Re-brandable Campaign Reports - Ever need to give someone access to an email campaign’s stats, but you don’t want to give them full access to your MailChimp account? Setup a re-brandable reports page w/your own company logo and color scheme, then send it to them.

Keychain Account Management - Do you manage tons of MailChimp accounts? You’ll be able to setup a “master keychain” account, with “keys” that let you quickly log in to each account w/out digging through all your sticky notes for those pesky passwords.

Twitter Tracking for EepURL - We launched our twitter integration a little while back with our own little URL shortener. The first thing people asked for was a way to track tweets and re-tweets about their campaigns in MailChimp. Done!

Subscriber Activity History - If you’ve got our optional AIM Reports module installed, you’ll be able to drill down to individual subscribers and see every campaign they’ve opened or clicked.

“Hide-this” Merge Tag - We’re introducing a merge tag that you can place around content that you want to hide on your public campaign archives. For example, unsubscribe links, the recipient’s contact or username info, salutations, your CAN-SPAM required address, telephone, etc.

Automagic Table of Contents - If you write really long newsletters (such as through the RSS-to-email campaigns), you can insert a merge tag where we’ll automatically find all your content titles, then build a linked table of contents at the top of your message.  No more pesky anchor tag coding!

101 Free HTML Email Templates - We’ll be offering some desktop software with a boatload of free HTML email templates that you can use w/MailChimp. We already have a great template designer, but this is for people who want even more (pre-built) variety. Stay tuned for details!

Easier List Setup - We’ve redesigned the entire list setup process to make it easier and faster. Instead of a 5-step wizard, think more “1-page-done.”

And that’s not all. We’ve got a few more amazing features we’ll be announcing (some of them in MailChimp Labs) on top of all this. Stay tuned for launch around mid-July!

In order to make this work on twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Well, ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted about their email campaigns, and then sticking all those stats into MailChimp.

So we did that. It’ll be going live mid-July, with MailChimp v4.2.

Here’s a sneak peek:

1. How many people tweeted about the campaign
2. How many people re-tweeted
3. Who the tweeters are
4. Timeline of tweetage from original tweet

We’re extremely excited about this integration because we’re seeing more and more of our customers (nearly 10% now) using Twitter in conjunction with their MailChimp campaigns. Now you can see how they’re intertwined!

Above is Ron, Fabio and James, who make up our new in-house Design Lab.

Behind James, there’s a doorway into another office space (the white 2010 Space Odyssey room):

See how tiny Josh is? That means the room is super loooong.

This is our conference room space with lots of white walls for posting design ideas and for video backdrops (such as for our customer videos like this)

Moving our marketing and creative teams into this office space will make room on the 4th floor for 3 more new people joining our support and compliance teams in mid-July.

We’ll post an update on how this affects our pizzanomics shortly.

Amit says to measure the success of his email campaigns, he compares sales to re-tweets…

From Amit:

“We care about tweets and sales. We’re measuring opens and clicks, but don’t pay a lot of attention to those numbers, because in the end what we really care about is how much we’re selling and how much we’re spreading.

Opens really only tells you how good your subject line is, and our open rates are pretty consistent… people are opening our emails because they trust the brand to be interesting.

50,000 clicks that lead to 20 sales are worthless.

5,000 clicks that lead to 200 sales are meaningful.

100 retweets means that people are digging the product and think it’s interesting enough to tell their friends out. 10 means it’s not cool enough and we shouldn’t have plugged it. The retweets are a more meaningful metric of product interestingness for us because it’s not a reader clicking through to learn more (low risk) but actually putting their reputation on the line to tell their readers that they think it’s cool (higher risk).

With those two stats you start to see some interesting things…

1) product with lots of retweets and low sales = price too high or product not filling a need.
2) product with few retweets but lots of sales = product is useful and well-priced but not exciting. It’s not gonna spread.
3) product with lots of retweets, and lots of sales = success! Well-priced, exciting to our customers, and it’ll spread.

For us, #3 is a success, and #1 can be turned around, and #2 means we’ve got a dud.”

Hmm, measuring email campaign success via twitter re-tweets. If one were good at creating graphs (which I am not), that graph might look like this:

Using twitter to measure email campaigns

Even though Photojojo does not use MailChimp (gasp!), I highly recommend their newsletter to everyone I know because of the great copywriting day after day after day. If you’ve never sent an email newsletter before, just remember that “step 1″ is to figure out your personality. It makes writing soooo much easier. Photojojo has tons of personality, and it’s why I actually look forward to receiving their emails.

Anyway, if you’re a MailChimp user, be sure to always tweet your email campaigns:

then follow yourself using something like addictomatic or tweetdeck.

And don’t forget our iStockphoto integration, where you can buy July 4th related graphics for your email campaign’s content. Beautiful, royalty-free photography for just a buck!

A little while ago, we posted a survey link to Facebook, Twitter, and The Jungle. I was looking at the data today, and noticed a new “create chart” link:

I actually jumped in my seat a little from excitement. I mean, normally I’d have to download the data to Excel (and I never do pick the correct export options) then generate my own charts. But now, they’ve gone and made it a single-click link. Woo-hoo!

The funny thing is a simple “create chart” was enough to get me excited. But they actually let you choose the type of chart you want (bar chart, line chart, etc). And you can download the image as a PNG (makes it much easier to email to someone). Super big thank you to the surveymonkey guys. Here’s what the chart looks like:

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Point of the article is to say that yes, more and more people are adopting DKIM, so that’s good for the cause (visit Online Trust Alliance).

Juicy deliverability morsel from the article: “Google and Yahoo! have announced that messages with valid DKIM signatures, where the domain has established a good reputation with them, are less likely to be classified as spam.” And a quick reminder to our own customers that yes, DKIM authentication is baked into MailChimp.

Some of their feature requests are actually already live (they just didn’t know about them yet). So that will be the subject of the next half-dozen or so upcoming blog posts from me: Oh really? MailChimp Does That?

For example, one person asked me if we could make our campaign designer window a little bigger, so there’d be more room to code his HTML.

Actually, we can do better than that…

Quick background - our campaign editor is sort of a WYSIWYG-hybrid. Specifically, it uses a modified version of the FCK editor. Yes, we’ve looked into many others (TinyMCE included) but FCK was, at the time, the most configurable WYSIWYG that was supported in Windows and Mac. It had to support multiple operating systems because—well, that’s the whole point of browser based apps. And it had to be configurable, because we had to strip a lot of cool stuff out (stuff that would never work in HTML email).

How To Never, Ever Use MailChimp’s WYSIWYG Again

We’ve got plans to build our own WYSIWYG one day. Technology has come a long way since we had to bribe programmers for Safari support. And with our image gallery hosting and iStockPhoto integration, we really need a more integrated solution.

Until then, there are many ways you can get your email design loaded into MailChimp without even using our campaign editor.

The “Email Beamer”

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just write an email in Outlook, or Apple Mail, or whatever your favorite email app, then just send it to MailChimp for distribution to your list? That would be especially handy for some of your clients who aren’t so tech savvy. Wouldn’t it be even cooler if they could use their own “stationery” that they’re so fond of? Even cooler if MailChimp could take their email, automatically inline its CSS, automatically host the images on our servers, and send a properly formatted HTML email. Done.

As described in this post, every MailChimp list has its own secret email address. You can create an email using anything you want, then “beam it” to your secret address. Here’s a demo video of how it works:

MailChimp’s Email Beamer

ZIP upload

Do you design and code all your email campaigns in DreamWeaver, or some other code editor? Take your .html file plus all the assets and zip them up in a folder. Then, upload to MailChimp and we’ll unzip everything, host all the images, make the relative image links absolute, and we’ll even in-line your CSS for you if you want. Really handy if you’re a control freak and you just want to use your fav editor.

Here’s a demo video.

Import by URL

If you’ve ever taken the time to setup a CMS, you probably wish you could just take the news articles you publish on your website and just turn them into HTML email newsletters. Well, you can do that with MailChimp’s “Import by URL” feature (demo video here). It not only automates publishing to email, but makes the whole “campaign archive” thing really easy too. Did we mention there are “email stylesheet” tags that you can use to format the content on your published web pages to look differently (or disappear altogether) when imported into MailChimp (here’s the tutorial)?

Here’s a beautiful example of the import-by-URL feature in action, from the folks at Modx CMS:

RSS to email

Finally, if you don’t even want to log in to MailChimp at all, you can just setup an RSS-to-email campaign in MailChimp, so that any time you post a new article to your blog (or anything that generates an RSS feed), MailChimp will send it out as an email newsletter. Unlike other RSS-to-email services, you can actually design a nice HTML email template around your content and you get all the wonderful open, click, etc. stats you’d get with any other MailChimp campaign. You can even schedule the updates to go out daily, weekly, or monthly:

If you’ll recall, Stumbleupon was a service that got bought by eBay for $75 million, then sold back to its owners (check out this 2007 article predicting the “synergy” between the two companies from Mashable). Like a lot of people, I pretty much thought StumbleUpon was dead after the acquisition. But we got a pleasant surprise from this Google Analytics report for Pictaculous.com:

Pretty much all that traffic is from Stumbleupon. The first spike was about 3,000 visits. Nope, not large by any means, but notice the 2nd spike, where we got +8,400 visits? Over 7,000 of those came from StumbleUpon again. It’s the gift that keeps giving!

BTW, how’d we get “stumbled” in the first place? Not sure, but the day before the first spike, we sent out this MailChimp newsletter where we formally announced Pictaculous (look for the iPhone in the side column). Go figure. Email marketing must work!