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Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Archive for the ‘Tips, Tricks, Best Practices’ Category

App Sketchbook Uses Email for Feedback, Doubles Twitter Followers

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

appsketchbook-thmI just found out that one of our guys at MailChimp, Steve, has sort of a side gig: App Sketchbook. (it was recently featured on The Unofficial Apple Weblog). Here’s where he came up with the idea:

“After being asked to design some iPhone® applications, I started to search around for design tips and information. There were PSD files, stencils and other paper prototyping tools available, but I’ve always sketched my ideas first. After printing out wireframe templates on sheets of paper (and ultimately losing my sketches), I decided to design my own sketchbook.”

Turns out Steve’s also using MailChimp, along with our Paypal integration, autoresponder tool, and social networking in a pretty unique way…

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LotusLive iNotes – IBM to compete with Google Apps

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

lotuslive-inotesIf you code a lot of HTML emails, sooner or later you run into nagging little Lotus Notes rendering issues (usually it’s a corporate user with a very old installation). They can be painful, but since so many companies use Notes, you have to design for it. Actually, I kind of like Notes, because it leads to more sales of our inbox inspection tool </ evil>

Well, we just learned from the ZDnet blog that IBM plans to put Lotus Notes in the cloud with LotusLive iNotes. According to the article, IBM appears to be positioning it against Google Apps as “web-based email for the enterprise.” Sounds like yet another email app you’ll have to learn how to design around, but this could be a good thing for email marketers.  Browser-based email programs generally render HTML emails nicely (um, because browsers are built for rendering HTML?) but they do have little idiosyncrasies, like spotty CSS support (we discuss this in point #6 in our How to Design HTML Email guide). We’ll post any special coding considerations we find for LotusLive iNotes here on our blog, so stay tuned.

Using Conditional Merge Tags for Prizes

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

We just noticed LaughYourWay.com using our dynamic content merge tags in a cool way.

In their website footer, they have an email signup box with an incentive to “win an iPod touch:”
subscribe-and-win

Then, whenever they send their emails, they pick a winner and use this dynamic content merge tag in their campaign:

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Dreamweaver and TextMate Plugins For MailChimp

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

We recently launched a new email template language that makes it easy to code emails that tie into the MailChimp email design tools. If you are designing emails for your clients, this is pretty huge, as you can create designs that ham-fisted, non-designers can tweak through the design inspector, without having to touch your code. We’ve just made it even easier for designers and coders to rock the email template casbah. (more…)

Where’d you get your list?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

In MailChimp’s list setup process, we ask users to “remind people how they got on your list:”

perm-reminder

We call that the “Permission Reminder,” and we automatically insert it into your email footers. Some people don’t understand why we need this. Some think it’s a hassle. Some people actually refuse to answer it. And they wonder why we shut their accounts down.

Here’s why:

A permission reminder might’ve helped the White House prevent that. Goes to show that no matter who you are, you can get reported as a spammer. Here are some ways you can prevent that.

Hat tip to Simms Jenkins and DJ Waldow for the clip

Images ON in Gmail – If You’re Authenticating

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

images-turned-offUnless you’re totally new to email marketing, you know that most email programs turn images in your HTML emails OFF by default. It’s meant to protect your privacy, but is very annoying to legit email marketers for a variety of reasons. Well, Gmail to the rescue.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

MailChimp’s Secret Page of Awesomeness

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

There’s a page in MailChimp that gets no love.

And it’s a real shame, because it’s packed full of really awesome, obscure, and advanced tools.

It’s called the “List Tools” page:

list-tools-screen

and here’s all the cool stuff you’ll find there…

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Trick: Hiding content from email archives

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Doing some updates to my MailChimp newsletter template, and thought I’d share some new features with you. First, check out this archive of my latest newsletter. In the side column, notice there’s a little link for people who may have received a copy of my newsletter from a friend:

subscribe-here

It’s a handy link, because people do occasionally write me and tell me “my friend sent me your newsletter, and I want to signup too—but where?” Granted, this doesn’t happen on a daily basis, but it’s happened enough times to make me find the merge tag allowing me to include that little signup link.

Anyway, I want that link to disappear when the campaign is viewed as an archive. Luckily, there’s a merge tag for that…

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Filters Allow You to Limit Google Analytics Data to a Subdirectory

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

thm-wp-pluginIf 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…

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http://www.mailchimp.com/nonrestrictiveocean.php