Every once in a while a MailChimp customer will ask me, “Hey, MailChimp’s been great for keeping in touch with my loyal customers. But is there any way to buy or rent an email list from you guys, so I can promote my business to potential customers in my area?” That’s when I explain to them the perils of purchased emails, and the virtues of organically growing a permission-based list. I also tell them they could just look around for other local merchants who might have newsletters (or similar publishers in their industry), then partner with them. In the back of my mind though, I’ve always dreamed of creating a tool for MailChimp customers to make that process easier.

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.

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One of the questions we sometimes get from customers who are new to email marketing is ‘how do I send attachments with my newsletter?’ We’ve always had to tell them that they can’t send attachments with MailChimp. If you want to send a document or pdf to your subscribers you need to upload it to MailChimp and then link to the file in your campaign.

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.
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Last week, we had some hardware failures at our US1 data center that affected about 400,000 users (here’s the blog post with all the related updates). Today I want to post an announcement about some upcoming server maintenance that’s related to that outage, plus provide a little followup to what happened.

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

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A while back we introduced an RSS button on the Campaign Archive Toolbar.

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.

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Each week, Customer Love offers a quick snapshot of one of MailChimp’s awesome users.

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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