Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
We recently published a 32-page guide for bloggers that covers everything you’d ever want to know about promoting your blog with MailChimp. It’s jam-packed with step-by-step tutorials, helpful tips and other useful information. So, why should bloggers be concerned about email?
We’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!
When I was little, kids used to tease my shoes. I always picked really weird, functional ones with hidden pockets, or folding wings or ninja shoes with that separate toe-thing, so I could climb “escape ropes.” You know, just in case. After a while, ugly shoes became my trademark. My little one-finger-salute to the mainstream.
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.
Here’s a really smart way newspapers can use email marketing (and automation). Secrets of the City, based in Minneapolis, describes itself as “The daily digest of Twin Cities culture.”
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:
Did you know that if you have an Etsy store, you can use MailChimp to send automatic email newsletters to all your customers simply by uploading new items to Etsy? You don’t even have to log in to MailChimp to do anything! You can just focus on your art, and let the ‘chimp deliver your marketing, using our handy RSS-to-email tool. All you have to do is setup your template, and point us to your Etsy store feed.
We’ll show you how, using a real Etsy artist page as an example. This project will require the following supplies:
Here’s a super quick tutorial on how you can setup a website, then email a news announcement to it for publishing. Then, using RSS-to-email in MailChimp, automatically send that news update to your subscriber list.
In this example, I’ve used Squarespace to setup a website for a fictitious company called Acme Bananas:
Now, I’ll show you how to:
1. Post news articles to that web page by sending emails to it
2. Automatically take news on that web page, and send an email newsletter to my MailChimp list.
Quick hackity-hack idea for the MailChimp RSS-to-email tool.
You can use mobile blogging (aka moblogging or “post by email”) to send content from your mobile device to your blog.
Which is a really nice feature when you want to blog while you’re traveling, or at a party/event. You pull out your iphone, snap a picture, email it to your blog, and booyah—your drunk, passed-out buddy is on the interwebs.
But you don’t always have to use this feature for evil.
You can also use it to email content into your MailChimp newsletter template, and have it automatically sent to your subscriber list.
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…
We love Eventbrite. Here’s a handy tip for linking it to MailChimp.
If you use Eventbrite to handle your company’s online events registration and ticketing, you’ll get your own “Event Page,” where all your upcoming events are listed. It’s nice.
In the bottom-right corner of that events page, there’s an RSS link to “subscribe to receive notifications:”
You can grab that RSS feed, and build an RSS-to-email campaign in MailChimp. That way, whenever your EventBrite page is updated with new events, MailChimp will automatically send an email update to your subscribers. Now, MailChimp checks for updates to RSS feeds around 3am ET. So long as your events aren’t extremely urgent (down to the minute), this is a pretty handy little bit of automation.
There are tons of other RSS-driven calendars and events sites out there where you can do the same thing. If you see a little RSS icon like this: 
chances are, you can turn it into an automatic RSS-to-email campaign in MailChimp (here’s a tutorial on RSS email campaigns). Eep eep!
You know you should be sending email newsletters to your clients and customers on a regular basis. But you never find the time to write them, do you?
The truth is, you’ll probably never find the time to sit down and write an email newsletter. That’s exactly why we created MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email tool. It takes content from your blog (or any RSS feed), and sends it as an email newsletter to your subscribers. Automagically.
If you’re a heavy blogger, you’re probably wondering if it’s anything like Feedburner or Feedblitz or the other bajillions of RSS-to-email tools out there. No. Mainly because with MailChimp, you can use your own highly-customized HTML email templates, and we provide open and click tracking, bounce management, list cleaning, spam filter check, and more.
But here’s the part that’ll make you really poop your pants. RSS feeds don’t just come from blogs. Your e-commerce cart probably publishes an inventory RSS feed (think email alerts when products are back in stock). Most event calendar services publish RSS feeds (think event alerts). Social networking sites like Facebook and Ning have RSS feeds. Airfare alerts are often in RSS format. They can all be turned into automated, trackable email campaigns with MailChimp.
Sound interesting? Here’s how to get started…
Free HTML Templates →Templates tested in all major email clients, ready for customizing.
Compare Us →Check out how we compare against other email marketing providers.
View Pricing Plans →MailChimp offers flexible plans for every budget.
Try MailChimp Free →Manage up to 500 subscribers, send up to 3,000 times/month for free.
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