“I get a ton of email, and notice that subjects really matter to me,” Dream Day Cakes co-owner and baker Fred Posner told MailChimp in our merge tags case study. “If it’s too spammy, I just delete the email. But subjects with personal attention or my name definitely get a double take.”

Keeping this in mind, Posner started running some tests on the Gainesville, FL bakery’s mailing list, using MailChimp’s first-name merge tag. Incorporating his readers’ names into their newsletters really personalized the experience. Turns out, every single one of his cake-eating customers is a human being, and human beings appreciate being treated as such. After using first names, Dream Day’s open rates improved dramatically, positive feedback rolled in, and Posner was one happy baker.

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At MailChimp, we believe that great customer support is about more than making customers happy. It’s really about empowering your customers. A wise man once said, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Plus, that man will spend less time asking for support and more time enjoying life.” But before you can achieve this higher level of consciousness, one must empower one’s support team with as much customer data as possible.

This new Zendesk widget can help with that. It can help your support team answer questions like, “Is this a loyal, engaged customer, reading all our latest news? Did this customer receive and open that recent apology email about our server outage, and the refund we’re offering? Did we send them the email about the API call we deprecated?”).

Here’s what it looks like in Zendesk:

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

Who: McSweeney’s

What: A publishing house founded by Dave Eggers

Where: San Francisco

Why we love them: Still going strong after almost 15 years, McSweeney’s initially started as a quarterly literary journal, but has since expanded its wordly empire to include  a daily literature and humor website, a monthly magazine, more than a couple nonprofits, a quarterly DVD magazine, and publications expertly covering sports and food, amongst—somehow?!?—other things. They’ve published countless talented writers both famous and unknown, including the likes of David Foster Wallace and Sarah Vowell, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates. They Might Be Giants were once so moved by them that they wrote a song about it. In both word and action, McSweeney’s is wildly inspiring, and their emails are excellently lengthy.

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In MailChimp v6.9, we launched a new feature called Tweet Trends that uses a direct integration with Twitter to analyze public social data and gives you interesting insights about the people who are subscribed to your lists. For example, it shows me who my subscribers generally follow:

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Back at the beginning of February, I put up a post about MailChimp’s addition of support for media queries.

In the example I gave in that post I briefly touched on the thought that, using a media query, you could bump up your email’s text size. People showed interest in that idea alone, so let’s take another look at it.

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