MailChimp

MailChimp Interviews Shawn Smith

Creator of Shawnimals

MailChimp user Shawn Smith is the creator of Shawnimals. We’ve all doodled crazy creatures before, but not many of us get to keep doing it for a living when we’re “grown up.” Not Sensei Shawn. He is livin’ the dream. He doodles, makes plushies, and has his own Nintendo game (Ninjatown for Nintendo DS).

A lot of people dream of the day they are able to see the characters they create come to life on TV, movies, or in video games. How’d you do it? How’d you get your work “found?”

I’m as surprised as anyone honestly. I was a game reviewer and hardware editor for EGM in my former life, so I have a lot of friends in the industry. Long story much, much shorter: Been drawing and designing and making my whole life, and after developing the idea and characters of Ninjatown I got hooked up with a friend of a friend who is Jeremy Pope who came up with the genre for the game and the rest is history. SouthPeak, the games publisher, green lit it, and we got to work.

You use MailChimp for a lot of product announcements, general news, and the fun little "Chronicles of Professor Fliggins" discoveries. What kind of stats or metrics do you use to measure success?

Certainly ‘Opens’ help us measure, but click rate is the biggest thing for us at the moment since we can only show so much in a newsletter. Ultimately we want our customers to buy our products, but in order for them to become true fans, they need to get into our worlds, read the stories and enjoy the characters and illustrations.

By making educated decisions on where to send them, we can then measure how long they stay there reading, or, if not, where they navigate to instead or bounce to. After that we can analyze that click rate data and match it up where our orders are coming from. Interesting results sometimes emerge, or confirm our suspicions.

Learn more about how Shawn uses MailChimp in our blog inverview with Shawnimals creator Shawn Smith and see more of his creations at shawnimals.com.