With a full-blown Wordpress blog, in addition to our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you might be wondering why in the world I’d want another site to maintain. The simple answer: the more I use Posterous, the more I love it! — Especially for the particular niche it serves. (more on that after the jump)

I like to think of Posterous as a miniblog– something that gives you greater freedom of expression than Twitter’s 140 characters (known as microblogging), but often is shorter and more sketchy than a fully fleshed out Wordpress post. One of my favorite Posterous features is autoposting, which allows you to link any content you send to Posterous with sites like your Facebook page or Twitter stream. The autopost feature currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and Xanga, with more integrations on the way.

For MailChimp, I’ve made the decision to only link Posterous to our Facebook Fan Page. So when I’m finding and adding content, our Facebook Fans are the audience that I generally have in mind.

So you might be wondering: but MailChimp, now that you have over 3,500 Facebook fans, how do you make sure your content is relevant to everyone?

The candid answer is that I don’t. I have to assume that if someone becomes a MailChimp fan, they’re interested in what we have to say. Much like email marketing, becoming a fan is a way of opting-in. In the case of Facebook, this means that someone is electing to receive updates from MailChimp in their home feed. (Side Note: Facebook does give you the option of hiding updates from a particular person or page if you find the number of updates annoying or excessive.)

As far as the content is concerned, often times I’ll post information and photos about what’s going on in our office (chimps are people too, you know!), links to interesting articles about design, small business and entrepreneurship, and even the occasional funny monkey photo.

Two things that have worked well for driving engagement on Facebook (measured in terms of “likes” and comments) by way of Posterous have been 1) making sure to maintain variety in the type of links and content posted, and 2) not treating the Posterous to Facebook autopost feature as “set it and forget it.” How can you expect people to engage with your business or brand– on Facebook, Twitter or your blog– if you don’t maintain an active presence there? I’ve made a habit of consistently responding to what our fans and followers have to say and have noticed a measurable correlation in their level of engagement thanks to Facebook Page Insights. So after posting something to Posterous and properly tagging it (I like to keep things categorized and organized), I head over to Facebook to see what, if anything, our fans are saying about it.

A fan page is it’s own little ecosystem, and it needs to be nurtured and treated that way. This becomes even more important if you’re feeding content into it from auxiliary sources.

It all started innocently enough this past Friday, October 3.  MailChimp Co Founder Ben Chestnut was to give a presentation on the basics of email marketing at this year’s Webmaster Jam Session.  In an effort to showcase the newly acquired life-size MailChimp (and pull off some subliminal marketing at the same time), Ben brought Frederick Von Chimpenheimer IV plus two cases of bananas with him to the Loudermilk Center in Atlanta.  Had we known then what we know now, Freddie might  have stayed safe from the hands of his ruthless abductors!  Allow me to recount for you the harrowing saga surrounding our dearly beloved missing MailChimp.

Our first indication that something had gone amiss came in the form of a tweet from Ihazurchimp.  We received the transmission early Saturday morning, October 4:

Mission accomplished: Chimp abducted, sans bananas. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ihazurchimp/2911326328/ #WJS08

The MailChimp Tactical Assault Operations crew was dismayed to say the least.  With only a Twitter username and the knowledge that these rogue chimpnappers were lurking about the Webmaster Jam Session, MC-TAO was forced to wait it out.  In the mean time, we created this page as an emotional coping mechanism.

Fortunately we didn’t have to wait long before receiving the next in a series of cryptic communications from Ihazurchimp.  The tweet was directed squarely at MailChimp, and it was clear that these “evil-doers” were not interested in bargaining:

@mailchimp The chimp is being well cared for since being liberated from indentured servitude. We only wish he would stop flinging his poo.

They wanted one thing, and one thing only: Frederick Von Chimpenheimer IV.  From the series of messages that followed, it became apparent that the captors’ agenda had little to do with a disdain for MailChimp as an organization.  Nope.  It was being played off as a radical protest for chimp liberation.

By Sunday night it was blatantly apparent that Freddie’s abductors had taken him across state lines.  (Little did they know this would allow their crime to be prosecuted as a Federal offense!)  I present to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit B at right: MailChimp in South Carolina.  Fortunately for MC-TAO, as the details of the Freddie’s disappearance began to unfold, we had lots of unsolicited help from our friends and allies.

Ken Seals, in particular, did some excellent detective work, deducing that OnWired has the MailChimp.  And who is OnWired, you ask?  From their website:

By day, we’re a small, vibrant web design studio located near Raleigh, North Carolina. By night: a band of highly–trained, elite special operations web mercenaries on the lam from the law.

Yeah, we thought it was a strange coincidence too.  Furthermore, Ken exposed the fact that Jon Norris (Creative Director of OnWired) used to work for Bronto, one of MailChimp’s best frienemies.  OnWired’s office is a mere 23 miles from Bronto headquarters, and we suspect Freddie will be transported there and held captive against his will.  The evidence just doesn’t quite seem to piece together as neatly as it should though, as indicated by this tweet posted Wednesday October 8:

@kenseals Thank you for your thorough investigation. Our plan to frame OnWired has gone better than we could have possibly imagined.

courtesy of @jasongraphix

This amber alert went out over the wire but turned up zero leads.  As you can imagine, this is all very disturbing to Freddie’s family here at MailChimp.  Our dream is to see him return home to Atlanta, and we’re holding on to the hope that he will.  If you have any information in this pressing matter, do not hesitate to call MC-TAO right away.  All leads are good leads, and we’re willing to do what it takes to get back our chimp. And to the captors, know this: We will hunt you down and seek sweet, sweet revenge.  This is not a threat, it’s a promise.

The article offers some tips on how to revitalize a list of subscribers who just aren’t responding anymore (because they’re a waste of money). The first step is to identify those subscribers who have gone inactive:

“This takes a little database work. Create a separate mailing list, and add anyone who hasn’t opened or clicked on a message in, say, six months or longer, to it. Send a message with a pleading subject line, such as “We miss you! Please come back!” Go ahead, grovel a little. Include a special offer or invitation to fill out a new profile or encourage them to unsubscribe once and for all.”

Sounds complicated. I wondered if it’s something I could do with my own list in MailChimp (and then tell our customers about it)…

Finding Inactive Subscribers on your MailChimp List

Step 1: Activate the AIM Reports Add-on

First, in order to accomplish this in MailChimp, you’ll need the AIM reports add-on (find out more about this add-on). AIM reports is like having a microscope for your campaign stats. It lets you drill down into your stats, to find out what each and every recipient does with your email. Not everyone needs it (if your list is 200,000 people, how would this help you?), so we’ve made it an optional add-on.

Step 2: Define a “did not open” segment

After the add-on is activated in your MailChimp account, create a campaign, then define a segment of your list of “People who haven’t opened my last 3 campaigns.”

My MonkeyWrench Newsletter list is supposed to be a monthly newsletter. However, I only have time to send it quarterly. That’s actually a good thing in this case, because I can define a segment like this:

(click to zoom in)

My criteria basically says, “Find all the people who didn’t open my last 2 campaigns.” Since I’m a lazy bum and send quarterly, two campaigns actually span six months. If you’re more diligent than I am, and send every single month, you could define up to 3 criteria, basically spanning back over 3 campaigns.

In my case, it turns out to be 2,258 people. Wow, that’s a real waste of time and money if I’m sending to over 2,000 people who just don’t care anymore. In MailChimp, that would cost somewhere around $50-$60 per campaign. If you’ve got an extremely large list, that number could be a lot more.

Why not run a segment in MailChimp right now, to find out how many people aren’t opening your campaigns, then look at our price chart to see how much all that “dead weight” is costing you per campaign. If you’re an agency sending campaigns on behalf of clients, they might appreciate the money-saving idea.

Step 3: Craft the email campaign

Once that segment of “non-responders” has been created, I can send an email to them.

The only question now is, “What the heck do we send to people who haven’t been opening my emails in the first place?”

For that, you’ll need to go read Wendy’s article:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/17803.asp

To be honest with you, I’ve never had to go in and clean my list of inactives, so I can’t really offer any advice here. If you’ve gone through this type of list cleaning process, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear how it turned out.  Whenever we send emails to MailChimp customers, we only send to “people who have a) paid money, and b) logged in within the last 6 months.” It’s sort of an ongoing filter for my list. Incidentally, you can do sorta the same, by defining a segment of “those who opened my last 3 campaigns.”

I can offer the following tips:

• All of this hinges on the “did not open” stat. We say someone “did not open” if they don’t download tracker images in your email. It’s possible your recipients have been reading your plain-text versions, or just refusing to enable the downloading of images when they receive your emails. So take it with a grain of salt, and don’t react too swiftly. You might want to send this campaign, then come back later and run a segment again, based on “Those who did not open the inactives campaign” just to further whittle things down.
• If they haven’t been opening in the first place, why should you expect anything different this time around? You shouldn’t, unless perhaps the problem all along was a poorly written subject line. Here are some tips for writing a better email subject line.
• Or perhaps these people haven’t been opening your emails because their spam filters trapped them. Be sure to understand How Spam Filters Work, and try our Inbox Inspector before sending your campaign. If your normal campaigns are very image heavy, try adding more text to balance things out. You might also try our new Email Authentication feature.
• If there are more advanced ways you’d like to analyze and use your stats, be sure to check out the powerful new MailChimp API.

Let’s say you’ve placed some inline-CSS on a table cell. You want to
give the cell a top border of 1 pixel, and the border should have a HEX
color value of #333333 (very dark gray). Your code would look something
like:

style="border-top: 1px solid #333333;"

Now let’s say you accidentally forgot the pound (#) symbol in that HEX value.

In most browsers, it’s a gimme. Nothing bad happens.

But somehow, IE7 thinks the color value is your border width, and gives you
a top border of 333333px (actually, it’s more like 960 pixels,
but you get the gist). It’s just coming up with some very large number
from that 333333. If you used "333" instead, the border would be exactly 333 pixels. If you enter 33, it’s 33 pixels. 333333 for some reason makes it 960 pixels.

Here are a couple sample files you can open in IE7 to see what we mean:

With the # symbol in CSS

Without the # symbol in CSS

If this post didn’t put you to sleep, you might also like:

HTML Email Tips for Web Designers

and more free email design and coding resources in the

MailChimp Email Marketing Resource Center

People forget opting-in. Or they lie. Or grandma signed up 2 dozen friends and relatives for a newsletter they didn’t want. Or dad thinks the "this is spam" button is just a nice way to organize his inbox.

Whatever the case, if you send email marketing long enough, you will inevitably get reported for spam. When that happens, a copy of your email gets reviewed by ISPs, anti-spam groups, blacklist administrators, and your email service provider.

So before you send your next email marketing campaign, imagine this scenario (because it’s probably happening behind the scenes with every single campaign you send):

One of the recipients on your list has just accused you of spamming by clicking on his "this is spam" button in his email program. Or a spam
filter on a corporate server has accidentally quarantined your message for review as
"possible spam."

As a result, an engineer at a major anti-spam organization, or ISP postmaster, or an IT guy at some big corporation, gets a copy of your campaign. Now he has to sit down, read your email, and determine whether or not it’s spam.

The only thing that person has to judge you on is your design and your content. He has to make a quick decision on whether or not to block all future emails from your company, or to let you into their circle of trusted friends. If you think he’s going to call you and ask you for proof of opt-in, think again. He will most likely take all of 3 seconds to make his decision.

Blocking you is easy. He clicks a button. Done. Now he can go back to watching YouTube.

Trusting you is
hard. He’ll have to log in to a dashboard and type your domain name into a "whitelist" of trusted senders, or he’ll have to
trace your email back to your IP address, and plug that into their
email firewall, or modify a .txt file in a server somewhere.

Put yourself in their shoes. Look at your emails.

Do your emails deserve to be whitelisted?