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

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Tony Robbins will both be keynote speakers at the event. Other presenters will be covering a range of topics, from branding to social gaming, tweeting celebrities and beyond. We definitely look forward to stuffing our brains full of new and interesting information and are also excited about meeting some of our users on the west coast. If you’re in the area and want to say hi, just give us a shout.

As MailChimp’s list of social media features continues growing, it seems only natural for us to attend the Twitter Conference. Especially with our new Twitter Template and our recent research showing that Twitter is being used more frequently than Facebook in email marketing. Oh, and you also know that you can track tweets and re-tweets about your email campaigns in your MailChimp dashboard, right? Hey, and don’t forget about our built-in integration with Twitter and other social sites, mmkay?

MailChimp provides a one-click feature for subscribers to share their completed email campaigns via the primary social networks. Currently 9% of campaigns (roughly 90 million emails) are shared via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, or Delicious.

This is a relatively new feature at MailChimp that lets your subscribers share your campaign via twitter, facebook, digg, reddit, linked in, and other social sites. If you’d like to add this to your MailChimp campaigns too, just insert this little tag: *|MC:SHARE|* in your footer (or wherever you want) and we’ll do the rest.

Another cool merge tag to try: *|TRANSLATE:EMAIL_LANG|*

It all started innocently enough this past Friday, October 3.  MailChimp Co Founder Ben Chestnut was to give a presentation on the basics of email marketing at this year’s Webmaster Jam Session.  In an effort to showcase the newly acquired life-size MailChimp (and pull off some subliminal marketing at the same time), Ben brought Frederick Von Chimpenheimer IV plus two cases of bananas with him to the Loudermilk Center in Atlanta.  Had we known then what we know now, Freddie might  have stayed safe from the hands of his ruthless abductors!  Allow me to recount for you the harrowing saga surrounding our dearly beloved missing MailChimp.

Our first indication that something had gone amiss came in the form of a tweet from Ihazurchimp.  We received the transmission early Saturday morning, October 4:

Mission accomplished: Chimp abducted, sans bananas. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ihazurchimp/2911326328/ #WJS08

The MailChimp Tactical Assault Operations crew was dismayed to say the least.  With only a Twitter username and the knowledge that these rogue chimpnappers were lurking about the Webmaster Jam Session, MC-TAO was forced to wait it out.  In the mean time, we created this page as an emotional coping mechanism.

Fortunately we didn’t have to wait long before receiving the next in a series of cryptic communications from Ihazurchimp.  The tweet was directed squarely at MailChimp, and it was clear that these “evil-doers” were not interested in bargaining:

@mailchimp The chimp is being well cared for since being liberated from indentured servitude. We only wish he would stop flinging his poo.

They wanted one thing, and one thing only: Frederick Von Chimpenheimer IV.  From the series of messages that followed, it became apparent that the captors’ agenda had little to do with a disdain for MailChimp as an organization.  Nope.  It was being played off as a radical protest for chimp liberation.

By Sunday night it was blatantly apparent that Freddie’s abductors had taken him across state lines.  (Little did they know this would allow their crime to be prosecuted as a Federal offense!)  I present to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit B at right: MailChimp in South Carolina.  Fortunately for MC-TAO, as the details of the Freddie’s disappearance began to unfold, we had lots of unsolicited help from our friends and allies.

Ken Seals, in particular, did some excellent detective work, deducing that OnWired has the MailChimp.  And who is OnWired, you ask?  From their website:

By day, we’re a small, vibrant web design studio located near Raleigh, North Carolina. By night: a band of highly–trained, elite special operations web mercenaries on the lam from the law.

Yeah, we thought it was a strange coincidence too.  Furthermore, Ken exposed the fact that Jon Norris (Creative Director of OnWired) used to work for Bronto, one of MailChimp’s best frienemies.  OnWired’s office is a mere 23 miles from Bronto headquarters, and we suspect Freddie will be transported there and held captive against his will.  The evidence just doesn’t quite seem to piece together as neatly as it should though, as indicated by this tweet posted Wednesday October 8:

@kenseals Thank you for your thorough investigation. Our plan to frame OnWired has gone better than we could have possibly imagined.

courtesy of @jasongraphix

This amber alert went out over the wire but turned up zero leads.  As you can imagine, this is all very disturbing to Freddie’s family here at MailChimp.  Our dream is to see him return home to Atlanta, and we’re holding on to the hope that he will.  If you have any information in this pressing matter, do not hesitate to call MC-TAO right away.  All leads are good leads, and we’re willing to do what it takes to get back our chimp. And to the captors, know this: We will hunt you down and seek sweet, sweet revenge.  This is not a threat, it’s a promise.

TwitterKeys is a service developed by the folks over at The Next Web Blog that allows you to insert certain Unicode characters in your tweets. Instead of posting that you have a conference call and coffee date before you head to the airport this afternoon, you might tweet something like “☎ then ♨ before ☞ ✈” To address the challenge of trying to remember all these great characters, @bomega and @sandervdv created a bookmarklet that brings up a floating pop-up window with three tabs. Once you drag it to your web browser’s bookmarks toolbar for instant access, you simply double click on the character you want to use.  Just ⌘ c to copy and ⌘ v to paste in to Twitter.

As a Twitter evangelist myself, I added TwitterKeys to my bookmarks toolbar as soon as I found out about it– and especially since The Next Web uses MailChimp!  (To read more about that, check out our recent interview with Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, one of the founders of The Next Web.)  Since the bookmarklet was occupying such prime browser real estate, and with the ease of copying and pasting characters, I started sneaking them into IM conversations.  But my obsession didn’t end there.  Like a giddy pre-teenage girl, I started using  TwitterKeys anywhere and everywhere text was involved… including email subject lines!

click to download the TwitterKeys for email marketing compatibility chart (.pdf)

It didn’t occur to me that this was a big deal (in a good way), until I was talking to Ben about successfully making contact with some very prestigious MailChimp customers using subject lines like, “MailChimp ♥ Ubercool“.  I thought about the fact that these special characters might not render correctly on the receiving end, but at that point my attempts at making contact hadn’t been very successful.  I was starting to get bummed out and a little discouraged and figured it was worth a shot.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, and it was time to try something that would make my email stand apart from the crowd.  Email marketers take note: it worked; using TwitterKeys in my email subject lines produced the response I was looking for and dramatically improved email open rates.

In order to make sure my discovery was actually something to “write home about,” I ran a battery of tests using MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector.  Inbox Inspector allows you preview a campaign in all the major email clients, test spam filtering and check firewall compatibility before you send it out to your list.  So just to give you an idea, I ran inspections both with and without TwitterKeys characters in the subject line.  Then inspections with TwitterKeys in the body of the email but not the subject line and vice-versa.  What about multiple TwitterKeys characters in the subject?  Was there any relation between TwitterKeys and spam filtering?  How about multiple TwitterKeys in the subject line, the body of the email, and no other discernible text?  You get the point here:
e x t e n s i v e  testing.

One of my most surprising discoveries was the fact that these special characters don’t have any impact on spam filtering, meaning that if you use them, your email is no more likely to be filtered out and classified as spam.  This is great news for email marketers!  I’ve compiled my findings into a one page chart that you can download and use as a reference.  It’s broken down by email client, and I’ve listed whether TwitterKeys work in the subject line (yes or no), as well as which characters (if any) will render in the body of the email.  One thing to note, however, is that TwitterKeys almost never work in plain text emails.  MailChimp allows you to copy the text from your HTML email and use it for the plain text version as a time-saving tool– just remember you’ll have to replace any TwitterKeys symbols with the actual words they represent.

How will we keep customers up to date on the progress of our server outage? We can’t post updates on our website. It’ll be temporarily down. We can’t send you emails. It’ll be temporarily down.

Twitter is where we’ll be posting minute-by-minute updates on what’s going on during server migration (and whatever else is happening at The MailChimp Intergalactic Headquarters):

http://www.twitter.com/mailchimp