We’re rolling MailChimp 7.1 out to all of our app servers right now. Soon you’ll notice a few subtle changes popping up in your account:

• 36 Templates: A boat load of lovely new templates for musicians, holidays, and kid-centric businesses. You’ll find these in the “Design” section of the Campaign Builder and in Templates as well.
• Persistent Messaging: A new messaging system that shows up at the top of any page when your lists are done importing, or there’s something to address with your account.
• Unified Contact Info: Edit all of your administrator, billing, and list contact info in one place (Account > Contact Information)
• Sending Meter: A simple little meter in the Account menu showing how close you are to your monthly sending limit.
• Link Dialogue: An updated interface making it easier to add links to websites, files, or anchor points in your email campaigns.

With the recent 7.0 release of MailChimp we’ve made some changes to the Templates and Campaign Builder sections. The traffic statistics of these two sections made it a particularly scary challenge for the product design team. Campaigns and Templates respectively are the third and fifth most trafficked areas of the app. It’s no surprise why. They’re the heart of MailChimp. Making changes to such critical parts of MailChimp while more than a million people are using it is like wrenching on a 747 while in flight. No pressure.

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We recently released a cool little WordPress plugin called Social that pulls the conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your blog into each post and makes it easy to broadcast to social channels when you publish. We were scratching our own itch. We’ve pined for a better way to handle comments on our blog, so we teamed up with our friends at Crowd Favorite to make a tailor-made solution. It turns out that we’re not alone. Ten thousand people have tried Social on their blogs too. After months of usage, we discovered a few things we could do better. Today we’re releasing Social 2.0 with a whole bunch of improvements:

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Sometimes the hardest part of getting an email campaign sent out isn’t the writing, or designing, it’s getting your boss and colleagues to give you the go ahead to send. After painstakingly creating a campaign, you send a test email to the head honchos, and they respond with an avalanche of feedback and changes. You make the changes, send yet another test to stakeholders, and the feedback fun begins again.

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With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers, we tweet and post to Facebook when we publish new posts. In a write-once-publish-many-times kind of web, commenting happens outside blogs even more than on the posts themselves. That’s why we worked with the fine folks at Crowd Favorite to create a plugin for WordPress called Social.

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