We wanted to make a free HTML email template design tool, but we wanted the templates to—you know—actually look good. We spent considerable time (and money) selecting premium graphics and fonts, and we integrated with Picnik (it’s like Photoshop, but it works in your browser), and we created this:
That’s just a sneak-peek at what this’ll do. We’re launching this on October 13th, and will be posting more demo videos then.
In MailChimp v3.3 (launching October 13) you can add this merge tag to your MailChimp campaigns:
*|TRANSLATE:XX|*
(where the “XX” is your language)
and we’ll insert links so that your subscribers can view translated versions of your email.
For example, if you send a MailChimp campaign in Spanish, and then insert this tag in your side column:
*|TRANSLATE:ES|*
MailChimp will insert a column of links to different Google-translated versions of your campaign archive (click to zoom in on the example to the right).
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.
Segmentation sounds like it could be a little complicated, so it’s understandable why some people avoid doing it. But they’re really missing out. We recently ran a study (See: Effects of List Segmentation) on how segmentation can help your email marketing, and found that overall, it can improve your open and click rates by over 14%.
Also, MailChimp makes segmentation super easy. We thought we’d put together 3 quick videos that show our customers how they can do what Jeanne Jennings recommends…
We hired a friend (and long time MailChimp user) to put together some new MailChimp demo videos. We told him to “make ‘em slick” but to have fun with them. Maybe he’s having a little too much fun. Here’s one he did to show how easy (soooo eeeeasy) it is to design emails in MailChimp:
And here’s a cool one for our Inbox Inspector tool:
Cool, MailChimp is a finalist for the 2008 ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award. We’re up for top “email marketing tool,” and we’re up against Lyris HQ Emaillabs (try saying that 10 times), Responsys, and MailerMailer. May the best chimp win!Â
Big thanks to all our customers who helped us get nominated. And remember, it’s not who wins that matters. It’s who racks up the most awards logos to cram into one’s website footer.
Last Friday I spoke at WebJam Session 2008. My session was “Email Design 101.” I was a little nervous talking about anything “101″ to a group of experienced web designers, but fortunately, email marketing is still fairly nebulous. So it seemed to be new material for a lot of people. The session went well, except for two things:
Re: the MailChimp sign, I *wish* we had the foresight to plan this kind of “gorilla marketing,” but we’re not that smart. Someone actually stole Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV from the event. Of course we don’t mind, but it’s fun playing along.
Anyway, I promised attendees to my session that I’d post some resources here on the blog, so here goes…
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Thomas Hill, one of the masterminds behind San Francisco’s RooftopComedy. RooftopComedy is dedicated to giving comedy fans access to the best, most cutting-edge professional comedy from around the globe, and they use MailChimp to help git-r-done. Not only do they sponsor and host comedy festivals, competitions and events, they also host an array of hand-picked and hilarious videos on their website.
Click here to read Thomas’s thoughts about email marketing, boob jokes and more!
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Some of you may have noticed a new author here on the blog (or you just thought I was going insane and referring to myself in the 3rd person). Her name’s Amanda, and she joined MailChimp a couple weeks ago to help us with our marketing. Sort of. Her main role is to talk with our customers, and help us spread the monkey love. Check out some of the case studies she’s already put together with RoofTop Comedy, TheNextWeb (inventors of TwitterKeys) and Scene360. More to come soon!
