Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
If you’re using MailChimp’s new RSS-to-Email feature to send automatic emails to your list whenever you update your blog, we’ve got a new merge tag you might want to include in your content:
*|RSS:RECENT|*
This will tell MailChimp to insert links to your 5 most recently published articles from your blog.
If you want, you can hack that merge tag a little bit like this:
*|RSS:RECENT10|*
to insert links to the 10 most recent articles instead.
We’ve created a little “chiclet” that you can add to your website that shows off how many subscribers you have on your list (actually, there are 4 different chiclet designs to choose from).
Just add a little snippet of JavaScript code to your web page, and we’ll display an automatically updating count of your subscribers.
This beautiful email campaign from Nerdbots caught our eye, so we had to showcase them here on our blog. Check out our interview with Angela Snyder from Nerdbots in our ever-growing Case Studies.
Whenever you send an email campaign in MailChimp, there are these little links in the footer for the forward-to-friend tool, unsubscribe link, update-my-preferences, etc.
Before, if your recipients hovered their mouse over those links, they’d see MailChimp’s domains (actually, we made them look pretty generic, like “foward-to-friend.com” or list-manage.com).
Some people told us they were too generic, and some others (really paranoid people) told us they looked a little suspicious. Good point. So we changed them to automatically include your own company name in front, as a subdomain. It’s a nice little touch to help make your emails look even more professional and trustworthy.
As mentioned earlier, we’ve upgraded our MonkeyRewards program to include 3 free inbox inspections (our add-on that previews your email campaign in dozens of email programs, and tells you if—and why—your email will be spam filtered) for every new customer you refer to MailChimp. This is in addition to the $30 in credit we already give to you and the refer-ee.
We’ve also re-designed the MonkeyRewards Dashboard that’s in your MailChimp account, so you can get better insight into just how much monkey love you’re spreading. Click on the thumbnail to zoom in on the screenshot. Enhancements include:
The MonkeyRewards program is really easy. All you have to do is add a little MailChimp badge to your email campaign, and/or your signup forms. Some people have been adding it to their websites, even. And that’s all you have to do. We’ll track all clicks from the badge, so we can reward you automatically. Plus, the badges don’t suck. Besides, admit it—you’ve been looking for some excuse to include a monkey somewhere in your email campaigns. Now you can earn rewards for it!
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... (more…)
Web designers and developers: ever help a client with an email marketing project, then started to get this weird, uneasy feeling in your stomach that maybe—just maybe—you were helping your client spam? You were probably more concerned about your karma, but did you know it can also hurt your client’s email reputation (and potentially yours?). Once that happens, good luck getting your email delivered, no matter what server or service you’re using.
At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.
We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.
The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:
With all the work on V3, we’ve gotten a little behind on official MailChimp news.
We’ve joined the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance, alongside companies like Bank of America, IronPort, Verisign, ReturnPath, and Symantec.
Everyone at the office here is having a fun time coming up with random quotes that MailChimp can say whenever you log in (seriously, it’s like the longest discussion in our Basecamp account ever).
Here’s an example:
and a tribute to lolcats:
What’s really creepy is I got a haircut yesterday, then logged in and got this:
How’d we do that? Perhaps the engineers are playing pranks on me.
Anyway, if you’ve got an idea for a random MailChimp welcome message, post a comment below. We’ll plug it into the interface. We’ve got customers from all over the world, so personally, I’d love it if we could get some local attitude in there.
Strongmail reports that AOL is filtering email based on your hard bounces. The basic idea is if you’ve got way too many hard bounces, you’ve got bad list hygiene, and they don’t want you sending email to their servers.
If you’re using MailChimp’s managed lists, we automagically clean hard bounces from your list immediately, to prevent this sort of thing. If you manage your list by hand in some excel file, and you manually remove bounces and unsubscribes “whenever you can get to them,” you’re going to have problems (and not just with AOL). If you’re sending your very first email campaign to an old list you’ve been collecting for years, you should remove any contacts older than 1 year, and then send your campaign in small chunks.
On a related note, here are “average email bounce rates by industry.”
Also, the new MailChimp reports will show you what your bounce rate is by ISP:
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