Sometimes they’re a little more excited than normal:

At first, I thought the summer heat in June and July took away all their excitement. But you can see on the next line they snuck a little excitement back in:

They were just “pleased” in June:

Honestly, for a frequent system alert email like this, they know what they’re doing. A simple little logo, plus some text is all they really need, and is all we’d put up with. If the started getting too fancy-schmancy with their designs, I think people would get tired of them really fast. These seem to just fly under the radar. In fact, after watching them send these all year, it motivated me to stay in touch with our own customers (a little) more often with our System Alerts. But since they do send so frequently, it makes it a lot easier to spot little details like this. I started to notice it about halfway through the year, and decided to just keep checking to see if they’d ever change it up. At this point, I hope they don’t. It’s grown on me, and I think it just wouldn’t be the same if they weren’t excited anymore.

Update: Be sure to check out the awesome comment from Amazon’s Jeff Bar below. I was truly honored (and excited) to see he took the time to reply to my silliness.

Read the bullet points. Particularly, #2 and #5:

When you’re writing your emails (especially automated inventory alerts like this one) you can get away with boring, functional, corporate writing and nobody will mind. But can you get away with sneaking in a little fun? That’s a lot more challenging imho.

But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.

There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…

How Storify Works

Here’s an example of what Storify does. I saw a tweet the other day from a father helping his daughter use MailChimp and Twitter to raise money for a charity. I thought it might be fun to donate some money, and see if he’d notice. The story took place on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Youtube, MailChimp and his blog. I assembled it all with Storify here:

http://storify.com/benchestnut/go-kayla

Drag and Drop Curation

I built it by just dragging and dropping tweets, and Facebook posts from within the Storify interface:

You can even search different sites, like Youtube, to drop videos into your story:

After my story is complete, I can publish it to Twitter, WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, or MailChimp:

When I hit “publish” in Storify, it’ll send the story over to my MailChimp account, and setup a draft campaign:

Still Developing

There are lots of potential use cases for this. The one that comes to my mind first is for people who send breaking news. Perhaps you’ve setup an RSS-to-email list, and it sends out daily. These are your subscribers who want up-to-the-minute news, and Storify helps you build stories for them — fast. I think this is just the beginning of something really exciting.

Storify is currently in public private beta right now. MailChimp users who are interested in giving it a try can request an invitation on their website, and use the invite key: mailchimp.

It’s still early, so we’d love to hear your feedback about where you’d like to see this integration go.

Related:

• Building the next big thing? Need a little funding, but want to keep all your equity? Check out MailChimp’s $1million Integration Fund.

As a publication, they obviously would prefer that you not unsubscribe from their list. They’d prefer that you change your settings. But they don’t hide their unsubscribe link (in fact, they make it more immediate). They’ve just prioritized the “change email settings” button. Smart.

Hey Ben,

Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but we miss you. We miss your smile, we miss the way you smell, we even miss the dumb jokes you used to tell.

That put a big smile on my face, and made me read on…

We know it’s only been a few months… but to us it feels more like a few years.

We’ve got tons of new photo goodies you’d love. Stuff you always dreamed of. Wanna check it out? (No pressure!) Here’s a $5 GIFT CODE for your next order. (Good today and tomorrow only, NO MINIMUM ORDER!)

Gift code: _______
Visit: http://photojojo.com/store/email

Hope to see you soon!

Wistfully,
Your pals at The Photojojo Store

p.s. The gift code’s only good today and tomorrow, but feel free to pass it on to a friend if you can’t use it!

p.p.s.  If you don’t want to receive emails like this anymore, please visit _____

Just because you can make an HTML email, it doesn’t mean you always should.

Once you’ve mastered the ancient and mysterious art of HTML email, it’s tempting to add images and links and bells and whistles to every email you send. But as photojojo demonstrated, simplicity can be powerful.

Getting the best of both worlds

Still, I often encourage people to consider crafting an email that looks like it’s plain-text, but that uses HTML (with only the most essential formatting). That way, you get the best of both worlds. A plain-text email can often look and feel a lot less “salesy” and more personal than a traditional HTML email with lots of photos. But coding your plain-text email in HTML gives you some basic open tracking and ROI tracking. And if it’s okay for people to share the coupon code with friends, you might even insert a Like button or social share link.

In MailChimp, there’s an an email template option called “Rich-Text” that we built precisely for this occasion.

When you build a campaign, and it’s time to choose a template, select “Start from Scratch”

Then select “Rich Text”

Note: I’m the guy who designed that template, so my apologies in advance. It’s extremely rough. I used “courier” as the default font, to make it really “texty.” You can change all the default fonts for titles and default text to something less harsh, like Times, or Arial. Also note that the template does allow you to insert a header graphic. You’re probably thinking that sorta defeats the purpose of “plain text” but I think that if you insert a very tiny, minimal graphic, it can make your email feel a little more “official.”

So, if I may be so bold, here’s how I’d re-design the email above in MailChimp:

• The merge tag with TITLE basically converts FNAME to title case (more on that here). It’s handy in case your customers entered their information into your database in all lowercase, or all uppercase.
• The logo is small, and aligned right (it’s out of the way, but still there in case people want some reassurance that this is “official photojojo letterhead”
• I’ve also added the Facebook Like button to the bottom of the email. Photojojo tracks Facebook “Likes” for every single product in their store, and with MailChimp, they could track Likes for their email campaigns.

I did something a little different with the header logo, that not a lot of people know they can do.

Your first inclination might be to click the “use image” button in the header:

Which would open up our easy header-image uploader. It’s great for people who aren’t super-savvy with Photoshop, because it has a picnik integration button:

and it walks you through the steps of adding a link, alt-text, etc.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I clicked the “use text” button:

Which brings up the normal MailChimp WYSIWYG interface. And instead of just typing the text “photojojo” I can actually upload a graphic:

I know that seems odd. The reason I’d do this is to have a little more control over how the header area is coded. Specifically, I want to give the logo graphic some special “id” code:

so that it shows up as a thumbnail whenever shared in Facebook. Otherwise, Facebook might select another graphic from your email, seemingly at random. Adding “campaign-icon” to tell Facebook exactly what image to use is a trick we detailed here: Coding HTML emails for Facebook

Researching Subject Lines

If this is a template that I plan to re-use often, or maybe plan to set as an autoresponder, I’d also spend some time with MailChimp’s built-in Subject Line Suggester tool:

The subject line of the original email was “A present from Photojojo!” and it worked for me. I definitely opened, though it’s mostly because I’ve come to expect great, relevant content from these guys anyway.

But still, I’d look at alternative keywords to see how they performed for other MailChimp users. We have over 400,000 users on our system, who send more than 20 million emails a day. The Subject Line Suggester is a tremendously helpful data set to learn from. And, of course, before setting this as any kind of permanent template, I’d run my subject lines through our automated A/B testing tool.

Whew. I know that’s a lot of work for such a simple plain-text email. But if you’re designing an email template that drives sales for your company (or your client), I just wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to use some of the “power tools” in MailChimp. Writing great content, however, is a talent you’ll need to master on your own.

But today I changed all that, because of an email newsletter I got from Jon Swanson. I subscribed to his blog updates a long time ago, because he was one of the first people to try our RSS-to-email tool.

All I wanted to know is whether or not our tool was working properly for people. But I ended up staying on his list, because I like his writing and his content. Heck, I’ve ended up purchasing books he’s recommended (that’s what’s so interesting about influence, and the social web).

Anyway, in Gmail, since I have Rapportive installed, I saw Jon’s face right next to his newsletter (that’s him over to the right). I can also see some of his recent tweets, which  include links to more photos.

This makes his email newsletter really personal, and really human. So if you have Rapportive installed in your Gmail, and you got my most recent newsletter, there’s me:

When I first wrote about MailChimp’s integration with Rapportive, I was only thinking about how you could use it to learn more about your customers. Never even thought about using it so that customers could learn more about you(r brand).

Speaking of learning, when I was looking at his Rapportive information, my MailChimp Raplet showed me that Jon is also subscribed to my email newsletter:

And he has a 4-star (very engaged) member rating.

Small world.

P.S.

Switching the email address that your company uses for your newsletter’s reply-to is NOT something you can just do on a whim (unless you own your company, and you love experimenting). That’s because if you’ve been using a role address for years, it’s likely your subscribers’ address books and spam filters have been trained to trust and accept emails from the email address you started with. Switching your reply-to could result in spam filter blocking.

But it’s something worth considering if you’d like to form a more personal, human bond with your loyal subscribers. Dan, my co-founder who runs our MailChimp Webinars, is building up a “social profile” for the webinar department so that their emails to customers can be accompanied by some fun bio information and avatar (pulled from this twitter account).

If this is all something you just can’t risk, no worries. It does look like Rapportive is working on a way to get corporate information included whenever it detects certain role addresses. A very “corporate” email promotion that I got from Network Solutions gave me this in Rapportive:

And come to think of it, you could always integrate your social profile information right next to your email newsletter by using MailChimp’s built-in twitter template (here’s a blog post about that from 2009), or any of our other socially integrated AutoConnect templates.

Okay, in some cases, the frequency just increases as the company’s experience with email marketing increases (in other words, “now we have more to say”). But you can’t just go from casual email newsletters to daily hyper-marketing. Not without the right approach.

Here’s an example of the right way to increase your frequency…

I subscribed to the Bonobos newsletter back in November of 2009. They sent emails every week or two.

Here’s an example of what they looked like:

Weekly is honestly more frequent than I usually prefer, but they’re always well-written and creative in some way, so I actually look forward to them. Their photographer always seems to come up with something different (btw, how smart is it that they blog about the making-of those photo shoots?).

Recently, they decided that they wanted to send more frequent emails.

But they didn’t just start blasting them to their list every day, like most retailers seem to do.

Bonobos created a whole new program (an “exclusive email list” as they call it), called “Bonobos Pro” that I could opt-in to.

Here’s the invitation they sent:

Hey, I like the idea of them sending me suggestions. I’m too lazy to go shopping, either offline or online. So I signed up.

Now, my emails from Bonobos look like this:

What’s nice is how they kept the same clean design (that I love so much), but made it feel slightly more exclusive with this little top-right corner-thingy:

That corner-thingy is genius. It’s a subtle “permission reminder” that explains why I’m getting these emails so frequently now. You know, in case I forget down the road, and wonder “what’s up with all these daily emails?!?” Explanation right there: “Dude, you signed up for them.” It’s subliminal, and it works.

Another reason that little corner thingy is cool? Just when I get used to it saying “Bonobos Pro” all the time, they change it up, and make me look:

Bonobos could’ve just upped their frequency, and stayed “can-spam compliant.” But they were smart about it. They didn’t want to alienate their customers. Coming up with this “Pro” thing is a ton more work than just hitting the send button more often, but in the long run, it’s worth it. Plus, it’s a great way to find your most loyal customers, who will open more, click more, forward more, and complain less. And hopefully, buy more banana shorts.

‘what if you deliberately included sold out product photos in your emails?’

This is a much more subtle (but no less powerful) way to add urgency than using text like, “hurry! act now! buy now!” That kind of text is typically not appreciated by spam filters. Or humans. I like the way you think, Linda.

Not convinced? I like the way you think, too. A/B test your content, then.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

Turns out I passed all the major spam filters!

My Spam Assassin score wasn’t great (anything over a 5 is DOA but I like to stay well below 3). But that seems to be because of other problems.

In terms of the extremely disgusting alt-text descriptions I used, they don’t seem to have triggered anything at all:

Got any questions you want the MailChimp team to answer here on the blog? Submit them here.

Learn more about MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector:

Click to see the winner

When I created this email newsletter, I had two different subject line ideas:

A) MonkeyWrench – Autoresponders, Turks, Freshbooks, and Webhooks

B) Turks, Freshbooks, autoresponders, and webhooks

Quick – Can you  guess which subject line got more opens? Turns out it got more clicks and fewer bounces, too!

Luckily, there’s no need to guess with MailChimp’s patent-pending built-in A/B testing tool. It’s totally automatic. I’ll show you how it works…

Log in to MailChimp, and click on the big orange “Create Campaign” button. Choose the “A/B split” option:

Next, you’ll be asked to setup your A/B test:

the setup page is pretty straightforward, but let’s break it down into pieces.

First, tell MailChimp what you want to test. I’m testing 2 subject lines:

Next, tell MailChimp how many subscribers you want to test on. Pick a random slice of your list that’s enough to make you feel confident about the results. I usually pick 20% of my list, but that might be different based on your list size.

You just drag the little slider left and right:

In the scenario above, MailChimp will randomly select 10% of my list, and send subject line A, and another random 10% will get subject line B.

Next, tell MailChimp how it should choose the winner:

Above, I’m telling MailChimp to “Wait 6 hours, then look at open rates. Whichever subject line got more opens, use that for the remaining 80% of my list.” You can make it wait only 1 hour, or stretch it out to several days if you want. I think 6 hours is long enough. Plus, I’m kind of impatient. If you like complete control over everything, choose “manually” and MailChimp won’t automatically send anything. You can log in and choose the winner. But where’s the fun in that?

Anyway, next I just go about creating my email campaign like I normally do, except when it’s time to enter my subject line, I get two boxes:

Plug in my two subject line ideas, and I’m done.

I then scheduled the campaign to send at 9am ET on Monday morning.

Then, I just sit back and wait. MailChimp does all the rest for me.

No need to generate random slices of my list, then generate more random slices, then generate the remainder of my list, and no need to build 2 separate campaigns, then a 3rd winning campaign. It’s just automatic. It’s so easy, you can run A/B tests on every campaign you send. Always be testing!

It saves me a ton of time, so that I can do other stuff.

Like blog about what I just did.

Also See: Those who A/B test get 10% better open rates