MailChimp

An Interview with Angela Snyder

Co-founder & Artist at Nerdbots.net

Tell Us About Nerdbots, and how you guys got started

Some people are dog people, some people are cat people, but Nick and I, we are robot people. Because of this soft spot in our hearts for all things robot, we decided on a whim one day to build one ourselves. Armed with an idea and some power tools, we made our first robot creation and just haven't stopped since.

Why'd you choose MailChimp?

I'm a graphic designer by trade, so it was really important to me to have creative control over what our mailings looked like. Right away, I knew what I wanted the emails to be visually, but I didn't know the first thing about all of the tech stuff that goes into making it happen.

I'm a little bit embarrassed that the morning I needed to send out our first mailing, I actually thought I could figure it all out in a few hours if I just Googled "how to code an email." It was sheer luck that my Google trail somehow brought me to MailChimp, a service I didn't even know existed.

I was so relieved and excited that I immediately had to log in and show Nick, the business end of our partnership. He was impressed with the ease of use and the creative flexibility it provided me, but what really sealed the deal was when he discovered all the charts and analytics. It was enough to make the geeky businessman in him salivate.

I bet a lot of other artists would like to hear about your email marketing process.

Each month, we get hundreds of visitors to our First Friday studio openings, a popular event in our community. Because we're only open on First Fridays, we see our customers just once a month. We use our newsletter to remind people during the in between that we also sell our creations online.

We also use it as a tool that lets our loyal customers be the first to know about the new robots we've made. Once we have a new one completed, we name it, come up with a personality for it and include it in our mailing. And sometimes we also have really exciting news to throw in there too!