I think it’s safe to say that Australia’s Cas and Jonesy are MailChimp’s most adventurous customers. Last month, they finished the longest unsupported polar expedition of all time. That means they were the first explorers to independently walk from the end of Antarctica to the South Pole and back—and they’re the youngest explorers to reach the South Pole. It took 89 days and 2,275 km (1,414 mi) of skiing, and they hauled everything they needed for three months on sleds.

Wow.

We mailed Cas and Jonesy some Freddie hats to keep their heads warm, and some Freddie plushies for companionship. Here’s a picture of them with their MailChimp gear, somewhere in Antarctica. All smiles, despite the fact that they’ve been traveling in, oh, the harshest environment on the planet:

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Austin and I have been cranking out new guides like it’s our job!

Actually, that is our job. Hrmmm.

Anyway, we recently added several new guides to the site. Check them out—we’ve got a little something for everybody. Here’s a rundown of the newest additions.

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MailChimp hired a scientist! More specifically, a data scientist. His name is John, and he’s good at calculus.

John’s main focus is our Email Genome Project, which analyzes millions of email lists—and hundreds of millions of email addresses—to find stories and trends in the data. This research helps us understand the email ecosystem, prevent abuse, and create better experiences for you guys.

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We’ve had some customers ask if they can send a MailChimp campaign with only part of the content in the actual email, and include a link to the full version of the campaign, hosted by MailChimp. The answer is yes: You can do that with merge tags.

Though we typically recommend hosting your own conditional content offsite and linking to that from your MailChimp campaign, there’s a way to create a “Read more” link that directs subscribers to your campaign archive page with the full content.

Essentially, what you can do is hide the full article and article descriptions between conditional tags, in order to only display certain information in certain areas within your newsletter.  So if the whole article is a little too long to send in a newsletter (or you’d just prefer to send a teaser), you can add a conditional tag to include a summary in the email, and another conditional tag to include the entire article on your archive page. It’s easier than it sounds. Place your tags like this:
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I’m happy to report that you can now nest segments within Hairball. (That’s right—it’s only been a few weeks, and we’re already adding new features to Hairball.)

Some of our users liked using Hairball for extensive segmentation, but they wanted to create segments within segments in Hairball, which they could then import as one segment in MailChimp.

Hairball simplifies that process. Maybe you want to create a segment of subscribers in particular locations who open and click your campaigns, so you can invite them to local events. That’s easy: Build a segment based on activity, and from there, narrow down the segment based on address. Or maybe you want to target inactive subscribers who were recently added to your list, so you can reach out. You can even create percentage-based segments for testing, and build a segment within one of those groups of people who didn’t open or click, to see if new content gets them to open your email. The possibilities are endless.

Still with me? Good.

Here’s an interesting example of how one of our customers wanted to use Hairball: She was having deliverability issues when she sent to a large list. She thought that certain email-address domains were causing problems, and predicted that by removing inactive subscribers with problematic email addresses, her delivery problems would go away. She can now use Hairball to create a nested segment of people who have email addresses that contain bad domains, and haven’t opened any of her emails. She can then send a MailChimp campaign to everyone else.

Interested in doing some similar segmentation? Here’s how it works:

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