• We have 1.2 million users in 158 countries. That’s quite a growth curve since going freemium in 2009 w/100k users.
• Those MailChimp users upload an average 472,000 images per day.
• We serve about 115 million of those images per day (using about 3.5TB of daily bandwidth)
• Currently, we run MailChimp on 117 servers. 134 total, counting all our different services and products.
• We send between 80-100 million emails per day (using 3.29TB of bandwidth per day)
• Our servers track an average 20,305,881 email opens per day.
• We track over 4 million clicks per day

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.

That tool would analyze your list, then scour the vast database of MailChimp customers, looking for similar publishers to recommend. But this idea has been on the back burner for years, because such a tool would require 1) a vast database of MailChimp customers, and 2) the ability to analyze it–fast. Well, going freemium back in 2009 kinda helped with requirement #1. We’re at 1.2 million users, and manage over 800 million email subscribers for them all. And launching our Email Genome Project helped with requirement #2.

Helloooooo, serendipity. Finally, we have all the pieces we need to build Wavelength: a MailChimp service that uses a massive amount of email data to help you find publishers who share something in common with you:

Wavelength doesn’t help you send a promotion to another list, and it definitely doesn’t give you other lists or email addresses. It simply shows you screenshots of other newsletters that some of your subscribers read. The goal is to help you contact those publishers and maybe form a relationship with each other. Ideally, you can link to each other and help each other grow your lists organically.

How Wavelength Works

Basically, Wavelength analyzes your MailChimp list, then compares it to all other MailChimp lists (really, really fast). It looks for subscriber overlap, then recommends similar publishers by showing you screenshots of the email campaigns they’ve sent.

For example, let’s say I own a local pub, and I’d like to find some email newsletter publishers in town to partner with.

I’d go to Wavelength:

and authorize it to connect with my MailChimp account:

Wavelength will ask me which list to analyze, and it’ll ask for some descriptive tags for that list:

Then, it starts thinking:

It usually takes under 20 seconds to compare a list with about 1 million other lists containing 800 million emails.

And in order to deliver the results really fast, we pre-generated over 3 million campaign screenshots in the system (#NBD, as the kids tweet).

Once the analysis is complete, I get screenshots of email newsletters that my customers are also interested in.

They’re listed in order of “similarity” (subscriber overlap):

As one tester put it, this is where you meet all your “email cousins.”

From here, I can drill down to see an archive of past campaigns by each publisher, and then subscribe to any of their lists.

See your subscribers, and maybe even yourself, in a new light

The example scenario above is very typical for what we’ve been finding in our initial tests. You’d think that other local pubs would be listed first, but you’re more likely to find local theaters, beer-related iPhone apps, local coffee shops, etc.

When I ran my various MailChimp lists through Wavelength, I expected to see mostly email marketing or design related results. Instead, I saw that my customers subscribe to newsletters about social marketing tools, CRMs, content management systems, productivity apps, design publications, and newsletters about company culture and innovation.

Here’s a snippet of my newsletter’s wavelength:

But what’s really fun is when I manage different lists in Wavelength, I get some different results. For example, we manage a list that talks about our various giveaways (t-shirts, monkey hats, plushies, etc) that I think is mostly composed of very loyal (and obviously very stylish) MailChimp fans, and the Wavelength for that list looks like this:

Yet another list I set up for an event we hosted in London had a Wavelength like this:

which actually gives me some ideas for other international events to sponsor.

When’s this available?

We plan to open up access to Wavelength in about a month. Why the wait? Well, it scans our system for what it perceives to be public email campaigns, and it makes an attempt to exclude any email campaigns that it thinks are “private” (I’ll explain what that means below). But instead of just relying on algorithms to tell us what to exclude, we thought it’d be good to let our customers manually exclude themselves. We want to give you plenty of time to do that.

Public vs. private email campaigns

MailChimp was built for email marketing, which is an inherently public activity. So what in the world should be considered a “private” campaign, and why would someone use MailChimp to send one?

Usually, it’s an internal company newsletter, or a wedding invitation, or a one-time prize notification or transactional kind of message.  The information in the email is not usually super private or sensitive (email is just not an extremely private medium), but it might be something that you don’t exactly want promoted, or something with expired content. Wavelength will almost always exclude these, because it won’t search lists that were only imported manually, it won’t include tiny lists or fresh new lists, and it won’t show campaigns sent to a segment of a list. For a campaign to be shown in Wavelength, its recipient list must be greater than 200 members, and show signs of being public. Namely, opt-ins were received from its public signup form, or the campaign archive bar (that thingy with all the social sharing buttons) is activated.

But if you want, you can manually override everything, and totally exclude your list from Wavelength searches.

For example, I have my list where customers can sign up for a chance to win a t-shirt. For some reason, I just don’t want this to show up in Wavelength results. Maybe the t-shirt designs are top secret prototypes or something. For that list, I can go to “Publicity Settings:”

And then mark its campaigns as private:

You’ll notice that while we were at it, we combined two other previously released features that have publicity and privacy options (the archive toolbar and the subscriber count chiclets). We figured it’d be nice to consolidate everything in one place.

Using data to make email better

Wavelength is a project I’m happy to finally see the light of day, but we’ve only just begun. In 2011 we brought on a server/devops guy to help us handle all this “big data” and we hired an internal data scientist to analyze that data (here’s some fun stuff he’s found). We’re already heavily using EGP behind the scenes here to prevent abuse and protect the email ecosystem. For example, about a year ago, a hacker stole someone’s identity to create a MailChimp account, then used it to send spam (one reason we’ve added so many security features to MailChimp, and why we make free 2-factor security apps like AlterEgo). After that incident, we analyzed their list and found other accounts that had lists very closely matching the hacker’s:

The “evil doer” is in the center, with similar lists surrounding (users’ names obviously have been obfuscated). See any common theme here? What we found was fascinating. Some of the “similar” accounts were legit users, and some appeared to be accounts that the hackers were in the midst of setting up. But this kind of graph raises questions like, “Why are they all London arts / entertainment organizations? Did they initially steal their list from some London theater? Or did they all scrape their lists from the same source?”  We’re also able to test incoming new accounts for the presence of stolen/purchased/scraped lists (based on data we’ve accumulated from accounts we’ve shut down for abuse), with the goal of keeping our system clean and our deliverability high (and also, you know–protecting email). And most exciting of all (to an email nerd like me), we can use what we’ve learned while fighting abuse to build cool new features like Wavelength that help us improve our email marketing. Who knew math could be so useful?

To be notified when Wavelength goes live, sign up to this list.

For general announcements about our Email Genome Project, subscribe here.

Related reading:

• Fun with data science (and dendrograms): http://blog.mailchimp.com/fun-with-data-science/
• Slightly scary: What happens to email typos? http://blog.mailchimp.com/comacast-and-gmai-all-your-typo-email-are-belong-to-us/
• Pesky tweets from scantily clad fembots: http://blog.mailchimp.com/dealing-with-tweets-from-scantily-clad-fembots/
• MailChimp’s Email Genome Project: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimps-email-genome-project/

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.

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!

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

To help clear things up, we called Jeff from PageLever. His site provides really cool Facebook Analytics to all kinds of businesses, so he’s in a position to have a uniquely informed perspective.

Jeff was boarding a plane as we spoke (the life of a busy man, er, businessman), so our conversation isn’t something I can just cut and paste. However, he did provide a lot of solid insights that I want to pass along.

Open Graph

You’ve probably heard this term discussed in various blogs and videos, but what is Open Graph and how do you use it?

The answer to the first question is simpler than you might think. Open Graph is just a way to connect the friends people have with the things people like. The underlying assumption is that what your friends are a better measure of your interests than, say, your demographic.

To start using Open Graph, just add Facebook’s Like button to your webpage, videos, songs, restaurant menu, or just about anything online. For all I know, you can QR code a Like button on physical objects as well. As people “Like” the object, they strengthen their relationship to you as a company. If they comment on and share your object, they strengthen that relationship even more.

You’re not limited to the Like button, by the way. There are all kinds of social plugins you can associate with your content. Some plugins enable comments, while others focus on finding connections between friends and content. Personally, I think some of these plugins make your website look as cluttered as my facebook page, but they each encourage a different type of engagement with your fans.  Keep that in mind, because it’s very important.

Edge Rank

So great, you’ve integrated with Open Graph, and you’ve targeted the content you want your fans to engage with. Now, how do you optimize this experience? Jeff had a lot to say about this (it’s what he does), so let’s dig in.

First of all, Edge Rank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what content, updates, posts, and suggestions to show Facebook users on their wall. Much like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, Edge Rank looks at the salience of an item to determine placement. In other words, Facebook will only show your posts to engaged fans.

If a Facebook user isn’t a fan of your company, they won’t see your posts on their wall. If they’re a fan but not sufficiently engaged, they won’t see your posts. In fact, you can have an engaged fan who happens to be slightly more engaged with a lot of other content, and they still may not see your posts. It’s all about the rank.  Facebook is a middle-man between your content and their users. Remember, Facebook’s goal is to promote Facebook, not you.  So how does Edge Rank work?

Time Decay

The math itself is a mystery, but we know the basics. Edge Rank has three main elements. Let’s start with time decay. Over the course of time, possibly just hours, everything you share on Facebook becomes less and less visible to your fans. There’s really nothing you can do about this, so you might find that you need to post several times a day to stay relevant.

Affinity Score

The next element in Edge Rank is the Affinity Score. This measures the relationship between a particular fan and a particular content author. This is why no one can honestly tell you what your Edge Rank is. Each fan is going to have their own Affinity Score based on how many times they’ve Liked, commented, and shared your content. Oh, and remember when I told you there were different plugins? This is where it becomes important.

All actions were not created equal. Likes, comments, and sharing don’t all count the same. While we don’t have the exact equation, just keep in mind that Facebook is looking for engagement. I would imagine that comments and sharing count more the Likes and page visits, but that’s just a guess.

From what I can tell, Affinity is a one-way street. You can’t artificially increase the Affinity Score between you and your fans by visiting or commenting on their pages. On the other hand, if you can get them to revisit your page, the effect will be profound. Apparently most fans only visit your Facebook Page once.  Revisits are rare, so if you can get a fan to come back, you’re way ahead of the game.

Native Edge Score

This brings us to the final element in Edge Rank. I’m talking about the Native Edge Score. It turns out that some kinds of content are worth more than others. It’s easy to speculate that content with video and images is worth more than text-only posts, but Jeff assures me it’s technically a mystery. The way he explains it, photos and videos are just naturally more compelling than plain text. They come with an intrinsic social weight that is difficult to distinguish from any native score Facebook assigns.

That being said, you may not care about the philosophical nuances. The fact is, photos and videos should play a key element in your quest for Facebook domination. When I asked Jeff about the salience of videos, he confirmed they were rather hit-or-miss. The ones that make it big often get shared over and over, and that’s incredibly good. However, there are far more videos that were just good attempts. I guess a certain amount of luck is involved.

Focus

With all this subjective scoring, it can be easy to think Edge Rank is out of your hands. Fortunately, Jeff has tons of data on how effective brands use Facebook.  He had a few suggestions for marketers to focus on.

Visibility

The number one thing you can do is to encourage users to take action. You can do this directly by asking for likes and comments, but you can also create the kind of content that compels people to respond. This is an area where your creativity is definitely going to be rewarded.

Another cool way to increase visibility is to encourage connection between your fans. Getting your fans to Friend each other has a multiplying effect on the actions each fan takes. Think of your content like infectious laughter. People tend to laugh more in groups than when they’re all alone, so if your fans can see each other and talk to each other, that laughter is going to spread very quickly.

Growth

Fans beget fans. Starting out, you might struggle to get each new Facebook fan, but you’ve got to persevere. Jeff said the largest organic source for new fans is the list of Facebook Suggestions found on every user’s home page. The more fans you have, the more likely you are to be suggested to the friends of those fans. There’s a tipping point here, and with enough determination, you’ll make it.

Your Fan Page

Your fan page can sit around and collect dust, or it can actually do some work for you. Your fan page should have a singular focus. It needs to create engagement. A great way to do this is to segment your page into two tabs.

The first tab will be your landing page. Make this look nice, but keep the bulk of the content away. The landing page should focus on Likes. Everyone who visits should immediately see your brand and a Like button. I mentioned this before, but revisits are rare, so this might be your only chance to get that Like. Make the most of it.

Your second tab should focus on deeper engagement. This is where you put your content, your contests, your requests for feedback, and all that jazz. Get fans involved with your company on a more meaningful level than the Like. Remember, if you’re not focused on engagement, you become less relevant and less visible to your fans.

Does It Work?

The value of a Facebook page is that it lies somewhere between Twitter and email. The social network is a powerful tool for customers and companies, but the messages you can send have to be concise and focused. Email is more forgiving, more persistent, and allows for greater depth in your message than other social media outlets. Despite what Facebook says, I believe Open Graph encourages, possibly even requires, email. The two are complimentary.

The truth is, I’ve been fairly skeptical about the concept of branding and marketing solely through Facebook. Then I read an article about Chris “Drama” Ptaff and his company Young & Reckless. Drama specifically says, “We don’t do print ads, we don’t do commercials. We haven’t even considered that because our reach is so much better with social-media outlets.”

That’s a powerful endorsement, and it obviously works for them.

I asked Jeff if he thought social media was truly for the young, or if focusing all your marketing energy there was just reckless (I’m sorry, it’s been a long post). He said the effectiveness of Facebook stems from the social salience of the product and the marketing. It’s the difference between having a website that plays music and a website that lets you play music for your friends. Ultimately age isn’t the barrier. If you can add to the social experience your customers are already having, you “get it.”

Preliminary Steps

When you’re setting up your drip campaign, planning is actually just as important as creating the content you’ll be sending out, apparently. So before you get started, the fine folks over at Marketingsherpa urge you to consider some of the following questions. (Seriously, I’m not an expert on this stuff but am happy to point you toward helpful resources from folks who are.)

What’s the goal of your autoresponder campaign? For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you might want to remind someone about the items they’ve left in their shopping cart and encourage them to come back and purchase. Do you have your content sorted out? Content is still king, and having well-written, informative and relevant content will help engage your subscribers and keep them interested. What’s the trajectory and duration of your campaign? What key marketing messages are you trying to convey? What’s the time period over which you plan to send your emails? Are they leading up to a specific event? These sorts of questions will help you figure out how often you want to send, and the specific content in each message.

Getting Started

Let’s imagine that you’re a wedding photographer who finds potential clients through word of mouth, via a signup form on your website, and by using Chimpadeedoo for iPad to let interested parties sign up at bridal shows.

You’ll want to make sure your signup form is capturing all the pertinent information for your autoresponder series– first and last name, email address, date (which I’ve relabeled so it refers to wedding date) and gender. Perhaps even use the 2 line description to entice people with a special offer for signing up, as I’ve done here.

Setting Up Your Autoresponders

Remember, the whole point of this tutorial is how to count down to a special date using autoresponders. Since we’ve collected the wedding date of our prospective clients, that’s the date we’ll base our series of emails on.

When I created my signup form in Chimpadeedoo, I offered an incentive– a free wedding photography consultation. In order to make good on that offer, I scheduled my first autoresponder (containing the free consultation offer) to send a few days (3) after signup. This gives the subscriber enough time to process all the information from the Bridal Show, but not so much time that they forget they ever signed up for my list. (Note: Experiment here! Is five days the sweet spot, or do you get better results from waiting a week or maybe even nine days? Leave a comment and let us know what you discover, as my guess is that things will vary by industry and use case.)

Then I created my campaign:

Next, I’ve decided that to stay in contact with my subscribers and help pique their interest in my services, I’ll send out a “tips” type newsletter one month after the subscription date. Again, in my autoresponder setup screen I’ll click the big “add autoresponder” button, then select the list I want to send to– Georgia Bridal Show 2011. Under “send settings” I’ll set my autoresponder to send 1 month after the subscriber’s signup date:

And again, I’ll then go in and create my campaign full of wedding tips and tricks. I’ll segment this one by gender, because let’s face it, you guys need a lot of help when it comes to wedding stuff. I’ll include pointers about how not to look like a total goofball in your photos, how far in advance of your wedding you should get your hair cut so you don’t have that “freshly shorn sheep” look, and even some common dance steps so that you’re not as nervous while twirling your lady during that first dance.

Once you’ve set up your autoresponder and are ready to jump into the design process, simply set the segment of your list you want to send to in Step 1 of the Campaign Builder.

Next, you know that (according to the wedding planning checklist) couples will be seriously auditioning photographers nine to ten months prior to the date of the wedding. In order to capitalize on that, I’ll set up two autoresponders– one that will send 10 months before the date of the wedding, and the other that will send 9 months before the wedding. These are specifically intended to remind my subscribers that it’s time to pick a photographer, while also suggesting my services.

Ten months out, I want to remind the subscriber where we met (the Georgia Bridal Show on June 26, 2011 at Gwinnett Center), provide some education and links to my website and portfolio, and offer my photography services for the big day. Since I collected gender information on my signup form, I might even consider segmenting on that criteria and including a bit more concrete information for the men on my list. Guys don’t always understand the nuances of wedding planning, so it might behoove me to educate as opposed to trying the hard sell.

There’s a lot that goes into planning a wedding, so when my autoresponder sends 9 months prior to the date of the wedding, I want to assure my subscribers I know what they’re going through and that LauterCo Photographers are here to help. This might be a good time to include offers from dress shops, tuxedo rental places or caterers that my company has prior working relationships with. You can even make sure those companies know you sent them business by using Google’s URL builder to generate a unique link for each vendor.

Google URL builder

Some other ideas you might want to consider

• 8 months before the wedding, send a PYOW-powered QR coupon code to a segment of those folks who “opened or clicked” your email from the 9-month autoresponder offering a discount on your photography services

• Post a QR Code outside your studio so that visitors who stop by can quickly signup for your email list