• 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

Who: Baratunde Thurston 

What: A comedian and writer who loves politics and technology

Where: Brooklyn

Why we love him: Baratunde Thurston wears many hats. He co-founded a political blog, wrote a book, hosted a show on Discovery Science, currently serves as The Onion‘s Director of Digital, and lives on Twitter (where he says hilarious things on a regular basis). It’s kind of unbelievable, actually, how much he does. But expressing himself is clearly important to Thurston, and he’s found plenty of avenues for that so far. Here’s to loving what you do, even if that means doing a dozen different things.

Sign up for Baratunde Thurston’s newsletter.

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.

Who: Ernest Alexander 

What: A men’s clothing and accessories label

Where: New York

Why we love them: Durability is in the details of every item Ernest Alexander makes, from the strap of a messenger bag to the stitching on the back of a wool necktie. Founder and creative director Ernest Sabine (his middle name is Alexander) obsesses over craftmanship. His grandmother and great-grandmother were seamstresses, so manufacturing is in his blood—and that comes across in everything his company creates.

Sign up for Ernest Alexander’s newsletter.

Schecter remains a pretty small business, currently employing just more than 40 people. So when it was named the official sponsor of the Uproar Festival, a month-and-a-half long trek that took 10 bands all over the United States and Canada, they recognized an opportunity to attract some new customers. But they still needed a manageable solution for their staff. “We knew gathering user data would be key on the road, but were unsure just how we were going to do it,” Schecter Vice President Marc LaCorte told MailChimp in our recent feature case study. “It had to be simple and easy, not only for our employees onsite, but also to encourage people to interact with us. We hoped to find an iPad app that would fit this need without much configuration. As luck would have it, Chimpadeedoo was sitting there on the MailChimp site, waiting for us to implement! As soon as I saw it, all my worries were calmed.”

Here’s the Chimpadeedoo skin Schecter created for Uproar:

Not bad, right? With a couple iPads all Chimpadeedoo’d and ready for action, Schecter hit the road, opting in fans to the company’s newsletter, and entering those same concert goers into weekly guitar giveaways. Here’s what the line to sign up looked like at an average tour stop…

…and here’s one of Schecter’s giveaways, the iPad setups, and some scary band t-shirts:

The Schecter folks created a list for the tour, picked the winners when the trip was finished, and shipped a bunch of guitars. The results? Well, they rocked. Schecter grew its email list by more than 22,000 users over the course of 32 dates, which averages out to almost 700 subscribers per stop! LaCorte was pretty pleased about all this. “Our lives were made simple thanks to Chimpadeedoo and MailChimp,” he says.

Additional resources:

Chimpadeedoo feature page

Chimpadeedoo on the iTunes App Store

Chimpadeedoo on the MailChimp blog

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/

This is a good solution for some of our customers, but not all of them. For example, many of our customers want to offer a free guide or white paper as an incentive to opt-in to their email list or as a reward for their loyal subscribers. But, they may be selling the paper or guide to their general audience. They need a way to send unique, restricted download links just to their email subscribers.

Other customers want their file attachments to reach as many people as possible, but they also want to keep track of who’s downloading the file and who’s forwarding it on to more people. They might want to send a personal thank you to their biggest supporters, the ones who helped spread the word the most.

Digioh is an online service that makes sending digital files to your MailChimp subscribers fast, easy and secure thanks to their new MailChimp integration. In fact, over 10,000 files have already been downloaded and tracked by MailChimp subscribers using the integration.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Go to digioh.com/mailchimp
Step 2: Create an account (you’ll only need to enter your email and a password to get signed up)
Step 3: Upload your file & select your file security level
Step 4: Paste the secure link that Digioh provides you into your MailChimp newsletter

Want to offer a free download to people who subscribe to your mailing list? Just paste your secure link into your welcome email in MailChimp and you’re good to go.

After you send out your newsletter you can log in to Digioh to monitor how many times your file has been downloaded, who downloaded it, and who forwarded your file on (if you decide to allow non-subscribers to download your file).

For more information on Digioh or to sign up for an account, visit digioh.com/mailchimp.

Planned Downtime: January 22, 1am ET

First, we’re doing some server maintenance at our US1 data center on Sunday, January 22nd at 1am ET (see this in your timezone). The maintenance will require downtime, but should only last a few minutes. During those few minutes, MailChimp will not be available for US1 users at all. Their campaign links will not work, nor will new subscribes be tracked. Again, it should only be a few minutes before everything’s back online. This upgrade will basically help us rebound faster should a similar outage occur again (heaven forbid).

So what exactly happened that day?

To recap, last year we invested in super fast SSD equipped servers to handle our increasing traffic. They helped us handle a TON of load, and sped things up nicely through the holidays. Then on January 2nd, several of those servers just up and died all at once–for no apparent reason at all. It just didn’t make any sense, and we’ve never experienced anything like this before. We admittedly didn’t spend much time investigating the cause, because we were busy taking out those SSDs and replacing them with 15k rpm SAS drives (plus a bunch more RAM).

Then a few days later, we saw this news: 64GB Crucial M4s crashing after 5,000 hours, fix coming

Those were the exact drives our data center used, and 5,000 hours is how old they were. We can’t say with 100% certainty that was the cause, but we can say there were other drives at US1 that didn’t fail, and they were different models (if we were the cause, you’d think all the drives would fail). And as stated above, we’re making some changes that should make events like this faster to recover from.

Some people have asked us, “So does this mean you don’t keep frequent backups?”  And from our close friends who know better, “Ha, guess you guys don’t know much about redundancy?”

To shed some light on the insanity of the situation, 76 hard drives died in 6 hrs. Fortunately, since we separate our users across 3 different data centers, the majority of them had no idea anything was even wrong.

For anybody who’s curious, there’s also this comment from Joe, one of our DevOps Engineers:

I thought I would briefly mention how we set things up though as we take these sorts of downtime and data loss events very seriously and I don’t want people to think this was a simple “a machine died, we restored from backups” scenario.

Each user shard in US1 is supported by 3 separate machines. Each of these machines is powerful enough to easily support the entire user shard on its own but only one of these is active at any given time. The other two sit mostly idle staying in sync and ready to take over in the event of a failure. We essentially are always running up to the second backups to two different machines for each user shard. In addition to all of this, we run full backups on every shard every day for “disaster” scenarios.

We very, very rarely lose an entire machine and when we do users do not notice because one of the backup machines is activated automatically and takes over.

In this case the nature of the hardware failure was so severe and so catastrophic that it impacted ALL of our machines – causing them to crash and corrupting their entire raid arrays of SSDs as they went down. We were unable to pull the current data off these machines for all shards before they were fully offline and despite spending many, many hours trying to recover the data after the crashes we failed except for that one clump of users that didn’t have any data loss.

Hope that sheds some light on our process. This was a truly unique event that I hope never happens again. We are making changes now to fortify our shards against data loss even further.

Customer feedback from the outage

I wanted to share something else with you. After the outage, we sent an email apology out to 788 users who were affected the most severely by the outage.

Here’s an archive of the email we sent.

I asked those customers to reply and send me any feedback they wanted. I totally expected to be screamed at and threatened for the next few weeks.

Instead, all I got was positive energy. People told me they loved us anyway, that my health was all that mattered, I’m a good human, etc. Here’s a sample of the replies I’ve received so far:

—-

So I am writing to thank you for you attention to this situation! I still LOVE Mail Chimp.. no worries… It was frustrating to reconstruct my campaign and to resend to my list… but I did it and all is well. Luckily, I had sent the campaign and could reconstruct it from the one I sent to myself.

—-

Ben, I’m so bummed. ARGH. Oh, that totally sucks. I thought that I had only lost a mini add-on campaign to one I had done earlier, but I just discovered this evening that it was the whole kit and caboodle campaign. SHEESH! The good news is that I’ve gotten some email replies from the campaign it looks like it got sent, but I have no way to know that for sure, who opened it, who doesn’t want to get email from me anymore, etc. as it doesn’t show up as a sent campaign on my dashboard.

Flippin’ firecrackers, I’m disappointed! I kinda want to throw a banana at you. BUT you’ve got such an amazingly fantastic, user-obsessed, FREE product, it’s hard to be mad at you.
How can you win back my confidence…? I would really love to know the stats for the campaign I sent out. I would like people from that to unsubscribe without sending me an email. Since those things are probably impossible, there’s not much else I can ask of you. You made a mistake, you totally owned it and are doing everything in your power to make it better. I was a Mailchimp evangelist before this, but I daresay this little f-up and your response to it might have just elevated my opinion of Mailchimp even higher.

Thanks for doing and being your best.

—-

Ben, thanks for your lovely email! I really feel you guys care about what you’re doing
Anyway, it’s no biggie. Thanks for letting me know.

—-

Hi Ben,
I don’t need any kind of compensation. This apology is more than enough for me.
Thank you!

—-

Dear Mr Chestnut,

Greetings from the Czech Republic and I hope you are doing well!

I am regret to hear about your hardware failures that have an impact on us. We have a good experiences with Mailchimp and it is clear to me that these things could happen. Due to the effort, the discount for the next month would be much appreciated! Kindly please let me know if it would be possible.

I am truly looking forward to hearing from you and wish you and your family all the best for a healthy and Prosperous New Year.

—-

Hello, thank you so much for all the explanations. As you say, we couldn’t send our campaign yesterday, but there is no problem with that. We’ve been using your service without any problem until now, so thank you for that and don’t worry about your hardware failure. These things sometimes happen.

—-

Although I lost my campaign and as a result need to send it again because of this failure,
Your truly honest mail and apology is something rare in the business world, and for that you have my full confidence in your service,
and much more important, in your credibility as a human being that doesn’t afraid to admit he made a mistake.

So, Thank you for this wonderful service of yours,
and apology accepted!

—-

I just wanted to say that you guys are awesome. Mailchimp customer service is SO top notch every single time. What a perfect “I’m sorry” email  

Love y’all, and no worries on the campaign. I’ll just shoot out another one. 

—-

I just got you email – as a free user I am ok with having a simple outage in fact all I lost was the report for a campaign I sent out on the morning of “the incident”. And as much as I enjoy seeing which of the 46 magicians read our email reminder – I’m sure the world isn’t going to end.  I say all that to say I appreciate your integrity and willingness to go the extra mile – it makes me confident that if my website ever gets off the ground – I’ll use mailchimp as my email service – thanks for being AWESOME.

—-

That is ok, Nobody can controle the lectronic world….if your healthy..that is all that count

—-

Hey Ben,

No biggie, it was just one of those automated RSS campaigns. This isn’t my paid account which I use for another project so I appreciate the awesome free level of service you continue to provide. You guys do a great job keeping me informed and providing a reliable, easy to use service with helpful support staff. Keep it up.

—-

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your message, I appreciate your concerns. At this point I am only doing testing so nothing of any significance was lost. This is my first attempt creating an RSS campaign and I must say I am quite impressed. I think MailChimp is great.

—-

Thanks for owning up to the problem. Ironic that it happened on the first business day of the year.  

Mailchimp is a great service. Thanks.

—–

Glad to here all sorted guys. Would prefer a t shirt via they are way cool.

—–

I’m devoted to MailChimp in the same way I’m devoted to Apple, Gmail, WordPress and Saddleback Leather. You’re a brand head-and-shoulders above the rest. When I was unable to access my account yesterday, it was disappointing, but had you not sent this email I’d have thought nothing of it. MailChimp had never disappointed me before, so one day without access or autoresponders hardly bothered me.

I appreciate the gesture, though. Keep up the excellent work, Ben. My businesses couldn’t run without you guys. Hopefully soon I’ll have enough subscribers to use the $50 credit on the premium service. (Although, a free lifetime account would have been an awesome way to “make things right” )

—-

Dear Ben,

Thank you for informing me so openly – i really appreciate it.

You are doing a great job and i am very grateful for your services.

My campaign link was broken, but no problem!

Many thanks for your support.

—-

Crap happens. You’all are still my favorite chimps. Thanks for the heads up.

—-

It happens. Don’t worry. I have full confidence in mailchimp. My campaign went and that’s all that matters. I don’t need a record.

Thank you for the explanation.

—-

Thanks for the email but really it seems that my email went out just fine. I got a copy in my inbox and everything looks Okay to me. We are still loving MailChimp!

—-

There were a couple not-so-happy ones too (and well-deserved) but the overwhelming majority of replies were very positive. I love our customers.

It might seem kind of weird at first to include an entire email campaign in an RSS feed, but it’s actually pretty useful. I’ll explain why in just a moment.

First, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Campaign Archives, every campaign you send in MailChimp gets a hosted archive version. There’s a default page, which you can see by clicking the View Past Issues button on the Campaign Archive Toolbar, or you can create a custom archives page, like ours at campaigns.mailchimp.com. Either way, your content is still hosted on MailChimp’s servers, which means your website doesn’t get the SEO benefit.

Now, let’s say you wanted to create a custom campaign archives page and take advantage of all that SEO-friendly content. The only way search engines can index your content in a way that gives you the credit is for you to host the content on your server.

There are two ways to access your archive campaign content in order to host it yourself.

We’ll start with the simplest method first. This is where the RSS button comes in handy—it makes all of your content available at the click of a button.

1. Make sure the Campaign Archives Toolbar is enabled for the list you want to work with.
2. Open one of your sent campaigns. Go to Campaigns, select Campaigns By List from the sidebar, choose the list you want to work with, click the title of a campaign with a status of Sent, then click Campaign Archive. This will open a new window with the email campaign. You’ll see the Campaign Archive Toolbar at the top of the page.
3. Click the RSS button. You’ll see a feed with every campaign you have sent to the list.

If you’re a programmer, you can use the RSS feed as the input to dynamically display your archive campaign content. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually copy the content from the doctype to the closing html tag, and save it as an HTML file on your server. Remember, the RSS file contains HTML for every campaign you’ve sent to your list, interspersed with XML, so you’ll need to locate and copy the content starting with <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> and ending with </html> for each campaign.

The other way to access your archive campaign content bypasses the RSS button entirely, dynamically grabbing archive campaign content using our API and posting it to your website.

This method is really only for programmers, so if that’s not your area of expertise, you may want to call a professional. Also, if you plan to build something custom for your site using our API, consider applying for our $1 million integration fund.

To get archive content through our API, use the campaignContent() with the for_archive tag set to true. You can retrieve archive campaigns and get the campaign_id required for the campaignContent() call using campaigns() with the status=sent filter.

Now that you’ve learned how to access your archive campaign content, it’s time to reap the benefit. After all, you have all that SEO-rich content sitting around. Why not put it to work for you?

Who: The Great Discontent 

What: An online journal that publishes weekly interviews with creative people

Where: Port Huron, MI

Why we love them: The Great Discontent is concerned with creativity, risk, and the human beings—musicians, writers, designers, artists—who traffic in both, thinking and making stuff every day. Husband and wife duo (and Designing Monsters co-founders) Ryan and Tina Essmaker interview a new person every Tuesday, and frankly, we can’t wait for the next one.

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