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MailChimp and Mandrill

MailChimp is unifying their regular e-mail data and Mandrill data. Uh, why would you care? You probably don't, but if you have e-mail newsletters and e-mail notifications, there is some pretty cool things you can do with their new system.

Mandrill is MailChimp's general e-mail sender. So if you have any web app, you can either just change the SMTP address or use their API and send through them.  Why is Mandrill better? You get notifications of who opened and clicked what in those e-mails, with minimal work on your part. It can even notify your web apps. There is some impressive stuff, too – such as automatically modifying e-mails your system already send to change templates or add Google Analytics tracking.

With the new integration, you get a lot of extra possibilities. Whenever you send a new e-mail to your lists, you can just send to people who received, opened or clicked (or didn't) any other e-mails you sent through your app. And there are a ton of other filters – such as near a location, part of a social network or a specific e-mail client. For example, you can easily filter out or in people who bought a specific product from you (if you use a tag on your e-mail), and send a follow up cross sale. Or if they didn't, you could send a discount.

Pretty cool stuff, specially considering their very low prices – and the first 12000 e-mails are free!

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Article

MailChimp – Behind the Scenes

MailChimp recently posted an interesting article about how they did their own e-mail marketing for a new app.

What I liked the most was the view on how they segment their list to maximize the impact of the e-mail they sent, while at the same time having minimal unsubscribes.

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Articles

MailChimp’s Mobile E-mail Research

Recently MailChimp posted about their mobile e-mail research .  A lot of people read their e-mails on cell phones – 57% in Japan and 41% in the US, so it starts to be a bit consideration.

Lots of suggestions on the report:

  • Use a instapaper URL link to make it easy for people to read your e-mail later, on the desktop.
  • Avoid single columns that require left-right zooming.
  • Apple recommends a font size of 17-22pts.
  • Have big, easy to click buttons instead of tiny links on your calls to action.
  • On two column templates, have a smaller left column – otherwise your reader might not see that there is a right column.
  • On Gmail, the head element is removed so only inline CSS works. It also cuts content at 102 KB.
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Articles

MailChimp adds Pinterest integration

Pinterest is all over the news lately (although some people complain about the traffic converting poorly). Now MailChimp has announced their Pinterest integration .

If you use Pinterest, looks like a nice, simple way to share your pinned photos with your e-mail subscribers.

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Product Review

MailChimp and Attached files

Mailchimp has a new, neat integration with Digioh that allows you to share files with your newsletter audience.

It also generates unique links so that you can track exactly who downloaded your files, as well as other stats.

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Articles

MailChimp: easily getting more data from your subscribers

Interesting article on how to get more data from your subscribers on MailChimp.

What I liked about this idea is that you get the advantage of minimal initial form fields – this increasing completion – while still asking for the data later with minimum extra work.

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Software

OnStage App – Collaborative e-mail design

MailChimp released today the first version of their new Collaborative e-mail design app – OnStageApp .

The concept is pretty cool – you can easily link to your MailChimp and share a design with other people. So they can mark places and suggest changes.

Check out their blog post for more details.

 

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Software

Analytics360

Analytics360 Screenshot
Just added a new plugin to my main WordPress Install – Analytics360. It allows getting data from both Google Analytics
and MailChimp (where my mail lists are now).

It gives you Analytics data, complete with graphs, referrers and top content. The graphs show when you list campaigns were sent, so you can easily see their effect. It also has filters so you see distinct graphs, such as Total, CPC, Organic, Referral or e-mail list.

Further on the MailChimp side, it also displays subscriber graphs for any of your e-mail lists.

You can also set GA to show only the blog stats.

If you use both MailChimp and GA, it is pretty neat.

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Site Reviews

MailChimp new features

As I prepare to e-mail the newsletter to my users (yes, it has been quite a while…), I logged in on MailChimp – which I'm going to use instead of PHPList, which is nice and free but very limited – and I learned that since the last time I went there a whole lot of new features were added.

Facebook Comments – which allows any post to have user comments, that optionally appear on their Facebook walls and thus carry the conversation (and product ads) farther.

A whole bunch of stuff with version 5.3 – including free Social Pro add on for 6 months.

Pretty impressive!