But… How did this happen??? Read on…

I don’t know how many of you know of Homestar Runner. Well if you don’t, go check it out now. It’s awesomesauce, trust me. Anyway, a couple weeks ago the inimitable Mike Chapman of the Brothers Chapman who are behind that insane cartoony treat came around the office. Next thing you know we were kneeing each other in the groin to see who could come up with a better voice for a Christmas Elf. It’s just what us video guys do. Don’t ask.

After three rounds in the MMA cage (we keep one in a corner here in VideoLab) Mike Chapman (he demands I use his full name EVERY time) had definitely proven himself the superior elf voice talent and bare knuckle brawler. Unfortunately we had a bet going that the winner of the cage fight gets to make anything they want to humiliate the loser any way they want, and we’ll post it on the MailChimp blog for all to see. And loser has to write a certain statement in the blog post. Ouch.

So yeah, I lost. But I’m a sporting man of my word, so here goes:

I’m Josh, and I make those artsy fartsy Customer Stories of those neat MailChimp customers doing neat things. But Mike Chapman is my superior, and Mike Chapman would approach them in a different way. A better way. The best way.

So there Mike Chapman, co-creator of Homestar Runner! Ya happy now?! Mike Chapman thinks people enjoy the funny! Wutever GOSH! We’ll see about that. I guess you all just have to go judge for yourself. I gotta go practice my choke hold. Enjoy, I guess. <sniff>

Bee careful! Click to watch the video.

I suppose the bee that rammed itself repeatedly into my hat just above my ear was warning me that she and her 15,000 other buddies inside the hive were trying to get some shut eye and were not to be bothered. It was a cold day in November, and bees just clump up and sort of go dormant during the winter months. And whereas I think everybody knows not to wake up a sleeping bear, I’ve never been told not to disturb a beehive in the winter. But like bears, and me for that matter, bees can get quite cranky and short tempered if bothered during their sleepy time.

“Do you want to put on the bee suit?” Roger asked as we got to the gate that separated us from about 20-odd hives which sat quietly amongst the trees in the woods. “Are you?” I answered. He said he wasn’t, so I thought aloud, “Well if you aren’t, I’m not gonna.” I figured I would trust the man who does this year round, and if I just stuck to the rules (move slowly, remain quiet, and no panicking) I would be ok. Everything went well, and when I finally got buzzed I did manage to control my urge to do the Invisible Insect Panic Dance. After a careful check in the folds of my hat, I figured my time was up, so we packed the gear and left.

The Paynes family and staff.

Roger Payne is a tall, gentle fellow who spends his days with bees. Hundreds of thousands of them. He is a third generation beekeeper, and along with his family runs Paynes Southdown Bee Farms. Located in the tranquil Sussex countryside in the south of England, Roger and the rest of the family and staff tend to countless hives scattered around the area and harvest the honey and beeswax that the bees produce. They turn that bounty into a range of products that are both edible delicacies, such as raw honey, jams, and candies, as well as functional accessories for the home and tools and equipment for the practicing beekeeper.

As is typical of the region this time of year, it was grey and a bit drizzly the week I spent there. It was also a bit odd that I was shooting a documentary on a beekeeper during the winter months. Maybe it fits MailChimp’s commitment to being unconventional. Regardless, there was ample activity at Paynes facility to make up for the lack of busy bees flying around practicing their pollen collecting activities that mark the warmer seasons.

Tucked into a cluster of small buildings which used to make up the stables of a larger estate next door, Roger and family are utilizing every square inch of space for the different aspects of running a thriving bee-based business. From small workshops in which they pour beeswax molds or build hives, to a jarring and labeling room, a storefront, a shipping and packaging area, there was not a square inch left unused. There were computers and desks tucked under staircases and squeezed into storage rooms between shelves stacked with cases upon cases of honey products. Yet I felt as though nobody seemed to mind the cramped quarters, perhaps because they spent so much of their time outdoors, year round, tending to their bees.

I spent a lot of time walking while there, mostly between the B&B, the bee farm, and the local pub (best sticky toffee pudding EVER), so I felt as though I got to feel the land a bit. And regardless of the weather being cold or the season grey, I could see how working with nature in such lovely surroundings could be a satisfying choice for three generations of Paynes. And to think that that little operation provides such a vast (and delicious!) collection of products to an entire region of the world really adds meaning to the phrase “busy as a bee.” As far as beekeeping goes, I think the word “keeping” refers more to “keeping-up-with” than any other meaning one might infer. And as Roger put it, with a smile, “they’re in control of us… definitely.”

Watch the customer story.

epic million-user cofounder chest bump

Liquidating thirteen thousand items– including MailChimp tshirts, monkey hats and plushies– is no small feat. But to do it in just 18 minutes and via the internet? Now that is impressive.

About a week before we projected we’d be hitting one million users, Ben blogged about our great million-user giveaway. Step one complete.

We kept a close watch, and yesterday morning when we were sure we’d hit our mark, our marketing team sent out an email to folks who signed up to be notified of future MailChimp promotions. Then we started dropping little hints via Twitter and Facebook which really got people excited. The tension was palpable.

When one of our users tweeted the following photo, and we knew it was getting really close.

I mean, how could I not share this photo? Adorable!

It also made us realize we needed champagne on hand! Luckily Video Josh came to the rescue, bringing back the bubbly just in the nick of time.

When we finally hit the million-user milestone, we tweeted the news and posted to Facebook, and you guys went crazy. Literally. We have realtime video evidence!

And here’s a chart of our Twitter activity from yesterday that I pulled from Topsy, which has an awesome and free Twitter analytics tool.

Last but certainly not least, we wanted to offer folks a way to be notified of future promotions because we LOVE giving away goodies! We collected emails on our landing page, and the list growth chart is pretty astounding.

See? Giveaways do work for increasing your subscriber list, even with double opt-in forms.

Social is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. Through the use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

Through Social, you can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments. Social polls Twitter and Facebook periodically for new comments about your posts, and adds them as comments when it finds a URL reference.

Lots of people use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web. Social lets commenters log in and leave a comment using their preferred social identity. They can also publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account from your blog.

Social intentionally has a broad name. It handles a lot of socially bits in your blog from broadcasting to content aggregating. There are a bunch of other nice things about the plugin, though:

• Automatically adds Twitter hover cards to any Twitter username you drop into posts or that show up in comments
• Let’s you filter between blog comments, tweets, Facebook comments, and trackbacks
• Handles comment thread layout intelligently so you don’t get microscopic widths after four or five replies
• Let’s you manually check for social comments from each blog post edit page, or paste in a tweet URL for a comment if you like
• Easily customizable design by creating your own templates for the plugin

Want to take Social for a spin? Hey, Madge. You’re soaking in it. We’ve got it installed right here in the MailChimp blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Social. We tried lots of other plugins that do similar things, but none of them quite fit the bill. So we made our own, and we’re releasing it free for everyone else to enjoy.

UPDATE: Alex King of Crowd Favorite, the development mastermind behind Social, has addressed a lot of the technical details and the roadmap for the plugin over on his blog.

Download Social for WordPress

Even if you weren’t able to make it this time, hopefully these animated gifs will help you feel like you’re right in the mix.

View from the 5 Seasons Brewing roof deck

The King of Pops helped folks cool off with his delicious, handmade popsicles

Ben chatting

Plenty of monkey hats to go around and swag galore!

The Mystery Men shared stellar surf rock tunes that were totally weather appropriate.

Our beloved Freddie appeared to share hugs and fist bumps with all

For the past couple years MailChimp has been using video in many ways. Short tutorials within the app; educational series in the MailChimp Academy; promotional spots for our new features; and a few utterly ridiculous bits of nonsense that serve a darker, more dubious purpose which I won’t be going into here.

But this year, we’ve initiated a new effort for the VideoLab™, and that is the Customer Story…

We’ve always shied away from the style of video that carries the label of “corporate” for the same reasons that we don’t have a team of salesmen that wear those blue button down shirts. “Selling” MailChimp in traditional ways just doesn’t sit well with us as a general rule. So when we decided it was time to make our own corporate videos, you know, the kind that tell a story of who customer X is, and how happy they are using our product, we decided a more natural approach would be to simply show customer X doing what it is they do. Period.

But wait, no mention of MailChimp? Nope.
Or how they use it to become more successful or efficient? Uh-uh.
No glowing on camera testimonials of how it changed the face of their business and how enthusiastically they refer it to all their businessy friends? Umm… <Cringe> Sorry, no.

We just thought it would be cool to pick some really interesting customers, who are doing some really interesting things, and make these little documentaries. “But why?” you ask. Well, surprisingly it is NOT so we can deploy Ben’s private MailChimp submarine that he paid big money for back during the first dot com bubble. The real answer is a bit less baroque. Essentially, we look at each Customer Story as a depiction of a particular craft-in-practice. I like to think that every business represents a collection of different crafts, with sometimes an especially interesting one at its core. So if we combed through our customer base and found some interesting businesses that were composed of interesting people practicing some neat craft, well, that would make for some pretty cool video.

In the past few months we’ve produced four of these Customer Stories. The first two we kept local, just to feel out the process and cut our teeth a little bit in terms of what resources, time and gear we would need to make them. Batdorf & Bronson coffee roasters was kind enough to let us make our first. Then our friends over at Hop City followed shortly thereafter with a treatise on all things beer.

Then it was off to broader horizons. Having the chance to travel to London to visit the office of [REALLY COOL BRAND WE CANT LEGALLY ANNOUNCE YET] was a thrill. I was nervous that they wouldn’t think I was hip or edgy enough to step foot inside, but I was pleasantly suprised to be ushered in by a kind group of hard working, extremely friendly people who were most accommodating.

Next came a visit with the Mighty Eagle itself, Angry Birds. During a chance encounter in a hotel lobby at SXSW, I pretty much invited myself to their offices in Helsinki, Finland for a shoot a couple weeks later. I had learned by this point that the best way to approach an invite to do a Customer Story is to ask if they would like to do it, then just show up at their doorstep with a camera and a few release forms! It hasn’t gotten me in trouble yet, but it certainly has eliminated a few delays and “scheduling conflicts.”

There are other things I’ve learned along the way. This is, after all, modern film making in the digital age. What you see here is largely the result of one guy with a bag of camera gear and a computer, which as the old saying goes, would have been impossible not too long ago. Which brings me to a short discussion on gear, for those of you who are so inclined to read on and geek out with me…

The Gear
Producing short films on foot requires minimal gear be brought along, but one must not sacrifice quality. So I have boiled down my kit to a few crucial gadgets that fill my bag juuust to the top, and still allows me to produce something that looks and sounds pretty pro:

Camera: Canon 7D
Shoulder stabilizer: Cavision RS series
Various Canon and Ziess prime lenses (rent the really expensive ones!)
Audio: Zoom H4n external audio recorder, with Sennheiser wireless units to either Tram lavaliers or shotgun mic
Davis & Sanford fluid head tripod (trying to find a small one for travel but so far no luck)

Extras include lots of CF and SD cards, a small clapper for manual sync, and a weather protector for the camera in case you find yourself in a small blizzard during a Helsinki winter. Of course spare batteries, chargers, and card readers are mandatory.

It’s basically as much as can fit into one rolling carry on. Like any other trip, its best to bring as little as you can, and I’ve whittled down my kit to the bare essentials of what i need, what i can keep track of, and what i can operate myself.

And let me say, the recurring MVP for each of these excursions has been the Lowepro Pro Roller x gear bag. It would take me several paragraphs to list and describe its invaluable features, and every single one of them has come in handy at some point. Amazing design and quality construction. It’s been a great travel partner.

Anyway, once we arrive on location the real fun begins. Normally a shoot of this type would include a director, producer, grip, audio engineer, and camera operator, and a person doing the interviewing. But in true do-it-yourself MailChimp style, our production team is either just myself, as in the case of Angry Birds and [Cool Brand], or me plus my lab partner Courtney helping out with gear, and Kate or Mark from DesignLab™ handling the subjects and asking questions. Barebone minimums here, people. But regardless of the size of the team, the key to getting good footage is knowing how to get a nice shot with available light, locking in clean audio, and coaxing out a good story by asking the right questions of the subjects on camera.

And all that has to be done on the fly – maybe there’s a little advance preparation in the submarine – but not always do we get to see where we’re going ahead of time or talk to the people we’re going to be interviewing. Its a real adventure, every single time, and a great challenge, and loads of fun.

Then there’s the edit. Cobbling a good story arc from lots of little clips and some longer interview footage is certainly the toughest and most brain intensive part of the process. Like football is a game of inches, editing is a game of frames. 24 of them per second, and each one counts. Especially when cutting for the web, where attention spans are short and 10 minutes is considered long form entertainment. Oddly enough, every one of these has landed just at about 10 minutes in length. I started each thinking “ah this will be about 5-6 minutes tops” but for some reason I’ve found that a story arc naturally falls into place between book ends that are about 10 minutes apart. But as much as I struggle to keep things as short as possible, there still are some fundamental aspects of a story that cannot be left out. Otherwise you get a choppy music video type of thing, which isn’t really what we’re going for. Character and story development development, however brief, and a thread that moves the content naturally from point to point is necessary to come out on the other end with something that maintains an audience’s attention. Rhythm, good sound, and some dynamic to the piece are crucial elements that must be sought in the edit. The final result should grab people’s attention in the beginning, move like a song through the middle, and end on a high note.

I look forward to climbing back into the submarine and visiting more customers who are doing interesting things. Sharing these stories through video is something we do to be human, not corporate. As MailChimp represents a vast community of all types of people in all kinds of places doing all sorts of things, I figure one thing we all have in common is the love of a good story. I hope you enjoy them.

We’re pretty darn excited that one of our all time favorite conferences in the world, An Event Apart, is coming back to our home town, Atlanta. Hosted by web luminaries, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, An Event Apart is an intensely educational learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference for you.

Many moons ago, I attended AEA when it was held at the home of the Atlanta Braves, Turner Field. It was smaller then and it was just one day, but it made a huge impression on me. The sessions were filled with practical information that I was able to use in my work, but I also had the opportunity to talk to and hang out with my web idols. It’s an event that is as much about community building as it is learning. That experience left me inspired and ready to do cool stuff. Since then I’ve been to AEA about a dozen times, and I still walk away with a pocket full of inspiring gems.

We’re really proud to be sponsoring AEA this year along with our friends over at Typekit. We hope to see you in Atlanta, or at one of the 5 other AEAs around the US. In fact, you can save $100 bones off any two- or three-day ticket with code AEACHIMP.

http://aneventapart.com

But it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing…

I remember a while back, when we were going through some server growing pains, people were tweeting all kinds of angry stuff at us. To be honest, a few of the tweets kinda made me want to pull the plug on our twitter account. I remember thinking, “we spend gobs of money on our infrastructure, and some guy 20 gazillion miles away, using some tiny coffee shop’s wifi, tweets that we’re slow and hash-tags us with a ‘fail’?” (By the way, we still listened to that guy, and kept on investing more in our infrastructure.)

And we actually had one guy (who accidentally purchased twice, for a grand total of something like $30) DM us with the following:

Slander threats? Really? And all I have is 140 characters to defend myself?

STFU is a horrible name for a product

So I reacted like any guy would. I asked our developers to come up with a tool that would let me reply to meanies, but with more than 140 characters. If some angry dude wants to tell the public that our software sucks, I should be able to apologize to him in public, then explain to him that we shut his account down because he got too many abuse complaints, because his list was poorly maintained and full of spam traps. See, there are two sides to every story, and it’s only fair to be able to tell mine too. You know, if we’re getting all public about it. Oh yeah, I also asked my developers to call this tool “S.T.F.U.”

Thankfully, as I always expect from my employees, they ignored that last suggestion and focused on building a simple, useful tool (probably to make me stfu). They worked on it in their spare time, and decided to just codename it “LongReply.”

Meanwhile, I went back to using a variety of different tools: twitter, tweetdeck, cotweet, hootsuite, seesmic, etc. All great tools. And this gave me some time to cool down and reflect on how to use twitter for public customer service.

We all need a little more human

Fortunately, by the time we got an early prototype of LongReply working, I had forgotten (mostly) about the negative stuff, and just used LongReply to give customers really thorough explanations. I noticed that people seemed to be surprised that a) not only were we so willing to help on twitter, but that b) we were actually very thorough in our replies. When you’re not limited to 140 characters, it’s really liberating. You can answer a question, then go on and teach users about other ways we can help:

And that’s when I really started to get excited about all this. It’s simple, really. People just want to talk to humans. That used to mean telephone support. But nowadays, even that’s not instant enough. The wait times, the “dial 1 for English” and the outsourced call center drones who aren’t really helpful at all have become the norm.

It’s why websites like gethuman.com exist.

So where’s the last place we can go, that hasn’t been automated yet, to find a real human being who can just help?

Twitter.

And remember, this is all public. Anybody monitoring the “mailchimp” keyword on twitter sees how we answer our customers. So in a way, help becomes marketing.

So what exactly is LongReply?

Okay, enough back story behind LongReply. Let’s talk about what it does.

It’s a new product we’re launching to the public soon. I think we’re talking about a few weeks.

It’s for listening, and helping. It’s not a “marketing hub” where you can post stuff, and see your message get distributed to all social media networks. It’s actually a bunch of really simple concepts (definitely nothing revolutionary), but when you apply all these simple tools to the problem of customer service, it’s quite handy (imho).

We’ll explain it more as we get closer to launching, but here’s a rough outline of functionality:

Chrome extension and Firefox plugin

You install a browser plugin that automatically adds a link to all tweets like this:

So imagine watching Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, and you see a tweet that you need to respond to. You click to open that tweet in your browser, and voila — there’s a handy LongReply link.

Write more than 140 Characters

After you click the LongReply link in twitter, it’ll pull up your LongReply account where you can just start writing a good, helpful answer. We’ll preview what the 140-char version looks like, and provide a shortened link back to this longer explanation:

As you can see, your long replies can include links, images, and a little formatting. You can also save drafts for later.

Reply as…

Another nice little feature is that if your company has multiple twitter accounts, you can link them all to your LongReply account. Our company has a main twitter account, but we also have one for our Compliance Team, our Webinar team, our API team, and so on. So the little pulldown makes it easy to “reply as…” any of those twitter profiles.

Saved Keyword Search with Sentiment Analysis

My favorite feature is the sentiment analysis. You can setup saved searches (like you can in Tweetdeck, etc), but it doesn’t require real-time monitoring. See, we’re getting to the point where the twitter volume is too much to try to follow. If we stop to take a coffee break, we miss important tweets. So we designed LongReply to have keyword searches, but you’ll notice we don’t do a row of extremely tight columns in order to cram as many tweets as we can (like you’d typically see in most realtime twitter monitoring solutions):

That’s because we’re using some of the sentiment analysis code we tinkered with back when we released our Facebook Comments feature. Instead of having to sit at my desk and watch the twitter stream 24/7, like that scene from Clockwork Orange, LongReply simply alerts us when there are angry (or happy) tweets that we should respond to.

Every hour, LongReply checks to see if there are any “non-neutral” tweets, and sends an email:

We plan to add push alerts to mobile devices (and, obviously some native iPhone and Android apps).

Multiple users

You can setup multiple users on your LongReply account, too. That way, a bunch of people on your staff can help your customers, and we’ll show you which tweets have already been replied to. Whenever we started giving more team members access to twitter, we had a bunch of situations where different people gave customers duplicate tweets. This will help prevent that. You can also specify which twitter accounts employees are allowed to talk through:

This is particularly useful if you have an unfortunate circumstance when an employee (who had access to your twitter account) leaves your company. You just remove them from LongReply, instead of worrying about changing all your twitter and facebook passwords. In the screenshot above, you can see we’re setting up a group for our Compliance Team to talk via the @mailchimpabuse twitter account.

What’s Ahead for LongReply?

We have no idea. It’s partly why we want to open this up to everyone, for free, and just get feedback. We mainly built it for us, but we think there are other companies out there who are struggling to deliver good customer service through social channels, and don’t quite need some of the bigger “enterprisey” solutions on the market (we don’t all have kick-ass mission control rooms like this).

Another thing that’s going to influence where this goes: I’ve always believed we should try to help customers no matter where they are. Have you ever commented on a company’s blog, and noticed messages like, “please don’t ask tech support questions here on our blog”? Yuck. If customers ask for help on the blog, you should try to help there.

Problem is, our blog articles get syndicated over to our Facebook Fan Page. So we’ve got comments over there to answer, too. Makes it hard to keep up with. And our company and functionality is growing, and I honestly can’t keep track of everything MailChimp does anymore. I’m frequently asking other people here “Um, do we actually have that feature? Cool! How’s it work?” So we want to pull in streams from multiple sources: your blog, facebook, twitter — even your help team’s inbox. And we’d love to end up with one place, where anybody in our company can log in and just answer people — no matter where the question was posted.

We also don’t believe this is a replacement for a full-featured help system. I frequently get tweets and blog comments that I need to pass over to a real help desk (Zendesk does this beautifully, I hear). So we hope to be exploring integrations with solutions like that, too. Finally, we think that integrating this app and layering some of your social interactions with your customer database in MailChimp would make a whole lot of sense.

After we get a little feedback from our users. If you’d like to be notified when LongReply launches, sign up for our list.

Perhaps you’ve observed your bounce rate going up while your open and click rates went down.  Maybe you’ve had increasing problems with blocks, slow delivery, or a number of other issues.  As daily senders, you’re likely more aware of your deliverability than most, and it’s going to take a joint effort between you and your ESP to make sure it stays healthy.

The Facts of Life

You see, those first four thousand subscribers were in love with you.  They wanted your email every day, even if it was a text-only campaign with no colorful images sporting those eye-soothing rounded corners.  They never complained to their ISP about you.  If your email ended up in their spam folder, they dragged it out, added you to their address book, and sent a kind email to let you know there may be trouble.

That kind of devotion is rare, and it naturally diminishes as you grow.  The next group of subscribers love you, but they aren’t “in love” with you. Then you met a bunch of people who just like you.  I mean, they like you a lot, but they don’t like-like you the way your core subscribers do.  It’s okay, we understand.  If we can just re-inspire those original warm feelings, you’ll be seeing the love from your campaign stats in no time.

What You Can Do

I’m about to give you a secret sauce of magical solutions that will improve your campaigns in every way, but you won’t like it.  In fact, you’ll laugh at how naive and ridiculous some of these ideas are.  I’ll be so embarrassed!  For my sake, maybe you should just skip ahead.  No?  Okay, but I warned you.

Magical Solution #1

Send less email.  It’s simple really, only send your daily email to subscribers who want it every day.  Offer a weekly or monthly version to everyone else.  Your open and click rates will go up, and fewer people will feel compelled to hit the “Spam” button.

Pro Tip: You can target your most loyal and newest subscribers at the same time. When choosing a list for your next campaign, click “send to segment.” Then set the Member Rating and Date Added filters as in the picture below. If you’ve had a spat of complaints or hard bounces and omnivore had to send you a warning, list segmenting is the quickest way to rehabilitate your account.

Segmenting List Inside a Campaign

Magical Solution #2

Improve your content.  If you need to send to your entire list every day, then make sure the content is rich and well rounded enough to be compelling to all.  ISPs are creating tools that put more and more power in the hands of your subscribers.  Every unopened email could be hurting your chances of reaching the inbox next time.

If applicable, consider segmenting your list by content.  Instead of sending the same long email to everyone, send the tech portion to your tech people, the shopping portion to your shopping people, and so forth.

While preparing for this blog, I came across something Ben wrote a few months ago.  It caught my eye as a good example of how you can and should take a hard look at your click stats.  The people who are exclusively clicking your tech, italian food, outdoor equipment, or potty humor links are prime candidates for targeted campaigns.  Yes, I am giving you the green light on an all potty humor email… for the customers.  I certainly don’t find that kind of thing amusing.  I’m too mature.  What was your user name again?

Magical Solution #3

Revise your list collection strategy.  Make sure your list is double opt-in to avoid hitting any spam traps or fake email accounts.  Be very clear with everyone who signs up that they will be receiving a daily email.  If there is a newsletter checkbox when a subscriber creates an account on your site, call more attention to it.  Subscribers who aren’t expecting your email are more likely to mark it as spam.  If enough people do this, the ISP may block you entirely, and by “you” I mean us!

What We Can Do

I know, I know, I’ve asked you to make a lot of hard decisions, and you want to know what we can do to help shoulder the burden.  After all, isn’t that why you signed up with an ESP in the first place?

The answer to your question is yes, we can help.  Actually, all good ESPs are already doing a ton to make your deliverability great.  This is the part where I’m going to overwhelm you with technical jargon and not explain what any of it means because it would take too long: DKIM, Reverse DNS, MX Records, Engagement Monitoring, IP Reputation, Blacklist Monitoring, Bounce Handling, SPF, MTA, Registrar, Throttling, Spam Filters, VERP, FBL, Whitelisting, Certification, Static/Dynamic Error Handling, Email Headers, Seed List, etc

If you’re interested, all of those terms and processes are explained in our Email Delivery For IT Professionals guide.  For daily senders, here are a few subjects you may want to consider when talking to your ESP:

Dedicated IPs

More than likely, your ESP has a sizable pool of shared IPs that all their users send over.   At MailChimp, we actually have several pools of IPs separated by cleanliness.  That way, emails to your best subscribers go out over our cleanest IP pool, and we can isolate emails to unproven subscribers so they don’t interfere with the rest of your campaign.  However, high volume senders can benefit from leaving the shared pool and purchasing a dedicated IP.

I’ll discuss many benefits of a dedicated IP below, but they key is that we’re helping ISPs trust you.  As a daily sender, your volume can look aggressive and dangerous, and this raises flags no matter how good your content is.  By sending to an active list from a stable location, we can make that volume look more attractive.  If you’re trying to get your subscribers to fall in love with you again, think of the ISPs as parents. If you can get their approval, you’re a big step ahead of the game.

And uh, I guess that makes Freddie your wingman.  Yes!  Thank you, thank you.  I’ll be here all night.  Someone get me some water because this metaphor is on fire.

Ahem…

Custom DNS

So I mentioned that your ESP has a lot of IPs, and each one of those has a domain name.  The domain names probably sound innocent and dull, like email1.campaigns.com.  However, under ideal circumstances an ISP would like to see the domain name match up to the From Address in your campaign.  While most of our users have a great sending history without a custom DNS, a lot of high volume daily senders can benefit from this kind of attention to detail.

Bounce Alerts

Bounces are both undesirable and inevitable.  Even the best list collection policy can’t avoid getting a few problem email addresses every now and then. We like to know the general makeup of your lists so we can be more responsive when bounces do occur.  Each ISP has their own bounce syntax and requires their own unique response.  Knowing what to look for can really help us prevent small problems from becoming big problems.

Any good ESP will already be familiar with bounce messages from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Comcast, or any other big ISP.  Beyond that, location is a key factor.  If the bulk of your list is in South America, your European ESP may not be as familiar with the receiving ISPs.  That doesn’t mean you need to switch ESPs, but you should get in touch with them to make sure your issues are on their radar.

Throttling

If it were up to us, we would send your email as fast as computationally possible, but the ISPs would never go for that.  You see, they need time to sniff every email for the salty scent of spam or the sickly odor of viruses. If we send too much too quickly, they’ll assume all the email is bad and throw it away.  The very thought gives us stomach cramps, so we do everything we can to assure your emails are sending at the right speed.  For those on dedicated IPs, your throttle rate should be fine tuned to match your IP reputation.

ISPs are also fond of sending bounce messages saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Something smells odd, and we’re going to need time to investigate. Don’t send us any more email for an hour or I’m throwing it away and adding you to my list of enemies.”  Ignoring those warnings can be very unhealthy, so it’s important your ESP respond as quickly as possible when those bounce messages occur.

You’ve Come a Long Way

For any email marketer, it’s probably worth reviewing your sending strategy every time your list grows by an order of magnitude.  With daily senders, those growing pains are going to be accelerated.  Just think, with a list of thirty-four thousand subscribers you’ll send a million emails a month. That’s definitely cool to email geeks like us.  However, at some point sending out more email becomes less valuable than sending out better email in the right way for your subscribers.  Like any good wingman, we want to see you succeed so we can brag about how we were there when it happened.

For example, whenever I send our MailChimp newsletters, I usually get a couple dozen replies and I reply back to every single one of them. Sometimes, the conversation gets really interesting and it’s a shame that all our subscribers can’t join in.

So in our upcoming v5.3 upgrade, we’re adding Facebook Comments functionality to MailChimp campaigns. This way, you can keep the conversation going with your subscribers after you’ve hit the send button.

Here’s how it works…

Let’s say you’re an artist (the awesome Chet Phillips, to be exact). You could sign in to MailChimp and use our AutoConnect template for Etsy, to automagically¹ pull in your latest work.

In your campaign setup screen, make sure you check “allow comments:”

Then, just insert our new Facebook Comments merge tag into your campaign like this:

When your subscribers get your newsletter, it looks like this…

And when they click the comments button, we take them to your campaign archive page with the Facebook comments window open:

From here, your subscribers can log in to Facebook and comment.

What’s nice is the checkbox option to post their comment to their Facebook profile:

which is an excellent way for them to spread the word about your newsletter to the friends in their network.

They can also see comments from other subscribers within this window, and if they want, comment to each other:

As people comment on your newsletter, you’ll receive email notifications from MailChimp.

Comment Stats

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could track all those comments inside MailChimp? Boosh. Open up your campaign’s social stats in MailChimp, scroll down to the Facebook stats section, and you’ll see all comments about your campaign:

The nerds in the lab also wanted to tinker with sentiment analysis, so you’ll see little frowny or smiley icons next to each comment, plus the overall sentiment.  Note that if you don’t like a comment, you can delete it from this screen, and your other subscribers won’t see it on your campaign archive.

If you want, you can try sending a campaign with the comments merge tag only to your recipients who are on Facebook. Just use our Social Pro add-on like this:

Or, you could create a small “round table” of your highly engaged customers. Just build a segment using our influence, engagement, and social criteria:

Turn your newsletters into conversation starters

If you’ve ever ended your newsletters with a request for feedback, like “Let me know what you think” or “what do you guys recommend for…” you’ll love this feature. Your subscribers can share their expertise and opinion with the rest of your community, instead of just your inbox. It’s also a great way to answer common questions. How many times have you sent an email to people, and had to reply back with the same answer over and over to a bunch of recipients? I’ve received great questions from customers, and knew that others on my list would benefit from the answer too. By adding Facebook comments to your emails, hitting the “send” button doesn’t mean the discussion is over. For your community, it’s just beginning.

Facebook comments, along with MailChimp Faces, are coming to MailChimp when we launch v5.3 in just a few days.

Related:

• Add a MailChimp newsletter signup form to your Facebook page
• MailChimp brings the Facebook “Like” button to email marketing
• MailChimp Launches Social Pro addon