MailChimp has some pretty special users, and Portland band The Decemberists is one of my favorites. Their music is awesome, their newsletters are beautiful, and look! They’re responsible email marketers! Yesterday the band’s lead singer tweeted this:
We couldn’t agree more.
Sign up for The Decemberists’ newsletter here.
We’re pretty darn excited that one of our all time favorite conferences in the world, An Event Apart, is coming back to our home town, Atlanta. Hosted by web luminaries, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, An Event Apart is an intensely educational learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference for you.
Many moons ago, I attended AEA when it was held at the home of the Atlanta Braves, Turner Field. It was smaller then and it was just one day, but it made a huge impression on me. The sessions were filled with practical information that I was able to use in my work, but I also had the opportunity to talk to and hang out with my web idols. It’s an event that is as much about community building as it is learning. That experience left me inspired and ready to do cool stuff. Since then I’ve been to AEA about a dozen times, and I still walk away with a pocket full of inspiring gems.
We’re really proud to be sponsoring AEA this year along with our friends over at Typekit. We hope to see you in Atlanta, or at one of the 5 other AEAs around the US. In fact, you can save $100 bones off any two- or three-day ticket with code AEACHIMP.
Naked Pizza makes all-natural pizza—it’s so healthy that they post the nutritional info right on their website. Delicious, inexpensive and an average of 107 calories per slice? That’s pizza I can feel good about eating.
I’m hungry. Anyway, social media plays a huge role in Naked Pizza’s business plan. They have an awesome blog called LivNaked and almost 10,000 Twitter followers—they even put up a billboard outside one of their stores to tell people they’re on Twitter.
Who said your signup process has to look boring? Certainly not LeahAndMark.com. These photographers have managed to draw new people in further using their signup process. They’ve taken advantage of the double opt-in process and used each step to show off some of their work.
First, they’ve started with a pretty basic form.
Rather than using a single header image for each step, they’ve kept the form plain and customized every page with a different photo in the body.
Here’s the Thank You page:
Look at those adorable kids! It gets better from there.
Since we were thinking about signup forms earlier this week, here’s one from Netted by the Webbys that recently caught our attention. They’re a MailChimp customer who totally customized their signup process via our API.
Pretty nice, eh? Notice the social sharing icons right under it, too, so people can encourage others to join the fold. I was curious about the rest of their signup process, and wanted to get their cool daily emails, so I went ahead and signed myself up.