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.

v6.2 is going live today, and — you should know the drill by now — the new features should be done propagating to all user accounts by end of day tomorrow. We’ll be blogging about them in more detail soon, but here’s a list of some of the new features:

• Google+ sharing available on email archive toolbars, plus new Google+ buttons can be added to your campaigns [documentation]
• Tumblr share button can be added to your campaigns [documentation]
• OAuth2 support is now available for all you API and app developers [important information for devs]
• 42 beautiful new templates added, AND remember those premium designer templates we launched a while back? They’re free now.
• Embedded signup form code has been slimmed down, optimized, and less “JavaScripty.”

Chimport Does the “Heavy Lifting”

Chimport Export Window

After you’ve downloaded Chimport from the App Store, log in with your MailChimp API Key. Chimport displays your Address Book groups and contacts. Select the contacts you would like to export, choose a list and click “Export to MailChimp.”

The status bar in the app will tell you how many contacts you’ve exported, how many errors occurred and how many members have been updated. Clicking on the status message will give you a more detailed report if there were errors.

Chimport uploads email, first name and last name from your contact entries to your list. First name and last name will only be uploaded if the FNAME and LNAME merge fields exist on your list, so be sure that they do. If an Address Book contact already exists on your MailChimp list, Chimport will try to update the first and last name fields.

Now that your list has been imported, you might want to take a look at all of MailChimp’s template options. There’s even a way to continue using Apple Mail and Mail’s Stationery to send your campaigns.

Download Chimport on the Mac App Store.

3 ½ years ago, right before our v3.0 launch, the powers that be decided they wanted to heavily invest in our API. Sure, we had an API in one form or another prior to that, but it wasn’t versioned or well documented, and did all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t “web scale”. At all. That was a time when we were sporting about 40k active customers and looking at a few hundred API users (tops). Before we get into fun things like today’s real numbers, charts, and pretty pictures, let’s take a little stroll through the API’s history from conception….

• 2007-03-20 – The very first API went out. It let you Subscribe and Unsubscribe folks – that’s it.
• 2007-11-21 – someone announced our brand new API (it essentially became v1.0 once versioning was added). That went to 439 possibly interested customers, of which 189 opened it (woot, 45% open rate!)
• 2008-05-16 – MailChimp v3 launched. I’d been here about 2 1/2 weeks. And for some reason they let me touch the code. Oh, that’s right, The Chad was the only programmer around. That announcement went to those 40k active customers mentioned
• 2008-08-10 – We announced v1.1 of the API … to 430 customers who were actually using v1.0 of the API. I’m just going to call that a 98% adoption rate from the initial announcement, ok (puh-lease)? Somewhere in here we also put versioning in place – whew, that was a good idea.
• 2009-02-24 – We announced v1.2 of the API was coming to 2,160 riveted customers. Yay, growth! Also, this is where I learned what happens when you offer free t-shirts and get another 45% open rate. Whoops.
• 2009-05-20 – I finally threw in the towel on trying email support and transitioned over to a Google Group. So worth not having to repeat myself! That was necessary because…
• 2009-05-28 – We announced v1.2 of the API – to 4,362 people (47% open rate)
• 2009-08-20 – In preparation for our Freemium plan we had built out our infrastructure a ton (seriously, it was completely different), at which point we picked up datacenters.
• 2009-12-02 – So that Freemium thing really blew up (in a good way). By this point we’d had 19,000 users on the API. Wowzers.
• … you can also get all of the gory details from the changelog

Jumping forward to today, just over 188k users have taken our API for a ride. And some people just refuse to upgrade. Here’s a quick look at the numbers across the currently running versions:

• v1.0 : 102 users
• v1.1 : 4,156 users
• v1.2 : 128,121 users
• v1.3 : 56,413 users

A couple points of note:

• that’s not double counting someone who has used 2 versions of the API
• that is an all-time count – people come and go, so don’t expect those numbers below…
• v1.3 was released 2010-11-15 and picked up 56k users in 8 months, or 7k per month. Woot!

Ok, so those numbers don’t really mean much, so let’s take a look at some ACTUAL growth and usage numbers straight from our API Logs. The graphs below include data from 2010-01-01 through 2011-07-25 - you’ll probably want to zoom in for real detail:

Here we have calls per day with the version clearly broken out for easy comparison. The light blue line is the aggregate total of calls covering all versions of the API. So in the past year and a half we’ve grown from roughly 1.5 million calls per day to 9.5 million, and we’ve just started peaking over 10 million. Note that these only count real calls that we can pin on a user (as you’ll see in a sec). Here’s another view of that with a stacked area graph (and thus no total) in case that’s your thing:

No real surprises there based on the total numbers above – v1.2 is by far the most used version,  v1.3 is coming along, v1.1 is dropping off, and v1.0 barely registers (yay!). The first thought upon seeing that is whether or not our new users are starting up on v1.3 like they should or on v1.2. Just to finish this off, here’s a nice little chart showing a simple percentage-based breakdown:

Now the juicy numbers a lot of folks want to see – has usage by users grown? And are they on-boarding with the proper version (ok, maybe only I want to know that)? The same 3 graphs from above, then, are:

So it looks like back at the beginning of 2010 we saw about 3.5k users per day accessing the API. Not too shabby. We can also see very solid user growth with us consistently seeing over 25k users per day these days (hey you guys!). Here’s that same thing stacked:

Oh, that makes me happy – new users definitely seem to be using v1.3 and usage of other versions has either leveled off or is slowly dropping. Good, thanks folks. Finally, here’s the percentage break down of those users across various versions:

So we can see the per-user percentages by version are skewing farther towards the newer versions of the API than the per-call percentages are. That’s a start, but we’re obviously nowhere close to shutting down anything besides v1.0.

One final note – all of those valleys are the weekends. It could have been normalized, but meh. Obviously we also have a ton of other data in those logs (user agents, which methods are used most, output formats requested, numbers of calls per user, blah blah blah) that we might break out at some point. If you’re nice.

Anywho, so yeah, when Ben (he’s the one who draws monkeys) talks about the API, the Integration Fund and how happy everyone is that that path was chosen, he’s not just blowing smoke.

Speaking of the Integration Fund and our recently launched Connect directory, we’re coming up on 150 listed integrations (ie, ones we know about). Those are generally drop-in-place, you-don’t-have-to-code-anything types of stuff meant for the folks I ran off in the first sentence. That includes everything from little widgets to help folks include signup forms, to freaking full-on integrations with various CMSes and Ecommerce Shops, to various SaaS partners of ours. I have to admit those full integrations really are some of my favorites because:

1. those guys know their systems and thus did them right
2. they rtfm’d and just kind of showed up (actually, all of you who do that are simply my favorites )
3. I didn’t have to learn those systems and code them (poorly, which is how things started)

Ok, so all of that’s cool enough, but lots of folks have a standard API these days, so it’s a little bit less of a big deal (read: it’s expected). And aside from the intent of making it even more friendly via a major new version we have planned (v2) at some point, it’s pretty close to feature-complete when compared to our mainline web app. However, along the way we’ve found people with all sorts of extra needs, so there are several other APIs we’ve released alongside it. Let’s briefly take a looksee at those…

Webhooks

Our Webhook implementation has actually been around for quite a while, but it’s certainly worth mentioning as lots and lots of people have found them to be very helpful. We don’t have firm numbers to share about usage, but it’s sufficient to say that we pretty much can never look at our job queues without seeing them constantly rolling through and out to users’ servers. If you haven’t taken a look at them and you are syncing data back into your platform, they are definitely worth the look. Also, the main API allows configuring them programatically, so we actually have had integrators who will create them on the fly for users, which is just really cool.

Export API

This was released out of necessity. Our main API is fully buffered, so it is, unfortunately, possible to send/request enough data that it blows out the memory on our processes – not cool. The Export API aims to fix that by simply dumping ALL of a particular set of data. Currently there are methods to download your entire list (much like an export inside the web app) and to dump all of the subscriber activity for a campaign. If you’re sitting there with a list of a few hundred or few thousand, that may sound like overkill (and it could be), but we have users who absolutely need to dump lists of 1 million+ or grab all of the stats for a campaign they sent to 500k users+ – makes more sense now, huh? Yeah.

STS API

This is the newest API in the family and was just released in February 2011 when Amazon released their SES API. We had always wanted to offer (and boy did people request) some sort of transactional sending service – but that’s not really what we’re engineered to do. Simply building on top of Amazon and adding some basic tracking stats has turned out to be a big win that didn’t require a ton of effort.

Also, since it’s attached to your account and can therefore use a regular API Key, we’re seeing plugins – especially the full on integrations I just mentioned – start including the functionality to replace core mail delivery systems that things like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento use. If you’ve dealt with that stuff, well, sending email directly from your shared VPS somewhere is sketchy at best.

So what’s next?

Glad you asked. About a year ago we tried to launch a Partner API – really the main reason for doing that was a concern that other small business web integrators who run SaaS platforms like we do would run into issues with our IP Connection limits. Turns out, they weren’t hitting those limits (that’s what I get for listening to the marketing department instead of talking to customers, c’est la vie) and what they actually wanted were features that there wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell we were opening up to the peanut gallery (that would be you). Those features included things such as checking username availability, creating lists programatically, modifying user plans / account information, increased rate limits, etc. And those things are in the works – but before you even think about asking, know that anyone receiving that access will be thoroughly vetted and have to sign their first born child away (and maybe second), amongst other things. In other words, we’re still deadly serious about the reputation of our platform and not even a super-awesome-big-name partnership that funnels tons of users into us is worth nicking it even one bit. Seriously. Also, if you need it, we’re probably already talking to you or plan on it

Really, that API is mostly going to be a re-hash of our standard API with the couple extra methods and some more strict security stuff in place. But that leads me to our final topic …

OAuth2

So, first a short reminder from 4 years ago: it used to be common place to – gasp – ask a user to let you store their username and password for API access (or even just ask for those details once). As time has gone by, everyone has realized that that’s not really a great idea. Problem is, not everyone has the attention of their developers like, say, Twitter does and thus turning off something like our once-suggested login() method for retrieving an API Key can be painful for small users without a dedicated development team. But it must be done.

With everything else going on it’s taken us a little while to get here (admittedly longer than we wanted), but we have an OAuth2 implementation built which should be released soon. If you aren’t particularly familiar with it, OAuth2 provides a secure way to:

1. allow your application to redirect a user to our web app so that
2. the user enters their actual login credentials into our system and our system only
3. then we’ll redirect the user back to your app and allow you to retrieve an access token for accessing their account
4. we then also give the user access in our system to block your application at any time of their choosing

SO much better for everyone. Our main focus for that will be getting the aforementioned SaaS platform integrations and any native mobile apps using OAuth2 to retrieve API Keys for users. Plugins for CMSes, etc. are not going to be good candidates for OAuth2 (if you don’t know why, no biggie), so users will still be able to retrieve API Keys for their account either from their API dashboard. OR, better yet (’cause you followed our suggestions, right? Right?) using the handy-dandy API Key Popup we added a while back:

So, yeah, if you hadn’t realized it, there’s a ton more than “just an API” we’re working on around here. Want to know more? Well, first R.T.F.M. , then you can keep an eye on either @mailchimp_api on Twitter or our API Announcement Google Group.

With this integration, you can send a survey link to your list from MailChimp, and then do some really cool tracking and targeting. Here’s how it all works…

First, you need to activate the SurveyMonkey integration inside your MailChimp Account Settings:

Then you’d build a survey like you always do in SurveyMonkey. In my example, I’m sending an internal survey to staff about a grilled cheese party that we won from sponsoring a crazy kickstarter project. The survey looks something like:

When you’re finished building your survey, click the little “Send survey” button:

then choose the “Distribute with MailChimp” option:

You’ll be prompted to sign in to MailChimp:

After you do, SurveyMonkey will “hand off” the survey to MailChimp for delivery.

If one were to construct a technical diagram or flowchart, this “data transfer process” would look something like:

technically speaking, of course.

Anyway, after the survey is passed to MailChimp, you’ll choose your list and then specify a subject line.

By the way, for my particular survey, I decided to use our Subject Line Suggester to see how other campaigns have performed with “survey” in the subject:

My takeaway was that informal and casual subject lines, like “quick survey” did better than very formal “Annual Survey From ___. ”

So I went with, “quick grilled cheese survey.”

When it’s time to choose your template, you’ll be provided with a default SurveyMonkey template that you can customize to match your brand. There are actually three SurveyMonkey email templates you can switch around and choose from:

(these are part of the 33 new templates our UX team just released)

Here’s what the basic one looks like:

Then, just send the email to your list.

When you open your campaign stats, go to the “Advanced Reports” section:

And you get the following stats from SurveyMonkey:

As you can see, we’ll show you how many people have completed the survey so far, how many have started, and how many people haven’t started at all. You can even send a followup to those who have not started:

or send a gentle reminder of deadlines to those who started but did not finish;

or send a thank you note to those who completed.

Starting from MailChimp?

I should note that you can do all this in reverse. You’d start within MailChimp, create a new campaign (it can even be an A/B test campaign), pick a SurveyMonkey template, and then specify which SurveyMonkey survey to link to:

THIS IS BANANAS

You’re  probably thinking “this is BANANAS!” and we couldn’t agree more. In fact, we have 500 commemorative “This is Bananas” t-shirts to give away:

Just follow @mailchimp on twitter and keep your eyes peeled (pun intended) for an announcement in the next couple days. If you’re not the following type, no worries.

The first 1,000 users who send a SurveyMonkey survey through MailChimp with this integration will get a free MailChimp t-shirt. You’ll know you won when you see this screen inside MailChimp:

Simian powers, unite!

Everyone and their mother knows that Tumblr is where all the "cool" people hang out. It’s also growing in popularity in leaps and bounds. We recently built a small integration to get you Tumblr folk a much cleaner and easier way for your readers to sign up for your email list.

The integration works by using a tool we created called Chimplr that generates some JavaScript and HTML that you paste into your Tumblr Theme’s "HTML Widget" section. The code puts a "Newsletter" button next to the other Tumblr controls. Don’t worry, it’s really easy to use!

One of the biggest problems our users face is how difficult it can be to edit the MailChimp signup form styling to match their own site. We understand that you are not all HTML5 gurus, so we came up with a solution that fits all Tumblr themes.

The inserted HTML creates a button that mimics the other Tumblr buttons. It looks at home in the Tumbleverse but is also recognizable enough for non-Tumblr people to see, and it launches a "lightbox" that appears over your blog that lets readers sign up to your email list.

The "lightbox" that your users sign up through looks like this:

In order to use Chimplr, you’ll need to have your MailChimp API key handy. You’ll also need to be able to log in to your Tumblr to make the changes (duh). Chimplr will walk you through the process of getting your Newsletter button set up with screenshots and a detailed tutorial.

To get the most out of your Tumblr posts, you can use MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email campaigns to automatically generate an email newsletter based on your Tumblr posts. You can read more about this feature in our RSS-to-Email tutorial.

As always, let us know how you fare with it. We love your feedback!

P.S. We are working on getting custom fields other than the “email” field to display in the popup. Hang tight!

Go to Chimplr

As I work to manage the super-exciting influx of applications to the integration fund, one of the main things I think about is how will this integration increase the utility of our application for our users (read: does this actually help anyone)? Well, we have a gang of users in the UK and as much as I try to avoid all things accounting, rumor has it, its kind of a big deal. Small businesses spend an average of 5 hours every week dealing with accounting-related tasks like credit control, statutory financial requirements (what?) and chasing overdue invoices.

Additionally, one of the biggest challenges for any business is taking control of their own data. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re trying to help you guys do through things like the integration fund and The Small Business Web. We want you to be able to use all the data you have to communicate with your customers and subscribers in the most effective way possible. And that is what KashFlow’s integration helps you do.

Basically, the KashFlow and MailChimp integration allows you to push your customer information from KashFlow right into your MailChimp list without having to go through the export-and-import process. One-click and you’re done - we’re big fans of that around here.

If you’re already a KashFlow customer there is no additional fee to use the MailChimp integration. If you’re interested in trying out KashFlow, you can get a 60 day trial here. They also take you through the process of setting up the integration here.

If you’re in the UK and not very familiar with KashFlow, here are a few things that impressed us about them. In 2008 KashFlow was the first accounting software to be certified by PayPal for integration with its payment platform. Additionally they’ve won a myriad of awards including a Business Software Satisfaction award for small business accounting. They were also named Small Business Accounting Software Package of 2009 and Web-Hosted Accounting Software Package of 2009 at the Software Satisfaction Awards.

QR codes are neat because they store information, like a website address or string of characters, that you can then retrieve with your smart phone’s camera and an app that’s able to read them.

There isn’t yet an option in any of our mobile apps requiring an API key to use your QR code instead, but our Mobile Labs team is working on the next piece of the puzzle as I type this. The idea is that initially you can use your favorite app to scan the code, then copy/paste your API key into the application.

Gems for Transactional Email

We recently launched Simple Transactional Service, a transactional API built on Amazon SES. There are two gems, mailchimp_ses (written by David Balatero) and uakari (written by yours truly), which make it easy to use our STS API.

Gems for more robust integrations

If you’d like to integrate with our main API, we suggest trying hominid (from Brian Getty) or gibbon (also written by yours truly) and there are more great options listed here.

Recent graduates of our Integration Fund:

• Shortstack
• Storify
• SunDrop Mobile
• MarkdownMail

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.