But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

A big part of the using-video-on-your-website mix is the video hosting service that you use. We’re a long way from 2005 when there was either YouTube, or an .flv or .mov embedded in your webpage. Today’s video hosting landscape is more like a food court at the airport; Do I want some cheap fast food? Or some cheap fast food posing as cheap healthy food because its on flatbread? Or do I want to spring for that place that looks all dark and leathery with lots of TVs and the $18 hamburger? There are plenty of choices out there, but making the choice of who to go with is not always so cut and dry.

We’ve tried out more than our share of hosts these past few years. All have had their pros and cons, their sweet spots and their misgivings. But this year we’ve moved our content to a new home that looks finally like a place to set down some roots. And that place is Wistia.

Along with a long list of the necessary fundamentals, such as solid service and performance, good support, and an easy workflow, Wistia provides some fun and helpful performance metrics that help us know how our videos are performing, and where there may be room for improvement.

One of the minor miracles of the internet and the video hosting revolution is that you have access to an abundance of statistics that can show you, down to the second, what your viewing audience is reacting to, and how. If you aren’t convinced that this is truly miraculous just do a little reading about the complexity and cost of the Nielson rating system for TV shows (viewer diaries, “Home Units” and “people meters”!), then realize that with the internets we get at least the same amount of information as they do for a minute fraction of what that system cost in terms of time, money, and effort.

Recently we sent an email campaign to 1.2 million users that announced a new service called Wavelength. In that email, we linked to a video hosted on Wistia, which meant we could go in after the fact to see how it performed. With Wistia’s metrics, not only can we see the normal stuff like total loads, total views, and average engagement,

The basic video statistic summary.

but we also get to see these nifty little “heat maps” that show each viewers engagement in a neat new way. They also show where in the world the view is from, which is always pretty cool.

Some Wistia heat maps.

The heat maps display a hotter color within the timeline of your video as people scrub or rewind to rewatch any portion of the video. So in a loose sense, we can look for patterns that may tell us what particular points in the video people needed, or wanted to see again. We can also see gaps in the timeline if they skipped sections. Of course interpreting these graphs is a fuzzy science, but if there are similar spots across the viewing audience that see more heat on the map, we can look at that point in the video and consider what was either extra attention grabbing, or maybe extra confusing, our maybe something so incredibly cute that people just couldn’t help but to watch it over and over again.

In this case, there wasn’t a strong pattern of viewing a particular point over and over again, but there was a telltale pattern of fall-off around the 20 second mark. After watching the video again I can see that in the first 20 seconds or so we define what Wavelength does in general terms. After that we launch into more detail. So, many people watched the first twenty seconds and got the gist of it, then switched off.

Statistics showed that 82% of the video was watched on average, which is actually pretty darn good for a web video that is 1:30 in length. If that number was significantly lower, I would be more concerned about that dropoff pattern 20 seconds in. I would be inclined to go back and rework the script or the treatment to encourage viewers not to leave. How would I do it? Maybe have the narration hint at something coming up later in the video, or possibly add a surprising or entertaining moment which may rekindle interest and buy us a little more time with our viewer. As more people are used to seeing and watching video on the web, convincing them to click the play button is getting easier. Convincing them to stick with the video, however, is actually getting harder imho.

All these cool metrics can really help us do just that. It’s simple enough these days to go back into the video and retool it as needed, then export a new version and swap out the last one. This way we can continue to iterate, update, and improve our content as needed. And in my experience, it’s rare that something that is ultimately a subjective piece of creativity, such as a video, gets so much direct objective feedback from a broad audience. So I’ve really found these stats to be a huge help as I’ve continued to create and shape the videos we produce. They’ve also thickened my skin a good bit.

Another nice thing about Wistia is how we also get a lot of control over the look and features of the player.

Simple player customization tools.

Many hosts allow you only limited control over what color your frame and buttons are, and what controls you can include. It’s nice to finally have an easy way to make the player look as minimal as we want it to and to be able to color it to match the palette of the page it will live in. It would have been a big bummer to have a bunch of big, off-color controls covering up the eyes and our pretty new logo in the poster frame of the Wavelength video.

As it so happens, we first learned about Wistia because they contacted us a few years ago when developing their own API thingy between MailChimp and Wistia. It allows you to integrate your video with your email campaign, which is pretty cool . And MailChimp has a Wistia merge tag which allows you to integrate a Wistia video of your own into your email newsletter and take advantage of the awesome statistics. Read about it here.  Ben also just wrote a blogpost about how we allow you to customize and automate your video merge tags.  Pretty simple stuff to do, but as you can see below, it may make waves if you actually use it:

Clickmap of an email newsletter.

This is a MailChimp click map of the email Ben sent out announcing Wavelength. As you can see, click rates on the text links averaged around 4-8 %, but that video staring atcha there got a whopping 62.8% of all the clicks. Maybe it’s that hypnotic eye power getting people to watch (I have a proprietary “hypnotic eye power” filter; merge tag coming soon!), or maybe it’s people’s inclination these days to prefer watching a quick video instead of, or in addition to, reading about something. Whatever it is, it’s these insightful statistics that help prove this video thing is worth keeping our eyes on.

Goooal is a new way to segment your MailChimp list based on what people do on your website when they visit from an email campaign. Goooal works by installing a tracking pixel on your site, and then adding “Goooals” to the campaign that you want to track. A Goooal could be something like: “If a visitor from my campaign goes to the www.mailchimp.com/party page, then add them to the Party RSVP segment.”

Once a subscriber to your list lands on a page associated with a Goooal, the tracking code sees it and records the hit in our super-duper database. We’ve made a cool results page where you can view the hits to each of your Goooals in real time, so that you can witness the action play by play. Just as a note, the actual process that adds the users to a segment takes a bit longer, since we don’t want to melt down the API each time there’s a new match. Once you’re subscribers have surfed your site a bit and you’ve got some good segments built, you can send targeted content that’s more relevant to their interests.

The thought behind the app is to take something that’s traditionally pretty complicated (Think of Google Analytics funnels and goals) and simplify it enough so that it’s still useful, but within the reach of most mortal humans to operate. We built this app so that you can get some better insight as to what people are looking at on your site, and hopefully figure out what they are interested in. People like hearing about stuff they are interested in.

Goooal works with your existing MailChimp account login, so you won’t have to create yet another account and remember yet another password. It’s free to use, so go give it a try and learn something new about your crowd! If you want to learn more about it, check out the FAQs.

We’re releasing this app as Beta. It should not eat your small pets or your MailChimp data, but please make sure you test your campaigns thoroughly if you plan on using Goooal. As always, get in touch if you see anything funky.

PS: The only thing missing from this is some audio each time you score a Goooal. Don’t worry, we’re on it!

Check out Goooal

At its core, mediafeedia is a content management system for Facebook that allows you to manage your business pages, schedule posts and interact with your customers. But it also provides a powerful tool for creating, delivering and tracking special offers through Facebook. That means you can create a special offer landing tab for your business page, collect opt-in email addresses when people sign up for your promotion, and then seamlessly import them into MailChimp once the user confirms opt-in.

I recently read an interesting post by Andrew Blakeley, who tackled a one-week challenge to like every brand that asked him to (on Facebook of course). The experiment was borne out of the frustration that brands and marketers seem to be constantly asking us to find them on Facebook, yet they rarely offer a reason for us to do so.

In fact, Blakely found that only 10 of 46 brands across a whole spectrum of industries, both on and offline, offered a reason to like them. He goes on to say, “In 2011 it’s more or less a given that your brand can be found on Facebook, and consumers know that. What they don’t know is why they should bother.”

mediafeediaOFFERS wants to help bridge the disconnect by giving you the means to grow your Facebook audience through page likes and opt-in email. So not only will your customers see your content in their newsfeed on Facebook, you’ve also established the basis for engaging with them through email by offering a special incentive. If you’re looking for a way to kickstart your email marketing program, mediafeediaOFFERS is a great place to start.

Still not convinced? Read how Squeeze Bar in Charleston grew to over 1,000 fans and 400 new customers after implementing a mediafeediaOFFERS tab on their Facebook page. That’s an impressive 40% response rate, and it translates into measurable ROI.

To create a special offer tab on Facebook, mediafeedia charges $99 for setup and then a monthly fee, starting at $9.99 per month. But because we really like this integration and think you will too, the first 500 users to sign-up for mediafeediaOFFERS and synchronize it with MailChimp will have the setup fee waived. (You can use mediafeedia as a content management system for Facebook free of charge.)

If you’re a business with a Facebook page, mediafeediaOFFERS can help you take your marketing efforts to the next level. We’d love to hear how you’re using this integration in the comments below.

Straker uses a hybrid (machine/human combination) translation approach, which gives the translations a more human touch, but it’s fast! The rates are standard for the 20 or so most common languages of commerce, with some modified pricing for the more esoteric. For example, Arabic, Spanish, and French are standard, Burmese is nonstandard.

All you need to do to start is sign up for an account. After you input your MailChimp API Key, you’ll be able to see all of your campaign drafts within the Straker Dashboard, and you can quickly get a quote.

Choose your base language, along with your target language(s) and type of translation.

You then get a window to finalize your translation request, view the price, and make any special notes on who the campaign is targeting or notes on the tone (at MailChimp we always use the informal “tu” form when doing Spanish translations).

After submitting you’ll wait for notification as to when your translation is finished. According to Straker, the average turnaround time for newsletter to go from English to Spanish is 35 minutes, so it’s not a long time but it would be wise to plan ahead.

Once it’s done you can review it within Straker, decide to accept or dispute the translation, and then create a MailChimp Campaign to have a copy of it appear as a new draft within your MailChimp Dashboard.

We hope this makes it easy for you to reach customers all around the world!

Check out Straker Translations

When Aarron first introduced OnStage, he ended the announcement with this warning:

We built OnStage quickly and rather than letting it languish in a state of perpetual polishing, we’re launching it today, rough edges and all.

We spent the last few weeks working on OnStage to get rid of those rough edges and introduce a few neat features in the process.

API Keys, no more!

Having to enter your API key every time you wanted to use OnStage was a pain. With our shiny new implementation of Oauth2, you’ll be logging into OnStage with your MailChimp credentials instead. Not only is this much more secure, but it’s so much easier for folks that are constantly using OnStage.

You should find all your previous campaigns, todos, comments, and revisions just like you left them. If you encounter any monkey business, please let us know!

As an added bonus, you should not see as many errors regarding emails already being used for OnStage accounts. We’ve done some reworking of the code to make sure that anyone with any email can collaborate with someone else with OnStage.

Oooh, preetty!

We have a top-notch team of designers and front-end guys. We grabbed a few of them, stuck them in a dark room, and didn’t let them out until we had a beautiful new skin for OnStage. The result is something that is much easier on the eyes, but also contains lots of bug fixes for all the poor souls out there using Internet Explorer.

A few goodies we snuck in there

A broken link in an email campaign is like leaving “sale” advertisements from the month before plastered on the walls of  your store. We’ve now added an easy way to check your links from OnStage just by hovering over a link. You’ll get a nice tooltip that shows you the URL, which you can conveniently click to open that link in a new window.

A lot of you also were interested in knowing who created each todo. You can now hover over each todo entry to show the name of the creator. For all you interns out there that were getting clever on your todos, your brief period of enjoying the first amendment is now over.

Lastly, we figured it would be useful to be able to see the current password for the campaign without having to click on the email link. Hover over the “Invite People” menu to reveal the current password. If you click on the link, the password will be selected for you, ready for a quick CMD + C (or CTRL + C for you Windows people).

We’ve got plenty of  ideas on how to make OnStage great, but we can’t do it without your help and feedback. Let us know what you love, what you hate, and what’s missing so that we can continue to make OnStage better. We hope it makes your email-sending-world-domination plan just a bit easier on you.

Check out OnStage

Today we’re happy to announce that we integrate with one of the most popular fundraising software tools out there.

Meet Chimpegration for Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge.

Chimpegration integrates The Raiser’s Edge with Mailchimp, allowing you to send relevant, targeted campaigns to your supporters. Chimpegration has a lot of features on top of the already sophisticated stuff that you can do in Raiser’s Edge (yeah, I’m not even going to pretend to be a Raiser’s Edge expert). Below are some screencasts from the developer of Chimpegration that demonstrate what you can do.

Export to MailChimp:

Manage Campaign Results:

Synchronization with MailChimp

Viewing Records

If you are a nonprofit that uses Raiser’s Edge and MailChimp, this new integration should make your life a bit simpler. Remember that we offer a 15% discount for all Nonprofits!

Check out Chimpegration for Raiser’s Edge

Also See:

• Free guide: MailChimp for Nonprofits
• Customer Story: Atlanta Humane Society

Most people that work in the realm of the interwebs know that Google Analytics has been the de-facto tool to analyze website traffic for quite some time now. What some more experienced web people will tell you is that Google Analytics is great for knowing where your traffic came from, but it’s not necessarily suited to study what exactly people do on your site and how they utilize it.

ClickTale has built a tool that offers you a different perspective on your traffic – and attempts to help you understand what people actually do inside the pages on your website. MailChimp can now automatically tag each link in your email campaign (much like our Google Analytics integration), making it a breeze to start studying the traffic that you generate from your chimpy email marketing efforts with ClickTale.

Some of ClickTale’s neat features include “Scroll Reach Heatmaps” that let you visualize how far your visitors scroll down the page (The dreaded “fold“!). More traditional heatmaps are also available that show your visitors’ clicks and focus on your pages.

Another interesting metric that ClickTale measures is how much time your visitors spend filling out forms, or Form Analytics. It measures how long a user will spend on each field of your form so that you can identify where your visitors are getting stuck. Forms on the web are subject to lots of usability pitfalls (there are books written about web forms!), and ClickTale allows you to study the effectiveness of your form designs.

Here is a Wiki article from ClickTale to help you get started: How to set up ClickTale MailChimp tracking

Wether you use Google Analytics, ClickTale, or any other tool, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to make a difference when you send your customers email. As an added bonus, ClickTale is offering a 33% discount on all their yearly plans. You can find the discounts inside the Partner Discounts page. We hope this helps all the data-monkeys out there!

Some related integrations:

• Metricly
• YouCalc

Automatically subscribe new customers to your MailChimp list

Forget about trying to keep your lists up to date manually every time you send a campaign! Chimpified will automatically subscribe new customers to specific lists and will even add customers to a static segment that you choose. (Syncing with MailChimp Guide)

Track your campaigns’ performance using E-Commerce360

Using our awesome E-commerce360 tools, Chimpified will update information about your customers’ purchasing habits everytime an order is placed. This gives you the ability to target campaigns to customers that have bought certain items, spent a certain amount, and more!

Migrate customers from your Shopify store to specific groups, segments, etc.

Shopify gives you some cool filtering options to segment your customers, and Chimpified can take advantage of those to populate MailChimp static segments. For a super-boost in your segmentation, you could even use Hairball to create nested static segments! These migrations can even be scheduled at intervals so that you don’t have to worry about remembering to migrate customers. (Migration Guide)

Create campaigns with items in your store with just a few clicks

Chimpified will build campaigns with products (or groups of products) in your store so that you can tell your customers with minimal effort. The Chimpified campaigns use MailChimp’s templating language, so you can use existing templates that they provide, or get fancy and design custom templates that match your store. (Create A Campaign To Promote A Product Guide) If you run a Shopify store and use MailChimp for your email needs, Chimpified is a great tool to bring them both together. If you’re already using Chimpified, leave us a comment and give us a glimpse of how you use it! We are really excited to see so much activity around our integrations. Check out the rest of them in our Connect Directory!

So we created Hairball. It’s an Air app that you install on your computer, and it syncs with your MailChimp list. Then, you can GO NUTS building all kinds of segments with your list. When you’re done, you sync it back up to MailChimp.

Hairball is currently in beta. If you’re interested in giving it a try, here’s where you can download:

• Mac: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.air
• Windows: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.exe
• Linux: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.linux.air

Some Quick Tips

1. First, go to “Connect Account” (it’s the link in the top right of the screen) and tell it which MailChimp account to connect to:

2. Next, you’ll see all your MailChimp Lists:

3. For each list, you’ll need to click the “fetch” buttons to sync their data down. Depending on the size of your lists, downloading their data can take a while (now you know how our servers feel).

4. After the data is downloaded, you can build unlimited segments. Get whacky!

You can even build a segment that’s based on fields with empty data:

5. After you’ve saved your segment, upload it to MailChimp:

6. You can even generate random percentage segments (what’s more random than 17?):

7. You can view the members of your segments in Hairball, or export them for a spreadsheet app or something:

Static Segments 

After building your segments in Hairball, they’re uploaded to MailChimp as “static segments.” That means we don’t have to build them dynamically for you, because you already did the hard work in Hairball (which makes our database servers purr  happily).

Whenever you log in to MailChimp and create your next campaign, you’ll see an option in the segmentation screen for static segment:

That’ll show the segments you built in Hairball. Pick your segment, and it’ll zap into place and you’re on your way. Power tip: use this to build a big static segment of “proof readers” that can test all your campaigns before you send to the full list.

If you’re one of our users with ginormous lists and MailChimp just feels a little sluggish when you build out your segments, give Hairball a try. Post your comments below, or in our Jungle discussion.

To personalize an image, Visage generates a custom graphic for each name (or other field) on the MailChimp list that you select—now each reader’s image will have his or her own name magically embedded in the actual image. Neat!

To use Visage, just sign up (you’ll need your MailChimp API key), and you’ll be able to get started right away. Currently there are 12 different templates available, ranging from an authentic shake-cam effect road sign to a band flyer posted on a light pole. Here are some examples of what you can make:

Visage is currently free of charge, and it allows you to generate 1000 custom images per campaign.

Check out Visage