August 9, 2008 – 6:05 am
Do you ever wish you had more time to do your email marketing? When you do find the time, do you basically just copy-paste content from your blog into your email newsletter?
Same here.
So in MailChimp v3.2, we decided to make all that automatic with our RSS-to-email tool. You create a beautiful HTML email template in MailChimp, then tell it where to grab your RSS feed (this can be your blog, events calendar—any RSS feed whatsoever). Then, whenever your RSS feed gets updated, MailChimp automatically sends an email to your subscribers.
It’s like putting your email marketing on auto-pilot.
And unlike other blog-to-email tools, you can totally customize the RSS emails with your branding, you can track opens and clicks, and you can even include advertising. Here’s a demo video:
Give it a try! MailChimp free trial
Posted in MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade | No Comments »
August 8, 2008 – 12:15 pm
We’ve been adding a lot of international support to MailChimp recently, so that our customers all over the globe can send campaigns in whatever language they choose.
In MailChimp v3.2, which is going live on August 11th, the entire opt-in process built into MailChimp will be available in 16.5 different languages:
By the way, that “16.5″ is not a typo. See, one of the “pseudo” languages we’ve added is Chimplish... Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in MailChimp News | 5 Comments »
August 5, 2008 – 2:17 pm
We’re launching MailChimp v3.2 this weekend (the 9th). It’s a free, automatic upgrade for all MailChimp customers, and is chock full of time-saving enhancements and innovative features that will make your email marketing smarter and easier. We’ll be posting more details after launch, but here’s a sneak-peek…
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Posted in MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade | 7 Comments »
August 1, 2008 – 5:55 am
 ReturnPath just released their 2008 Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. There’s a lot of great data to digest here.
- Only about 20% of email servers out there are properly setup and can be considered “legit” email senders.
- Your Sender Score can be closely correlated with your Delivered Rate (something I assumed in this blog post, but couldn’t provide any proof—until now). Note that “delivered” means “it made it to the machine of your recipient” but doesn’t necessarily mean “it wasn’t spam filtered.” The mailman delivers your mail, but doesn’t know if recipients will rip it up and throw it away before reading it.
- Only 0.63% of email from legit servers can be classified as “Commercial.” That either means commercial email marketers are not sending as much email (and “clogging up the intertubes”) as we all thought, or that they’re all sending from illegit or unknown servers, and not following best practices.
Then, they give two big whoppers of insight:
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Posted in Deliverability, MailChimp News, Stats, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 2 Comments »
August 1, 2008 – 5:46 am
At MailChimp, we manage over 65,000 subscriber lists, with over 75 million recipients in them. We’ve seen a sloppy list or two, and have dealt with a delivery problem or two. So we’ve learned a thing or two about how sloppy lists happen, and how to prevent them. Most sloppy lists come from ignorance, not evil. But that doesn’t make it any less stupid. So here are some stupid list management mistakes to avoid:
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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Deliverability, MailChimp News, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 2 Comments »
August 1, 2008 – 5:19 am
I run the abuse desk at MailChimp. I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve had to shut down because of improper use of a tradeshow email list. Seriously, “tradeshow list” is a boilerplate message that I’ve setup in my email program now. The sad part is that tradeshows are supposed to be a great networking opportunity. But too many newbie email marketers mess it up. Here are some tips for dealing with tradeshow lists:
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Posted in Abuse Desk Stories, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | No Comments »
July 31, 2008 – 2:39 pm
 Most of the major ISPs have some sort of feedback loop (FBL) in place, where their users can report spam (learn more about feedback loops, and how they can affect your deliverability). Email marketing services like MailChimp have to sign up for all those ISPs’ feedback loops, so we can properly clean our users’ lists of complainers.
Just recently, MailChimp has experienced some amazing growth, and so we’ve had to add more IP addresses to our delivery queue. That means we’ve had to re-submit all our IPs to all the ISP FBLs again.
Normally, each ISP has its own FBL, with its own set of requirements, application process, review process, and reporting format.
This time around, we’re noticing that nearly all the FBL application emails we’re getting back from these ISPs look exactly the same. Then we figured out why: they’ve switched to ReturnPath’s FBL service. This is nice, because: 1) we’ve been ReturnPath partners for a long time, and 2) hopefully, we’ll all have a centralized FBL system to work with (and submit IPs to), instead of managing so many different accounts with so many different ISPs.
Posted in Deliverability, Emarketing, Business, MailChimp News | 2 Comments »
July 31, 2008 – 2:06 pm
We’re getting more questions from customers with large email lists about sending their campaigns from a dedicated IP address, vs. using MailChimp’s “shared” pool of IPs.
They want to know if their deliverability will be any better if they use a dedicated IP.
It’s not a question we can answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”
Mark Brownlow has a good overview of all the different points to consider before sending from your own dedicated IP.
At MailChimp, whenever we setup a new IP address (either to add to our overall rotation, or a dedicated IP address for a high-volume customer) it takes time to “break it in.” Here’s what we go through…
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Posted in Deliverability | No Comments »
July 31, 2008 – 10:56 am
Jesse’s our new API engineer. He’s been quietly beefing up the MailChimp API’s functionality, and making it work with just about any application or database that you can think of hooking us into, or building a plugin for.
He just recently sent an email announcement to our API users about some upcoming changes. Of course Jesse’s used MailChimp to send countless tests to himself. But this was his first time sending out a “real campaign, to a real list with real people” using MailChimp. It was also our first-ever attempt at contacting just our API users, so this was a learning experience for all of us.
 I casually walked past his desk a few hours after he sent the campaign, and asked him how his stats looked. I thought he’d say, “Hmm, I dunno, let me check” and then he’d open his browser, log in, etc. But nope, he made this quick flick of his wrist, and up popped his email campaign report.
Turns out he’d been watching his stats change by the minute (like all our new customers who send their first campaigns).It was cool to see him so happy about his stats.
It’s exciting to see your email stats go up, up, up for the first time. Eventually, you get past that first high, and will prefer to receive your stats later, via RSS.
Anyway, before his campaign stats page fully loaded, and before our pie charts boing-boinged into place, he told me, “I’m running circles around the software industry.”
He was referring to our email marketing benchmark data, which we embed right into your MailChimp email marketing stats (screenshot of how that works).
Jesse got a 50% open rate and 11% click rate, which when compared to the average for the software industry, is pretty darn good. How do you compare to your industry peers?
Posted in MailChimp API, Stats | No Comments »
July 30, 2008 – 2:51 pm
 Mike Schinkel hosts a local meetup group called Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. He called me up recently to speak about “Email Marketing Basics,” but I told him that whenever I do that, attendees think I’m actually The Dude who sends all the email around here. And so what happens is 2 years later, people send me their logo files and customer spreadsheets, telling me, “Okay, I’m finally ready to do some email marketing, so here’s my stuff—put together a mockup of our newsletter, post it for approval, and I’ll send you the $15 check.” Maybe it’s the way I dress.
I usually have to explain we’re kind of a “self serve” tool, with kind of a lot of customers, and I kinda have to do other stuff right now. But sometimes I just do everything they tell me, so I can test our product (our engineers tell me the technical term for that is “eating your dogfood“).
ANY-way, Mike thought that was funny, so he asked me to come in and discuss the MailChimp entrepreneur story instead: how we started as a little web-dev agency, and became a software company with tens of thousands of customers all over the world (condensed version at /about/).
It was fun. Sandi Karchmer Solow gave a good lecture on email marketing best practices, and I got to jump in at the end with a few stats and case studies to support what she said. If you’re new to email marketing, and you’re not sure how to get your business started, Sandi’s a good consultant to go to.
I learned a few things at this event:
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Posted in MailChimp News | 1 Comment »
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