Interview with Deb Richardson from Mozilla
When we found out Mozilla was using MailChimp, all the techies in our company just about you-know-whatted in their pants. So I just had to ask Deb Richardson from Mozilla to sit down for a little Q&A...
MailChimp:
Wow. Mozilla uses MailChimp? Do you have any idea how proud the nerds in our office are right now? They could die tomorrow and they'd be happy. What made you pick the chimp?
Deb Richardson:
When we decided to do an email newsletter, we looked at several options for handling it, including the possibility of just hosting it in-house. A bit of research into the legal requirements for doing bulk email quickly convinced us that using a third-party service was the wisest choice -- while we could put together a system that would allow us to properly comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, it was just much, much easier and faster to leave that sort of thing to the experts. The last thing we want is to be accused of spamming, so we decided to find a service that would take care of all that complicated stuff for us.
After evaluating several available services, we ended up settling on MailChimp for a bunch of reasons. Mozilla takes privacy very, very seriously and MailChimp's privacy policies are excellent. You also have a stellar reputation as an internet citizen (for being non-spammers), a simple and wonderfully elegant interface (you guys really have done an outstanding job with that), excellent testing tools, full and easy support for both plaintext and HTML formats, a simple and fully compliant opt-in system, great formatting and design tools (including a variety of easily-customizable pre-built templates), and good tracking and reporting tools (although we currently don't use these at all).
To make a long story slightly shorter, MailChimp passed a long and detailed list of requirements with flying colors. Most importantly, however, is that MailChimp makes all of this kinda fun, and we value fun pretty highly at Mozilla. We also like monkeys. A lot.
MailChimp:
We heard through the grapevine (bugzilla) that you actually fixed a teeny-tiny little bug in Firefox specifically so that you could use MailChimp. Is that true?
Deb Richardson:
Well, sort of. When first evaluating MailChimp I discovered that the rich editing interface wasn't working properly. After a little digging, I figured out that we had introduced a bug that caused the FCK editor component to break in Firefox. We fixed it, of course, but it was really because regressions are bad and we fix any of those that we find. Other people had noticed the bug in other places, so it wasn't really specifically about MailChimp (sorry!).
MailChimp:
We have to ask. Your audience seems more like the RSS-type. Do you find that the email newsletter attracts a different segment of your audience? Are they less technical, or more loyal, or does anything set them apart from the majority of your audience?
Deb Richardson:
The reason we chose to focus on a periodical email newsletter for about:mozilla has more to do with the purpose of the publication more than the nature of the audience. As you guessed, many Mozilla folk do use RSS feeds a great deal, and there are a huge number of feeds available for various Mozilla channels including Planet Mozilla, all our newsgroups, blogs, forums, and so forth. Adding yet another feed-centric information source to an already massive pile of feed-centric information sources didn't feel that useful since the newsletter is intended to help cut through that information overload by providing a high-level summary of the most important news items for the week. We all also get an absolute ton of email, of course, so we make the newsletter content available through both email and web feeds -- this way everyone can choose the content source that best suits their needs.
MailChimp:
Any tips you can offer to other email marketers on writing newsletters to a techie audience?
Deb Richardson:
Our newsletter is less about marketing and more about making sure that the really important news and information gets out to the right people within the Mozilla Project at the right time. Most of the content we publish is actually provided by the community itself, so our newsletter is very much "by the community, for the community". Using the newsletter as a tool to facilitate communication within a large and diverse group -- incidentally helping everyone do their jobs better -- is basically a win-win situation for everyone. The Mozilla Project is huge and getting more massive and complex every day, and our newsletter is primarily focused on improving intra-Project communication.
That said, I think the best way to write for any audience is to focus on what's really important to that audience using language that's appropriate for that audience. Using highly corporate or "markety" language when talking with technical people isn't going to get you very far, for example. Be simple, concise, and specific with your language, and make sure your content is genuinely interesting to the people you're talking to. Useful content that's timely and well written should pretty much sell itself.
MailChimp:
Can you tell us about Mozilla Messaging, and how people reading this can help the cause?
Deb Richardson:
Mozilla Messaging was born out of the belief within the Mozilla project that to promote our vision of an open, competitive, innovative Internet, it's important to have an organization focused on improving the state of email and internet communications. Mozilla Messaging shepherds the Mozilla Thunderbird project, as well as promotes the Mozilla manifesto beyond product development.
The best way to help the cause is to use software which promotes openness and interoperability. If you want to get involved with Thunderbird specifically, we have a page with pointers: (http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/getinvolved/).
More MailChimp case studies
|
