Tag: E-mail

Using Animated GIFs on E-mail

Post author By Luiz A D R Marques
Post date August 20, 2013

Interesting article from MailChimp on using animated GIFs on e-mail .

They demonstrated some features on e-mails with animated GIFs. They look very nice, and more importantly, clearly show how these features work.

I do wonder how well these work for people with data plans. Even though they are very short, just these two add up to more than 200K. Just to compare, my lower resolution flash demos had more than a minute of content and had a few hundred Ks (Instant Demo is quite nice that way).

Even so, I still like the idea, and might use it when talking about new features on my products in the newsletter.

Tags E-mail

Articles

MailChimp and Mandrill

Post author By Luiz A D R Marques
Post date March 30, 2013

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!

Tags E-mail, Mailchimp

Article

MailChimp – Behind the Scenes

Post author By Luiz A D R Marques
Post date March 15, 2013

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.

Tags E-mail, Mailchimp

Articles

Research on Spammy E-mail Design by MailChimp

Post author By Luiz A D R Marques
Post date October 17, 2010

MailChimp recently posted an interesting article on how some designs look spammy to people. The research was done using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and turns out some e-mail campaigns get flagged as spam even though they weren't.

Tags E-mail, spam

Site Reviews

MailChimp new features

Post author By Luiz A D R Marques
Post date September 16, 2010

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!

Tags E-mail, Mail, Mailchimp