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New Twitter email template in MailChimp

September 15th, 2009 | by Ben

twitter-loveMailChimp’s list of built-in social media features just keeps growing.

Today, we launched a new twitter email template. The twitter template is perfect for social media power users (um, no “social media d-bags,” please) who want their emails to follow their twitter “identity.”

Here’s how it works:

When you go to create a campaign, select the “new email” tab:

new-email-tabl

Then choose the new “twitter” template option:

twitter-template

On the next screen (the campaign builder), you’ll see that MailChimp visits your twitter page, and automatically pulls in your colors and background image:

twitter-template-mailchimp

If you look closely at the right column, you’ll notice a nifty new twitter merge tag:

twitter-full-profile

Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.

Clicking on “pop up preview” will show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:

pop-up-preview-twitter-template

As you can see, there’s even a little link to “follow.”

Setting Up The Twitter Integration

How does MailChimp even know your twitter account? Because by now you’ve used our awesome campaign tweeting and re-tweet tracking integration, right?!? If so, your settings are already saved. If not, just make sure you go to your account page, then click on Integrations:

integrations

and then enter your settings for twitter:

twitter-authorize

Finally, if you’re new to MailChimp’s social features, check out this video:

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Posted in MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade, Using MailChimp | 37 Comments »

37 Comments

    • Bob Potter says:

      Thank Ben. You rock! You do an awesome job of keeping us up-to-date in an easy-to-understand way.

      Reply to this comment
    • Mike Templeton says:

      I take it the new “TWITTER:FULL_PROFILE” merge tag is also available as a standalone item?

      Great work pulling this together. The auto-generation feature for grabbing colors is awesome (like always), but I think the profile inclusion is even more innovative. Now instead of just a “Follow us on Twitter” link, you’ve got a full blown incorporation of your profile inside the email.

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        Mike, the merge tag can indeed be used as a standalone item. FTR, my original version of this article had an _underscore_ in that merge tag, but that was incorrect. The correct tag is: *|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE|*

        Reply to this comment
    • adam mclane says:

      I’m trying to get this to work on an existing campaign. Is that possible? What am I doing wrong? My tag looks like this, *|TWITTER:FULL_PROFILE|*, right?

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        Hi Adam, I don’t remember there being an underscore in “FULLPROFILE.” Try it w/out.

        Reply to this comment
        • Ben says:

          DUH. I wrote the article with the wrong merge tag. Sorry Adam, there’s no underscore like I typed in my example. I’ve edited the article. Thanks for pointing this out!

          Reply to this comment
          • adam mclane says:

            Perfect! Looks great. I pulled that out and it works great. I’m guessing as time goes on I’ll be able to hack it with some preferences? Like… having it display 2-3 tweets as opposed to 5 so it fits my content?

            I know, picky picky. :)

            Reply to this comment
            • Ben says:

              Hi Adam, Yes. You definitely know our M.O. We launch something, see if anyone even uses it, wait for enhancement requests, then the team meets in the office thunderdome to “decide” which features to work on next.
            • Chad says:

              Hi Adam, this part is less documented, but there are two other Twitter merge fields you can use to customize the output. *|TWITTER:PROFILE|* will show just your profile information and follow link without the latest tweets list. *|TWITTER:TWEETSXX|* will show your “XX” latest tweets, so *|TWITTER:TWEETS3|* will show the latest 3 tweets instead of 5. We’ll hopefully get these documented and up on the mergetag cheatsheet in the next day or two.
            • adam mclane says:

              Chad- I will use those, thanks! I put it into a couple templates yesterday and it looked a bit odd. Those hacks will dip the whole thing in awesome sauce.
    • Thomas says:

      What video maker do you use? Camtasia?
      It looks very good

      Reply to this comment
        • Jon says:

          I saw in an earlier post – back in 2006(!) that you where using Adobe Captivate. Would you recommend Screenflow over Captivate?

          Reply to this comment
          • Ben says:

            They’re for different purposes, imho. Josh does um, “edu-tainment” kinda videos, where we need fast-paced action-packed pseudo-tutorials. But Jennifer, in our support department, might need to use captivate for step-by-step “real” tutorials, where someone has to learn all the nitty gritty details. We’re not at the point where captivate can be used yet, though. The app is still changing quite a lot, due to all the new feature enhancements. But if/when the app “matures” (God forbid), and features don’t change too much, taking the time to do full tutorials with Captivate might be worth it.

            Reply to this comment
      • jennifer says:

        I’ve started using Camtasia for quick how-to tutorials. You can see my first attempts on our youtube-

        http://www.youtube.com/user/MailChimp

        Reply to this comment
    • Jan says:

      Hi Ben,
      sounds great! But unfortunately doesn’t work on my account… :(
      Is the link “use template” may be wrong? Should it be …wizard/html-template?id=… instead of …wizard/html?id=… ?!
      Any idea? I want to try it! :)

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        Hi Jan, Uh-oh, what’s not working? If it’s not pulling data from twitter, then try going to the integrations page in your account settings, disconnect from twitter, then reconnect. If you’re still having issues, definitely contact help -at- mailchimp.com, and they’ll look into it.

        Reply to this comment
        • Jan says:

          Hi Ben, no it is one step earlier when choosing the template.
          It is a IE 7 problem…! It works fine in Firefox. It is great! Thank’s a lot.

          Reply to this comment
    • Jan says:

      ..sorry IE 8

      Reply to this comment
    • Jason says:

      Very nice template! I love how you guys keep putting new templates out and keep integrating with other social media.

      Keep up the good work!

      Reply to this comment
    • Sean Patrick McPeak says:

      I *heart* Ben. I wanna be you when I grow up. :)

      Reply to this comment
    • Sam Bigger - Utah Web Design says:

      I love this template!!! Thanks Ben.

      Reply to this comment
    • Paul Gailey says:

      I like this!

      I do notice the tweet data gets pulled in at the time of sending the email so if there is lag of the recipient opening the email the twitter data is possibly out of date – however if they click the browser version link they will get a fresh load of twitter data.

      (incidentally there is a “N” missing on the “Notify me of followup comment via e-mail” in the comment box)

      Reply to this comment
    • Bodog says:

      This is definitely a cool feature. Unfortunately, I can’t use it yet for my clients, since the integration is account-wide.

      A useful feature would be per-list integration.

      For example, I have a client who runs a number of venues, each with their own Twitter account. Each venue has a separate list for subscription purposes. It would be great if I could somehow associate a Twitter account with each list either via the integrations section of Account Management or the list tools section of each list, just like I can with Google Analytics tracking.

      I know I could open a new account for each venue, but that seems like over-handling to me. Much better to keep one account for the parent company and separate venues by lists.

      Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      Someone @mailchimp correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that for these twitter-specific merge tags, you actually can specify what twitter profile to pull data from. I don’t know the exact markup of the tags to use, but I’ve seen people do it internally.

      Reply to this comment
      • jennifer says:

        You are correct, Ben.

        http://eepurl.com/ffmo

        Right now there’s only one full Twitter Integration with one account, but you can have multiple twitter feeds show on your campaign if you use the Merge tag listed on the link above.

        Reply to this comment
      • Bodog says:

        Thanks for the reply Ben. I don’t see this option on the cheat sheet:

        http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/merge/

        So I assume it must be either experimental or undocumented. To do this, the account would still need to be authenticated somehow and I don’t see any options in the control panel to authenticate more than one Twitter account.

        Even if it’s just “in the works”, that would be excellent.

        Reply to this comment
        • jennifer says:

          Not sure if our replies made it to you Bodog, I see Neil and I replied to the thread, but not to your comments specifically.

          Right now there’s only one full Twitter Integration with one account, but you can have multiple twitter feeds show on your campaign if you use the following:

          You can use the Twitter merge tag |TWITTER:FULLPROFILE:twitterusername| to pull in each specific profile. Only publicly available feeds will be pulled in, so if one account is protected, those tweets will not be displayed on the campaigns. Not authentication is necessary. You can see Merge tags in action by using the pop-up preview mode. If you see it not working, I’d contact the support department for further troubleshooting, but using that tag should work for you.

          I’ll see about getting that added to the Merge tag cheatsheet so that it is documented.

          Reply to this comment
          • Bodog says:

            Thanks for the replies guys, this is exactly what I need. I haven’t had a chance to test, but I bet it works just as I need it to.

            Cheers.

            Reply to this comment
    • Neil Bainton says:

      It is possible to pull twitter profiles for any public twitter page using the merge tag *|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE:mailchimp|*. You would replace MailChimp with the profile you want to pull into your campaign.

      Reply to this comment
    • Andy Ciordia says:

      I don’t know how I missed this but I’m so glad I found it. It looks beautiful, slides in to play easy and allows us to bridge a little divide between those on the social vines and not. Keep up these ideas. A facebook badge like one in the future?

      Reply to this comment

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