It’s no secret that mobile readership of email is skyrocketing. In May of 2011, Return Path released a study in which showed an 81% increase in mobile viewership over the prior 6-month period. Then, in September, Litmus released its own study which bore out many of the same conclusions.

Litmus’ number was a little higher: 150% over the previous 6 months. I don’t know what the margin of error is in either study, but even being conservative and splitting the difference between the two numbers nets you a healthy increase. Either way, these numbers show that people are overwhelmingly choosing to view email on their Androids, iPhones, and iPads, and that means finding a way to optimize email for smaller screens.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that media queries are a way to optimize email for mobile devices, and MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow.

Now, chances are that if you do code your own templates, you already know what media queries are, you stopped reading at “MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow,” and have moved on to implementing media queries into your templates. For the rest, what follows is an overview of what a media query looks like, how to implement it into your code, and even how to set it up so that you can adjust the media query style rules within MailChimp’s campaign editor.

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A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

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.

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The holiday season is in full swing, and with Christmas and Hanukkah fast-approaching it seems like a good time to highlight some of our related templates. With over 30 holiday-themed templates to choose from, we’ve got you covered whether you’re sending out party invitations, selling some of the season’s most anticipated toys, or just sending out a newsletter with a Christmas twist.

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With Thanksgiving coming up this week, we’re all taking time to reflect on what we’ve got to be happy about and thankful for. And after all of that reflecting, eating, and napping is done, many people dust off their kevlar body armor, hockey helmets, grab their favorite spiked clubs, and put on their trampling shoes, all in anticipation of Black Friday.

In preparation, I’ll take a moment to highlight some templates and tools that can help you capitalize on the biggest consumer day of the year, and I’ll start with some templates.

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OnStage is a tool that lets your MailChimp email campaigns take the stage to receive realtime feedback from collaborators and head honchos. We launched it 2 months ago for you to give us some feedback.

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.

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