original email in English. Click a translation link on the right.

We’ve got a lot of international users on MailChimp. So we’ve considered translating our entire app into multiple languages. It’d be a huge undertaking. But the truth is, most of our users speak a little English. So for now, we’ve kept our translation efforts focused on the signup process.

Any-hoo, If you’re sorta thinking about “going international” too, there’s an easy way to do that with MailChimp.

It’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to get this done, but I’ve finally created an RSS-to-Email version of the MailChimp Blog (you can subscribe to the right, if you’re so inclined). I created a special template for the blog emails, and in that template, I’m using our new TRANSLATE:LANG merge tag to provide automatic translations of my email.

Here’s what the same email looks like in different languages…

Korean:

French:

Portuguese:

Honestly, I have no idea, but it looks cool:

The TRANSLATE tag is very, very tall. It generates links to 34 languages. So you should only do this if you’re using a side-column template of some sort.

Now that this is all set up, my blog readers across the planet can get a rough translation of my content. And I don’t have to do anything. I just blog like I normally do, and MailChimp does everything else automatically.

And with the RSS-to-email tool, you could add translation links to anything that generates an RSS feed. Not just your blog.

Some shopping carts, like Magento, output RSS feeds for inventory. Eventbrite generates RSS feeds of all your events.

It’s not just for business, either. Churches and non-profits who want to spread their outreach globally can do it really easy now.

And here’s the thing. If you’ve already got an email marketing vendor for all your newsletters and promotional campaigns, who cares? MailChimp’s so affordable (free in some cases) that you can just use our tools for certain segments of your email list. There are some huge companies who have their own in-house email systems, and who also use MailChimp for certain types of campaigns. We don’t feel the need to be your exclusive email provider. MailChimp’s cool that way.

Now, I know you’re thinking that the automatically generated translations are not “perfect” translations. But whenever you run into someone who obviously doesn’t speak your native tongue, isn’t it nice to see they’re trying?

So give it a try yourself. You’ll find the translations, though not 100% perfect, are good enough.

For now.