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.

One-click Social Share

We’ve made it super simple to connect MailChimp with Twitter, allowing you to automatically tweet a link to your campaign as soon as you hit the send button. Just go to your Account settings, and click on Integrations. Under Twitter, just click the big authorize connection button and oAuth will take it from there. This is a safer and better way of integrating with Twitter because it means you no longer have to enter your Twitter username and password directly into MailChimp.

It’s also a snap to share your email using Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Digg or Delicious using our social share feature. In your Campaigns list, just click on the “social share” link underneath the email you’d like to share with your network.

You’ll be taken to an intermediate screen (which will open in a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your web browser configured) where you’ll need to enter your username and password for the service, and then voila! Easy peasy.

Twitter Template

Are you a social media power user who wants to be able to include your Twitter identity as part of your email campaign branding? If so, the Twitter template is perfect for you.

When you go to create your email campaign, you’ll want to select the “new email” tab when it’s time to select your template. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the 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:

When you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve included a new Twitter merge tag in the right hand column. Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.

Then when you click on “pop up preview,” we’ll show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:

Tracking Twitter Tweets & Re-tweets

As you probably already know, every time you finish a MailChimp campaign and send it off, you can post a link to the campaign archive on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. In order to make this work on Twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted their email campaigns. So we did that, and you can now access those stats through the Reports tab in your MailChimp Dashboard.

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

Social Site Merge Tags

We’ve made it super easy to insert social sharing links into your emails with just a simple merge tag.

So instead of having to go grab icons and links individually for sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, you can just add *|MC:SHARE |* wherever you’d like your social links to appear.

If you only want to include certain social sites, there’s also a way to do that using MailChimp’s merge tags.

Here’s how…

*|SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2| *

So for example, to just include Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Digg, you would insert the code:

*|SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg| *

Resulting in the following:

Eventbrite Integration

We’re excited to announce that MailChimp has partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in Eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp. Ben wrote an excellent tutorial that covers all the nitty gritty details about the integration, so I won’t go into all that here.

Essentially though, you can create and sell tickets using Eventbrite. Then design a great looking invitation using MailChimp, track ticket sales and stats, and even create follow up emails using Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools!

We think this video shows how excited we are about this, and why you should be too! (warning: there’s smooching involved):

Video Merge Tag

If you want to include a link to a video on Vimeo, YouTube or Blip.tv, we’ve got a new merge tag to help save you time. It’ll automatically generate a screenshot of the embedded video player, which will link to the location of the video online.

Just use:

*|YOUTUBE:xxxx| *
*|VIMEO:xxxx| *
*|BLIPTV:xxxx| *

Where “xxxx” is the unique video identifier at the end of each link.

J—aiyznGQ in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—aiyznGQ

2753436 in:
http://blip.tv/file/2753436

6223439 in:
http://vimeo.com/6223439

The resulting email will look like this:

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some additional posts you might find interesting:

• Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Trends in Email: Sharing Via Facebook and Twitter
• Using Posterous To Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• Using Facebook Fan Pages in Conjunction With Email
• App Sketchbook Uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitterkeys and Special Characters For Email Marketing

Follow these best practices and you are sure to create awesome emails that your clients will love:

• Your email layout should be no wider than 600 pixels for best viewing in various email clients
• Avoid using the following CSS in your templates:
  • Floats
  • Positioning
  • Background images (doesn’t work in Outlook and Gmail)
• Use this wonderful reference created by our friends at Campaign Monitor to see what CSS is supported in major email clients http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
• It’s a good idea to limit the number of editable spaces in the template to keep things simple
• Name all editable spaces consistently. The name you assign via mc:edit="somename" is used to create a field in the database to store the user’s content. If they switch templates after writing content, they could lose their copy if the editable space names aren’t consistent. Use the following conventions common content areas:
  • mc:edit="header – used to name the header
  • mc:edit="header_image" – used to name an editable header image
  • mc:edit="sidecolumn" – used to name an editable left or right side column
  • mc:edit="main" – used to name the main content space
  • mc:edit="footer" – used to name the footer
• Editable images should not be placed within an editable content container
• Set the @theme declaration in your CSS for the page background, header, footer and content space so templates can be quickly customized with the MailChimp color themes. See the template language docs for the correct names to be used.
• Be creative with the use of merge tags. Use the social merge tags to provide readers of your email new ways to connect with you and share your content. Use The table of contents merge tag (*|MC:TOC|*) to create an automatic list of links to the <h1> and <h2> headings in an email.
• Be sure to include the required CAN-SPAM info in the footer (*|UNSUB|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* *|LIST:ADDRESS|*)
• Include target="_blank" in links to ensure they open a new browser window or tab when emails are viewed in browser based email clients
• Include a link for users to update their subscription preferences <a href="*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*" target="_blank">change subscription preferences</a>
• Include a link to let users view the email in a browser: <a href=”*|ARCHIVE|*” target=”_blank”>view this email in a browser.</a>
• Include a link to your website: <a href=”*|LIST:URL|*” target=”_blank”>visit our website</a>
• Feature the forward to a friend link somewhere prominent <a href=”*|FORWARD|*” target=”_blank”>forward to a friend</a>. Make a cool button treatment for it where possible to encourage sharing
• Once you’ve created a template, put test it in a campaign and try customizing it by changing color, adding content, etc to make sure it will work well for others who might be using it in different situations.

* | MC:SHARE | *

When placed, it inserted a large row of social sites that your readers could share your newsletters with. One request we started receiving immediately after launching this was the ability to specify individual social sites (not all of them at once).

You can do that now. Here’s how…

* | SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2 | *

for example if you only want digg in your email footer, you’d do this:

* | SHARE:digg | *

If you’d prefer 4 icons:

* | SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg | *, etc.

(note: I’ve added extra spaces to the merge tags in this blog post so that they render correctly for our RSS-to-Email subscribers. If you copy and paste from this post, the merge tags will not work.)

If you code this into your email content:

It’ll look like this when you actually send the campaign:

It’s a great way to give your most recent subscribers access to your past content. Note that it pulls the subject lines from your 5 previous campaigns. Also, you can change it to any number, like: *|LIST:RECENT3|*, *|LIST:RECENT10|*, *|LIST:RECENT20|*, etc., if you’d like to change it from the default 5.

Speaking of past campaigns, learn how to embed our free campaign archive module onto your own website

Just add a little snippet of JavaScript code to your web page, and we’ll display an automatically updating count of your subscribers.