Happy anniversary email -- from your camera?

Everybody knows by now that you can use email autoresponders to send a birthday greeting to your customers (here’s a tutorial on sending belated birthday autoresponders). But why not pick a big-ticket item from your store, and send a triggered “happy anniversary” email? While you’re at it, throw in some useful tips for the customer, some feedback/social links, and upsell opportunities (in that order).

Click the thumbnail to zoom in on an example I put together in a few minutes.

No need to do this for every item in your store (that’d get annoying fast). Just pick one or two big ones, setup the autoresponder, then just put it on autopilot.

Related: Target emails by purchase activity, MailChimp Autoresponders, MailChimp API. This blog post inspired by this article from Loren McDonald.

We’ve just posted a 36-page guide for Etsy Sellers that takes you through everything you need to know about marketing your Etsy Shop with MailChimp.

I know you might be thinking, ‘But, Amy, I make things by hand. I’m all about the DIY movement. Why would I do email marketing?’

I’ve got good news. Creating your own email newsletters is totally DIY marketing. Plus, it is actually really effective. Unlike paid advertising or annoying SPAM emails (which we hate) your newsletter is sent only to a list of people who have asked (by signing up) to receive it.

You see, you have people that really want to know about your Etsy Shop, your products, your process etc. These are your loyal customers and fans. Give them what they want! Make them feel really special by sending them exclusive and useful content. Previews of your new products, special discounts, and an inside look at your handmade process are all great ideas for content.

Email marketing allows you to share your craft and your personality with more people. Plus, with MailChimp, not only is it free for lists with up to 500 subscribers, its also easy, fun and powerful.

If this sounds good to you, here is an outline of all the topics covered in our guide for Etsy Sellers:

Building Your Mailing List
Creating an Attractive Newsletter
Sending Your Campaign
Social Sharing
Pay Pal Integration
Tracking and Reporting
Google Analytics
Autoresponders
RSS-Driven Campaigns
Segmenting Your List

Download MailChimp’s Guide for Etsy Sellers (8.6 MEG PDF)

p.s. Just in case you were wondering, we are in no way affiliated with Etsy and this guide is not intended to imply any endorsement or certification by Etsy of our services. Also, Etsy is a registered trademark of Etsy, Inc. And of course, please consult a physician before attempting any crafty projects.

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?

For one thing, people have different preferences about how they consume information. Some people want to come to your site and browse your latest posts; some are interested in what others are saying in the comments; and some just want to skim your content via RSS and never visit your site at all. There’s another group of people that prefer reading your blog in their email clients. It’s true! They may not have many sites they care enough about to warrant managing a feed reader, or they just like getting email instead of visiting your blog. Whatever the reason, it’s a nice option to offer your readers so they can engage with you in the way that suits them best.

Also, aside from promoting your regular blog content, there may be other ways you can use email to engage your audience and track the effectiveness of your communications. You could send exclusive content to your mailing list, like special articles or sales. You could inform them about updates and news that may be outside the scope of your typical blog postings. The bottom line is this: When people sign up to receive updates from you, they’re telling you they want to hear from you. They’re saying, “I’m interested in what you have to say. Please keep me informed.”

You may not know how engaged your average reader is. You don’t know who’s reading your RSS feed, or how devoutly they’re reading it. But you know that people who give you their email addresses are indicating a certain level of commitment in asking to receive updates from you. And with a service like MailChimp, you know who those people are, and you can actually track their engagement by how often they open your emails, what they click on and what they share with their friends.

Sounds pretty good, right? Here’s an outline of all the topics included in the bloggers guide:

Building Your Mailing List
Sign-Up Form Plugins
Setting Up an RSS-to-Email Campaign
Using Feedburner with MailChimp
Merge Tags for Bloggers
Templates
Frequency (Interest Groups)
Social Sharing
Reports
Analytics360 for WordPress
Blog Publishing Tools
ChimpFeedr
Yahoo! Pipes
Mobile Campaigns

DOWNLOAD MailChimp’s Guide for Bloggers (PDF, 16MB)

Interested in seeing these tools in action? Sign up for one of our bloggers webinars:

November 11, 2009 at 11AM EST
December 2, 2009 at 11AM EST
December 16, 2009 at 4PM EST

If you’ve ever received a subscription to a magazine, you know that as you approach the end of your subscription, you start receiving letters in the mail about renewing your subscription. And it’s never just one: You get a series of letters, all designed to move you to action. It may seem like overkill, but there’s good research showing that a renewal series is more effective at retaining subscribers than a single renewal notice. Renewals can get lost, thrown away, or forgotten in a pile of mail. Sending a series of renewals increases the likelihood that a subscriber will renew if he desires, or that he’ll make an active decision not to renew.

Keeping someone on your email list may not mean that you’ll see additional subscription or advertising revenue. However, if the overall engagement of your list affects its deliverability, it makes sense to confirm that inactive subscribers want to be on your list, and to remove subscribers that have lost interest. Plus, if you have a large number of inactive subscribers on your list, you may be spending more money on your campaigns than is necessary. The magazine-renewal principle applies to email lists, too: Email can easily get lost in a cluttered inbox, and sending a series of reactivation notices ensures that the subscriber is aware that his subscription is expiring.

To set up a reactivation campaign in MailChimp, create a new campaign. When you get to the list screen, segment your list like this:

Make sure both conditions apply by selecting “match ALL of the following”. We recommend that you target subscribers who have been inactive for at least six months. To do that, set the two conditions like I’ve done above. Member ratings of 1 and 2 respectively represent subscribers who have soft bounced and subscribers who have never opened or clicked email you’ve sent them.

When you’ve successfully segmented  your list, you’re ready to begin writing the text of your reactivation campaign. For the second and third emails in the series, you can segment your list the same way. Subscribers that have reactivated won’t match the conditions of the segment, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally sending them subsequent renewal notices.

What does a reactivation series actually look like? I’ve created a very generic series below. You’re welcome to copy or revise this text for your own reactivation campaigns.

EMAIL #1

Subject: Do You Want to Renew Your Subscription?

*|FNAME| *,

You signed up to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *. Would you like to renew your subscription?

Please take a moment to indicate your preference below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

<a href=”*|UNSUB| *”>NO, I no longer wish to receive email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

EMAIL #2

Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Expires Soon

*|FNAME| *,

We haven’t heard from you about your subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. If you want to be removed from our mailing list, you don’t need to do anything further. If you’d like to continue receiving news and information, please reply by clicking below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

EMAIL #3

Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Has Expired

*|FNAME| *,

Thanks for your interest in receiving *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. Your subscription has expired and you have been removed from our mailing list.

If you’d like to renew your subscription now or in the future, click the link below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Sincerely,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

Wrapping Up

As you can see, the first notice just asks if the subscriber would like to continue receiving email. The second notice acknowledges the first and only provides a positive action; the subscriber will be unsubscribed if no action is taken. The third email confirms that no action has been taken and the subscriber will be unsubscribed, while providing one final opportunity to reactivate.

Concerning the YES and NO options within the emails: The YES option can link to any page on your site, because simply clicking on the link will increase the subscriber’s rating to 3 stars and remove him from the inactive segment. Ideally, you should link to a dedicated page that thanks your subscribers for renewing. Note that you can’t link to MailChimp’s “thank you” page; the link should go to a page on your own site. Also, it can take up to 24 hours for member ratings to change after subscribers click the link in your reactivation email. The NO option should contain your unsubscribe link, which you can copy above or from any previous campaign you sent.

Regardless of the frequency of your normal campaigns, we recommend sending the reactivation series over three weeks, with one email per week. That way, you won’t overwhelm your subscribers with email, but the series will be frequent enough that you’ll keep the reactivation request fresh on their minds.

When you’ve completed the series and allowed a week for subscribers to reply to the final email, go into your MailChimp list and remove the subscribers that still fit the inactive segment.

Obviously these subject lines are a little obfuscated, but you can get a lot of ideas from this tool…

Sell it to me Straight

Subject lines with “Happy Thanksgiving” didn’t perform quite as well as a presumably boring “Thanksgiving from ____”

Avoid Writing a Turkey of a Subject Line

And the mere mention of “turkey” just seems to make open rates plummet. Maybe we’re all not-so-thankful of turkey after Thanksgiving?

Do “Sales” Really Work?

And look at “Thanksgiving Sale” One miserable star? Probably an overused phrase. Or is it? Let’s run the word “sale” through the subject line suggester:

Look at that. The phrase “Sales Ends Friday” got a 5 star rating! So maybe a generic “sale” subject is not as good as a more specific subject line with an ultimatum. On that topic, you might want to look at Mark Brownlow’s really detailed study of Amazon’s “salesy” subject lines.

Next: Testing Your Ideas

So the Subject Line Suggester is a great way to get ideas (ideas that had great open rates) for your email campaigns. After jotting down some different ideas, you may want to create an A/B Subject line test in MailChimp.

So now you can send a special campaign to your most loyal customers. Or, send a “come-back” campaign to the inactive members on your list before you clean them out.

Here’s why this feature is so important.

The Move To Engagement Measuring

If you follow the email marketing industry, you know that engagement is quite the buzzword lately. We recently talked about how one of the major ISPs is measuring engagement and using it to decide who gets to the inbox, and who goes to the junk folder (See: Feedback Loops Being Replaced by Engagement?).

That ISP is basically looking at whether or not your subscribers open, click, and in general, “interact” with you. If you send an email that mistakenly goes to the junk folder, then the subscriber moves it back out, you scored some engagement points. If your subscriber hits “reply” to send you a message, you get some engagement points.

Cleaning Inactives Helps Deliverability

Returnpath’s George Bilbrey goes into more detail in this article on Mediapost: “Engagement: The New Frontier in Deliverability?” At one point, he advises that senders:

“Treat inactive subscribers differently: This is probably the biggest change that most marketers need to think about.  Mailing to a lot of inactive accounts may actually make your reputation look worse at some ISPs.  Segment out inactive users and run a win-back campaign. If you cannot win back these subscribers, you may simply want to stop mailing them altogether.”

Fascinating? Then you’ll also like this from ReturnPath: How Engagement Metrics Influence Deliverability

Over at Clickz, Jeanne Jennings had this to say about inactive members of your list:

“If these folks really aren’t that into you, they may take the next step and report you as spam. It’s like that shunned suitor who just won’t go away; eventually the victim will consider him a stalker and get a restraining order. Keeping inactive names on your list can open you up to blacklisting and deliverability issues.”

See: Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Reengaging Inactives

More Sophisticated Than Open and Click Ratings

Some clued-in users have asked us for ways to “segment based on those who haven’t opened the last 6 months” or “those who haven’t clicked in my most recent 3 campaigns.”

It’s awesome that people want to follow best practices and clean out their lists. But the problem with this approach is: 1) open tracking isn’t totally accurate, and 2) “my most recent campaigns” can mean something very different if you send daily emails vs. monthly or quarterly emails.

And neither of these approaches take bounces, spam complaints, and un-then-re-subscribers into account.

So we take a more holistic approach to measuring engagement, by looking at the historical activity of all your subscribers, and taking into account even more variables that are indicative of engagement.

BTW, if you’re into complicated equations, there’s some talk about metrics one could measure in “Future Vision of Email Measurement” at Deliverability.com.

How and Why MailChimp Measures Engagment

We’ve actually been tracking engagement data across our entire system for quite some time now (Chart: Gmail users more engaged?).

Then in March of this year, we unveiled our “List Activity Score” to make sure your best recipients got rewarded with the best deliverability rates.

Note that I did NOT say that our “best senders got the best deliverability rates.”

That’s because we found that our best customers often had multiple lists. And some lists were not as well maintained as others. So we stopped putting our “best senders” on our best IPs, and started sending emails to our best subscribers from our best IPs.

This is meant to reward senders for proper list management. Hence the awesome laurels you’ll find for the best lists:

But if you’re good at reading between the lines, you’ve picked up on the fact that this also means you really, really, really should clean out inactive members from your list.

And with this new release, we’ve made each of your subscribers’ activity score (or level of engagement) visible to you, so you can clean your list appropriately.

Here’s what the stars mean:

1 Star – negative rating, this person has unsubscribe and resubscribed, or soft bounced in the past
2 Star – no activity, never opened or clicked, most likely a new member
3 Star – this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, limited activity
4 Star – this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, a little more activity
5 Star – this recipient has started opening or clicking your campaigns, lotsa activity

How To Segment by Engagement in MailChimp

Whenever you create a campaign, step 1. is to select your list.

Click on “send to segment:”

Next, choose to segment by “member rating:”

If you want to send a special “come-back” campaign to your inactive members, you might select subscribers with 1 or 2 stars.

If you want to send a special offer to your most loyal subscribers, you’d click 5 stars:

In both cases, be sure to hit the “refresh” button to see an updated count of the segment:

Alternatively, you can perform a search on your list under the Lists tab, then click “View All” members:

Note the handy “download spreadsheet” link.

This is where our integration with Picnik comes in really handy:

Also see: 6 free spooky Halloween email templates

I just stumbled upon this nice Halloween email campaign from Block Club, a graphic design firm in Buffalo NY.

MailChimp comes with all kinds of powerful, easy-to-use, and free email template tools that make email design easy.

But Block Club is a graphic and web design firm, and this is a “design tips & tricks” publication.

So their emails have got to look really nice and custom-made.

I noticed a few “power tricks” in their email template, and asked them if I could showcase them here…

Thinking Out Of The Blocks

By now, we all know that when coding HTML emails, simple tables are the safest way to go.

Unfortunately, this can lead to some boring layouts. So one really simple visual trick you can use is to make a piece of your header poke out from the “visual bounding box:”

Visual trick: make your header less boxy by protruding from the edge

If you look really close, you’ll see that it’s well within the boundary of the table. It’s just an optical illusion.

And it’s easiest to do with your header graphic, so you don’t have to code any extra table cells for those “sticky-outies.”

I showcased a similar header trick over here, and this old(ish)campaign from Songbird is one of my favorite examples of beating email boxiness:

This email campaign from Songbird is a great example of designing out of the boxiness of HTML email

And we do the same thing with MailChimp’s email header designs:

A recent email from Apple showcasing their larger displays uses the same trick, but instead of the header, does it on the sides:

Staying Inside The Lines

Okay, with a name like “Block Club” it’s pretty obvious that blocks are going to be an underlying theme to their email design:

but if you’ve ever used MailChimp’s WYSIWYG editor (or any WYSIWYG for that matter), it’s also obvious that coding nice, tight little boxes would be a complete p.i.t.a.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We’ve got an awesome editor with lots of crazy cool features (free image hosting, iStockphoto integration, etc). Personally, I use the editor all the time because it saves me time.

Upload HTML Email By ZIP

But if you want extremely precise, pixel-perfect grids, you’re going to have to go old school, break out the text editor and code everything yourself. Which is exactly what Block Club did.

And it’s something that any web designer can do with our upload ZIP file option:

MailChimp lets power coders upload their own HTML email designs via ZIP file

In case you didn’t know, you can also import your HTML email designs into MailChimp by just pointing us to a URL.

Check out the Modx CMS-to-email example here:

See how Modx creates emails with their CMS, then imports to MailChimp

There are actually a plethora (I love saying PLEH-thora) of options for getting email designs into MailChimp. Learn more by reading: Guide to all the email template options in MailChimp.

Going Against The Grain

You’ll also notice that Block Club’s email uses a tiling background image with diagonal text (actually, they use diagonals a lot to contrast the underlying blocky grid):

Background images in HTML email are possible, but require special design considerations

In fact, they use diagonal elements quite a lot. You can see them in the images they use in their content blocks.

Diagonal elements contrast the “blocky” grid nicely, by going against the grain. Tiling your logo in the background like this can also give your email a slightly premium/authentic look (think Louis Vuitton handbags, or look really, really closely at paper money or American Express cards).

But let’s focus on the tiling background image.

Gracefully Degrading Background Images

Background images, in general, aren’t all that reliable in HTML email. There are dozens of email apps out there, and they render HTML emails differently. So the secret to getting background images to work in HTML email is to just accept the fact that they won’t.

Then, design your emails to “fail gracefully.” In other words, never design an email so that the background image is “mission critical.” Test your design and make sure that when your background images are not working, the rest of your email looks fine.

Click Once, Measure 50 times

If you’re going to use your own HTML email code, it pays to test your work before you hit send. MailChimp’s inbox inspector lets you push a button, then we’ll screenshot your email in all the major email apps and test it in all the spam filters.

Block Club ran some inbox inspection tests to check their design, and the design held up nicely across the different email apps. Here’s what it looked like in Hotmail, for instance:

Use MailChimp's Inbox Inspector to make sure your email design holds up in all the major email apps

Full Circle Back To Templates

Okay, so if you’re a control freak, now you know you can do a lot of custom design work in MailChimp without using any of our built-in template tools at all.

But after sending a few campaigns (and refining it with minor tweaks here and there), you may actually want to look into turning that totally custom HTML email design of yours into a built-in MailChimp template.

Yeah, I know this entire article was about avoiding our built-in templates, and coding your own designs. But trust me, this is a real timesaver (and very handy if you setup MailChimp accounts for clients).

Our Email Template Language makes it easy to upload your design into the MailChimp app, then define editable (even repeatable) regions. There are even Dreamweaver and Textmate bundles to make coding easy.

If this sounds interesting to you, check out Aarron’s video tutorial with some really advanced tricks.

1. They’ve turned on MailChimp’s free Archive Toolbar, which is a handy option that lets recipients view past issues, subscribe to the list, and autotranslate. If you don’t have it turned on for your lists, you should really consider it.
2. Nice use of rounded corners, and making the guru’s head poke above the header is a nice design trick to keep the email from looking too boxy.
3. Smart to include twitter and facebook sharing options (a trend that’s on the rise), and this is the first time I’ve seen an RSS option in an email campaign. Nice. We’re also seeing interesting uses of flickr in email campaigns recently.
4. Normally, I see people putting our social sharing links in their footer. This is the first time I’ve noticed it in a side column, and it actually tiles quite nicely there. Here’s how you can customize the social share icons you want to display in your own emails. BTW, how many times have you written a bunch of content, then wanted to “balance out” the side column? Sometimes I’ll insert a “quote of the day” but using an illustration is a nice idea too.
5. At the bottom of their email, there’s a link to view past issues of their newsletter. This is great for recent subscribers, or for subscribers who might’ve missed a previous email. You can do this automatically with MailChimp’s Recent Issues merge tag.

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!