Whoah, can't believe the holiday season's already here. Gearing up for those Thanksgiving and Chrismahanukwanzakah campaigns?
We've got a few tips for you...
Dangers of URL Shorteners
Did you know that using a URL shortener in your email marketing campaigns can adversely affect your deliverability?
In general, URL shorteners are great tools that serve a good purpose, but spammers have abused the heck out of them to disguise their (already blacklisted) links. Learn about URIBLs and link reputation
Related: Bit.ly has started warning users of potentially malicious sites, based on information it has about URLs being shortened.
Subject Lines with Discounts
 Mark Brownlow did an extremely detailed study of how Amazon uses discounts within their subject lines.
Interesting observations: targeted campaigns had smaller discounts. Broad campaigns had steeper discounts.
New Subject Line Tool
 On the topic of subject lines, wouldn't it be cool if you could predict how a subject line will perform?
Now you can, thanks to some hard work from the nerds over in the MailChimp Labs!
it works like Google's Keyword Tool, but for subject lines. You just enter some words or phrases that you were planning to use in your subject line, then MailChimp will compare it to all subject lines ever used in our system, their resulting open rates, and then tell you how they performed.
Thanksgiving Subject Lines Tested
Over at the MailChimp Blog, we plugged some Thanksgiving related keywords into the suggester, and learned that the word "turkey" tends to put open rates to sleep too.
Are You Measuring Engagement?
If you follow the email marketing industry, you know that engagement is quite the buzzword lately.
 We recently talked about how one of the major ISPs is measuring engagement and using it to decide who gets to the inbox, and who goes to the junk folder (See: Feedback Loops Being Replaced by Engagement?).
BTW, this PDF from Google (Sender Reputation in a Large Webmail Service, 324 KB ) is what kinda started the whole conversation.
Cleaning Inactives Helps Deliverability Returnpath’s George Bilbrey goes into more detail in this article on Mediapost: “Engagement: The New Frontier in Deliverability?” At one point, he advises that senders: “Treat inactive subscribers differently: This is probably the biggest change that most marketers need to think about. Mailing to a lot of inactive accounts may actually make your reputation look worse at some ISPs. Segment out inactive users and run a win-back campaign. If you cannot win back these subscribers, you may simply want to stop mailing them altogether.” Fascinating? Then you’ll also like this from ReturnPath: How Engagement Metrics Influence Deliverability
Over at Clickz, Jeanne Jennings had this to say about inactive members of your list: “If these folks really aren’t that into you, they may take the next step and report you as spam. It’s like that shunned suitor who just won’t go away; eventually the victim will consider him a stalker and get a restraining order. Keeping inactive names on your list can open you up to blacklisting and deliverability issues.” See: Really Simple E-mail Segmentation: Reengaging Inactives Segment by Engagement in MailChimp
We recently added engagement tracking in MailChimp, and here's a tutorial on how you can segment your list to send "come back" campaigns, or send special offers to your most loyal subscribers.
Dynamic Content Tip
Here's a quick idea idea for Dynamic Content from Laughyourway.com. In their website footer, they have an email signup box with an incentive to “win an iPod touch.” Then, whenever they send their email newsletter, they use this dynamic content merge tag in their campaign to alert the winner...
Segment by Purchase Activity
If you're using Magento, Zencart, osCommerce, or any of the other carts supported by MailChimp's eCommerce360 plugin, you can now segment your email list by purchase activity:
MailChimp a Top 10 Social Tool
We're kinda proud to be considered a "Top 10 Social Media Tool for Entrepreneurs" by the folks at Mashable.
Some people have tried to spin social media as the "end of email." Personally, I've seen this many times already. Remember "push" technology? It was basically stocks and weather data pushed to your desktop, like a screensaver. That was gonna kill email. Then instant messenger was going to kill email. Then RSS. Then blogs (especially after Google bought Blogger!). Then MySpace. Then Twitter. Which, by the way, is silly, because I've read the leaked twitter docs (which were emails), and they seem more focused on killing Google. Now Google Wave is going to kill all of us.
Nah, we happen to think email and social media go together like peanut butter and bananas, which is why we've built so many social integrations and features like auto-tweets, tweet-tracking, and more. For us, it's all about finding and building the right tools to help your business. We use a combination of email marketing, twitter, and facebook at MailChimp.
If you're interested in learning how to use social media and email for your business, check out one of our upcoming social media webinars.
Regards,
- The MailChimp Team
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 We recently analyzed the stats for over 184 million messages sent from MailChimp and put together a report analyzing the engagement of recipients by email provider (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol, and comcast).
It was eventually picked up by the folks at eMarketer.
Anyway, Gmail users appear to be the most engaged, and there are some interesting hypotheses as to why, suggested in the comments.Integrations MailChimp recently partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in Eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp.  Integrating SurveyGizmo with MailChimp was a no-brainer; easy to use email marketing with easy to use online survey software equals one easy to use, well-rounded marketing campaign.  With the Zendesk integration, you can have all your help desk customers and users subscribed to a mailing list, so that you can send out proactive support information and/or service related newsletters. Learn more...CRMs + MailChimp Ever since we posted about our integration with Salesforce, people have been asking for Zoho, Javelin, and other CRM integrations as well. We can only integrate so fast, so it helps when other companies actually take the first step and integrate with us (our API documentation is pretty thorough). On that note, here are some integrations that 3rd parties have recently launched:  Here's a nice video tutorial about how MailChimp and Javelin work together.  The folks at CRMstage have created a module that syncs your MailChimp list with SugarCRM.  Pearl Software just integrated their CRM with MailChimp, and posted a video on how it all works. They've also got a special offer to all MailChimp customers, which you'll find in our partner discounts page.  I'm a sucker for hippos, so can't resist pointing out this Network Hippo + MailChimp integration. Be sure to check out all these other plugins and integrations with MailChimp!                      |
