I try to keep up with what you’re doing out there.  Every day, I track the public eepurls that customers share on Twitter and check them out, looking for cool stuff to feature or interesting tricks you’re using in your email campaigns.

Recently, I was browsing through some holiday campaigns that are going out, hoping to find something neat to show you, when I stumbled on one from Ollie & Boo that I thought was really cute:

It’s short & sweet, not too “in your face” and has a really pretty palate of colors that aren’t your typical holiday fare.  Just as I was about to mark it down as one to feature, I realized that it’s one of our holiday templates.  Whoops!

Rather than wallow in my embarrassment at not recognizing one of our very own, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out our holiday templates to those of you who  may not know we have ‘em.    If you have a special event or holiday campaign that needs to go out and don’t want tocreate a whole new design for it, you can look under templates and select “pre-designed,” then “holiday.”

There, you’ll find a bunch of templates for all sorts of holidays, ranging from casual to more elegant styles.

If you’re hosting a holiday event, you’ll definitely want to check out our Eventbrite integration to manage tickets or RSVPs.  You could even include a QR COUPON merge tag for a cool giveaway, then use Pyow! to scan them as folks check in to your event (or check out at your store.) We recently did this at our customer appreciation event in Atlanta to give away pints of Chimpenheimer Crunch, created by Jake’s Ice Cream.  Everyone who checked in with a QR code from the email we sent got to take some MailChimp ice cream home with them. Pretty sweet.

Are you doing a cool holiday promotion?   We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

You’ve probably noticed the “view this in your browser” link we include in our templates to take your subscribers to the online archive of your newsletters.

It’s pretty handy in case people can’t view the correct version of the email in their email clients, but have you ever wished you could hide that link when people actually go to the archive page? Or, have you been hoping for a way to change the text to some other content instead?

Well, with our dynamic merge tag: *| IF:ARCHIVE |*, you can!

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When you take a look at one of your lists, you’ll notice that along with your average open and click rates, we also show you your average subscribe rate and a target subscribe rate.   The target rate is the number of new subscribers you want to aim for each month to keep your list growth “in the black.”

Looks like we’re doing pretty well at the moment (whew!) but if your number is below your target rate, there are a couple of things you can try. You’ll want to be sure that your signup forms are visible in all of your different “homes” online. If you have a Facebook fan page, be sure to add a signup form to your Facebook page using our Signup App.There’s also a plugin available for your WordPress blog.
You could also create a fun giveaway to create some buzz around the list and give people incentive to sign up. Here’s an example of the giveaway we did with DesignLab to help grow their list. (ProTip: People love plushies almost as much as they love t-shirts!)

If your unsubscribe rate is starting to dip too far below your target, you may want to take a look at some things:

How often are you sending? It could be that your list is losing momentum if you’re emailing too infrequently, or they’re feeling overwhelmed by emails if you’re sending too often. If you started out as a weekly newsletter, but want to bump it up to daily sends, you want to be careful about how you do it.

Is your content relevant? Are you sending the type of content that your subscribers were expecting when they originally signed up, or have you changed drastically from that initial subject? Straying too far from the original topic without warning can cause attrition. If folks signed up initially to get advice about modifying classic cars, they might not appreciate diary entries from your dog, no matter how cute he is.

Finally, you may also take a look at your unsubscribe survey results to get an idea of why people are leaving the list. And remember, our smarter bounce management methods keep you from losing too many valid subscribers at a time.

Happy list growing!

If you’ve been using MailChimp for a little while, you’ve probably noticed this handy little “List Growth” graph in your account that shows how your lists are growing over time. At first glance, this chart shows you stats across your entire account, but if you’d like some insight into a particular list, you can select any list from the drop down menu to get a more specific view.

For example, we’re running a t-shirt promotion to celebrate our v5.3 release. We’ve set up a list for the promotion, and it’s fun to watch it grow.

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Who said your signup process has to look boring? Certainly not LeahAndMark.com. These photographers have managed to draw new people in further using their signup process.  They’ve taken advantage of the double opt-in process and used each step to show off some of their work.

First, they’ve started with a pretty basic form.
Rather than using a single header image for each step, they’ve kept the form plain and customized every page with a different photo in the body.

Here’s the Thank You page:

Look at those adorable kids!  It gets better from there.

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