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MonkeyWrench Newsletter from MailChimp
Segmentation & Interest Groups
First, a little MailChimp news: we just recently launched our new interest groups and list segmentation functionality. List segmentation lets you target a sub-group of your subscriber list to send more relevant, focused campaigns (to smaller lists). So instead of setting up tons of separate lists (and manually cross-referencing all your unsubs and bounces across them) you can just keep one master customer list, and send campaigns to your segments.

Ways you can segment your lists:
  • Send only to recipients who did (or didn't) open a previous campaign
  • Send only to people with a specific domain(s)
  • Send to people who subscribed to your list after a specific date (or campaign)
More examples, list segmentation tips, and screenshots...

Sending Automatic Birthday Promos
A lot of our restaurant and e-commerce customers ask us how they can setup MailChimp to send automatic birthday promotions. That's probably a feature we'll add to MailChimp real soon. But with our new list segmentation functionality (plus a little advanced HTML trickery), you can actually do this right now.
How-to: Sending Automatic Birthday Emails With MailChimp...

Tiny Fonts Trigger Spam Filters
Web designers: If you're using teeny-tiny fonts inside your email campaigns, you might be triggering spam filters. It's something our friend Murray Summers alerted us to while he was using our Inbox Inspector tool to check a client's campaign. You're probably not using tiny fonts in your email content, but check your email footer (all that copyright information, unsubscribe text, etc).
Read more: Tiny fonts trigger spam filters...

API Contributions
A few more web developers have made contributions to the MailChimp List Subscribe API. You can use our API to seamlessly link your (or your clients') shopping carts, CRMs, etc. to a MailChimp-managed list (and nobody has to know about it).
  • ThatSoftwareGuy (aka Scott Wilson) has contributed a very handy Zen Cart API module. BTW, check out Scott's excellent shopping cart guide here.
  • ProjectLocker has contributed a Ruby Gem for MailChimp here.
  • Tom, from Nydus Media, has contributed a Python class for MailChimp (and he did this while deployed overseas). You gotta love his witty little crack at our PHP in his readme file. Ha ha Tom. Typical Python developer. But hey, we salute you sir.
  • Rob from MyEdgeNet has created a Flash API for MailChimp (called SuperChimp). He's also got some cool Halo 3 plugins for MySpace and FaceBook at his website.
Preview Panes and Images Off
More email programs and web-based clients are switching to VERTICAL preview panes for the inbox. Do you know how your HTML email campaigns look in these email programs? Does your email design gracefully handle when your recipients' images are turned off? We just enhanced our Inbox Inspector to include screenshots of your email campaign in vertical vs. horizontal preview panes, and with images on vs. off.
Screenshots and details at our blog...

Inbox Inspector screenshot

We've got more tips and case studies to share with you, but don't want to make this newsletter too long. Look for another MonkeyWrench issue coming soon in early November.

Regards,

The nerds at MailChimp.
How does HTML email render on Apple's iPhone? Perfect. Almost too perfect. Video demo here.
HTML Email rendering on Apple's iPhone



Three Words to Avoid in your email subject lines (MailChimp's 2007 subject line study):
3 words to avoid in your email subject lines


Kooky Prize Winner
Every issue of the MonkeyWrench, we pick one lucky subscriber and send a kooky gift (from a MailChimp customer's store).
Congratulations to Nick, at Nova Web Solutions. This issue we're giving away a cool web design themed t-shirt from the folks at ChoppingBlock.com. We've been huge fans of The Chopping Block since we first stumbled on their website back in 2000, so we're really proud to have them as customers. If you're a "DesigNerd" like us, you'll probably dig their t-shirts and posters too:

Chopping Block t-shirt
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