If you know the secret code, it unlocks some cool discounts on useful stuff…

Okay, there’s no secret code. You just click the links to get our partners’ promo codes. But secret codes would be cool, cuz then we could do decoder rings.

The discount codes are cool nonetheless.

Anyway, you can get very special discounts from our friends at Eventbrite, Squarespace, Moo cards, Batchbook CRM, iStockphoto and more here:

Unlock special discounts from MailChimp partners

To turn them on, go to your Account Settings -> Contact Info

and check the boxes for the alerts you want.

You can also get alerts via RSS using Chimp Chatter, and you can access stats about campaigns on your iPhone.

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

364 new HTML email templates for the holidays added to MailChimp

A little while back, we partnered with TemplateZone to provide MailChimp customers with 101 free HTML email templates. It was downloaded over 25,000 times, so we think people are liking this application.

We’re excited to announce that they just added 364 more holiday templates for MailChimp customers, completely free!

All you have to do is go download the holiday add-on pack and install it…

What’s the difference?

Some of you might be wondering why you’d use TemplateZone’s templates instead of the built-in templates already inside MailChimp. The answer is more control. Unlike MailChimp, which is a web application, High Impact Email is desktop software, so it’s easier to handle image-heavy designs with, saaaaaay, diagonal text:

Or designs that have fancy masking:

where you can upload, resize, and crop your own image into the background:

there are some templates that allow you to drop in your own product photos, and text overlays:

How it works

If you’ve never used TemplateZone’s High Impact Email software before, here’s how it basically works:

1. You download and install the MailChimp-specific TemplateZone software on this page (it’s PC only, but Mac users have 600+ template options detailed here)
2. If you want the holiday pack, install that as well.
3. You’ll need to link the software to your MailChimp account. The software will walk you through that during setup.
4. Pick a template, and customize it within the software.
5. Pass it over to MailChimp.
6. Log in to MailChimp, go to the Campaigns screen
7. Open the campaign you just created in TemplateZone, and hit Send.

Here’s a video tutorial:

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.

Segment your list based on customer purchase activity

There are several different ways you can use this new segmentation feature…

Segment by Products Purchased in the Past

You can send an email to people who’ve purchased a particular product from your store:

Segment by “Big Spenders”

And like I mentioned here, you can now search for segments under the “Lists” area of MailChimp, too.

So maybe you want a list of all the subscribers who’ve spent more than some amount:

you can download that list of “big spenders” and make a new list, or do some kind of external research on them in your own database:

Segment by Amount Spent on a Single Order:

Generate a list of people who’ve spent more than some amount on a single order

Combine Segment Criteria

Or, you might combine segment-by-engagement and send to your most loyal customers who spent good money with you recently:

Add ZIP Code Proximity

If you collect address information, you can even add ZIP code proximity to your segmentation criteria:

Activating Ecommerce Tracking in MailChimp

To make all this work, you need to have our ecommerce360 plugin installed (Magento, Zencart, osCommerce, and Prestashop versions available).

Drupal user? There’s talk of a Drupal/Ubercart plugin here.

After you’ve got your plugin installed, whenever you send a campaign, open up the “advanced tracking options:”

Then check the box for e-commerce tracking:

We’ll automatically tag all your product links with tracking code, and the rest is magic.

Email Marketing ROI Reports

But wait, there’s more! In addition to all the great segmentation options, you should activate our Analytics360 tool to get these handy ROI reports for each of your MailChimp campaigns:

We basically calculate how much money the email campaign cost, and compare it to how much money your campaign made.

You can totally print this report out and leave it on your manager’s desk with a little sticky note that says, “why I deserve a raise.“

They included some beautiful new holiday templates, plus some new themes like “Environment” (for all the green and earth-friendly businesses we’re seeing in MailChimp) and “Functional” for use in very specific applications, like, say, Autoresponders.

What’s cool is that since we’re using our new Template Design Language, some of the templates have some unique MailChimp features baked right in. I’ll show you what I mean…

To find them, create a campaign. When it’s time to pick your template, go to the “Gallery” tab:

You’ll notice a pulldown menu where you can sort the template by category:

Under “Holidays” you’ll notice some elegant options, like:

Mmmm, turducken (what the heck is a “turducken?“).

Under the “Functional” category, we have new templates that you can use for very specific cases, like an annual autoresponder when it’s time to come in for a checkup:

Under the “Environment” category, you’ll find this template:

Let’s take a closer look at this one.

In the right column, you’ll notice a series of tips. We’re using MailChimp’s nifty ability to create addable content blocks:

Just keep clicking the little “+” icon, to add more tips.

Yes, Style and Versatility

I know this template is called “Live Green,” but this particular template is actually versatile enough to be used for other applications.

Like, saaaay, a plumber’s newsletter.

Let’s use the iStockphoto integration in our image gallery to search for “plumber” pictures:

and plop it into the left column of our template:

After that, I can tweak the colors, fonts, and other styles to match my brand.

Exportable for Template Hackers

Here’s a power tip from Fabio (yes, that’s his real name). He’s one of the DesignLab scientists who contributed a bunch of these templates, and is working on many more.

“Most of these pre-built templates are kind of rigid, but if you’re handy with HTML/CSS, you can take any one of them and export the code in order to tweak it exactly the way you want:

Tip: You’ll want to brush up on our Email Template Language (here’s a handy video tutorial).

Then, re-import your custom template back into MailChimp by clicking this button:

just copy-paste your code into our template editor and hit save:

We hope you find these useful. Stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot more email template announcements to make!

But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.

It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…

If you want to include a video in your MailChimp campaign, and it’s hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo, just get the video ID, and stick it in our new video merge tag like this:

MailChimp will go to the video, grab its keyframe (a still image from your video), then overlay some video control elements to make it look playable:

Whenever users click, it’ll take them to the hosted version of your video.

No need to screenshot anything, upload to MailChimp, etc. Just use the merge tag, and you’re done.

We’re really excited about this one, because it’s our first integration-via-bookmarklet we’ve ever tried.

1. Installing your bookmarklet

Log in to MailChimp,click on the Account button, and go to the Integrations Panel (marvel at all the integrations):

Whoah, that's a lot. Go to mailchimp.com/extras to see even more integrations with MailChimp

At the bottom, you’ll see “GoToMeeting.” Expand it, and you’ll see a link to a bookmarklet.

Drag the bookmarklet into your browser's bookmarks bar

Drag that link into your browser’s bookmarks bar:

Ok, now you’ve got our bookmarklet installed.

2. Passing webinars over to MailChimp

Next time you’re logged in to your GoToWebinar account, go to the “My Webinars” page:

and then click that Bookmarklet you just installed in your browser.

That’ll grab the list of webinars on this page, and pass them over to MailChimp.

If you have multiple webinars, we’ll ask you to pick one:

Then we’ll open up a special GoToWebinar template in MailChimp (note that this template is actually hidden and inaccessible from our template options, unless you specifically pass GoToMeeting data via the bookmarklet) with your links ready to go:

While you’re here, you might want to edit the email design a little.

Maybe you can pick a different color palette, or use our iStockphoto integration to find some good pictures.

Hmm, think I’ll change the title of the event to “MailChimp Secrets” and search for “whispering monkeys” (get it? secrets?):

and insert the image into your invitation:

Because EVERYTHING is better with monkeys

Or you might even want to switch the template to one of your own saved versions. Click the “change template” link:

and we’ll stick the GoToWebinar content into one of your saved template designs like this:

Important note for template designers: MailChimp looks for a content section in your template called “main.” All of MailChimp’s default templates have this. But if you’re an advanced coder who’s using the MailChimp Template Design Language to build your own templates, you’ll need to have an editable content region called “main” in order to pass GoToWebinar data here.

Here’s a quick YouTube video on how to do all this:

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.