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’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.
We first joined twitter after hearing a lot of buzz about it at SXSW a few years ago. Being more of a “long form” writer, I didn’t quite understand how this “crazy fad” would fit into our marketing and branding. Long story short (see what I did there?), it eventually caught on for us — but not so much for marketing. It’s become more of a customer service tool. Like everything else on the web, apparently.
But it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing…
Wow, your company is really taking off, and that daily email to four thousand subscribers has exploded to forty thousand subscribers. Pretty soon it will be four hundred thousand, and maybe one day you’ll reach four million! We’re really excited for you, and now that you’re growing, it’s time for us to have “the talk.” That’s right, it’s about revisiting your email marketing strategy.
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.
Email marketing can be a one way conversation sometimes. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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…