As described in our v6.7 release, we launched some updates to our video merge tags. For those who don’t know about them, our video merge tags are little snippets of code that look like this:

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

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click to view large

During a recent update, we added the ability to include RSS feeds inside of both regular and A/B split campaign types. This is great if you want to add a feed of your most recent blog posts to the side column of your newsletter, for example.

In order to create the campaign shown above, I started out by selecting Create Campaign ==> Regular Ol’ Campaign in my MailChimp dashboard. In step 3 I chose the 3:1 Start From Scratch template because I knew I’d be showcasing meaty, longer form content in the body of my email before pulling in my RSS feeds below.

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How to fix weird text wrapping like above in RSS-to-email

Back in 2008, when we initially rolled out our RSS-to-email feature, we thought it would be a nice, automated way for email marketers to “fill in the gaps” between their monthly or quarterly email newsletters. You blog (or post to flickr, twitter, and Facebook) almost daily, and all those tools generate RSS feeds. So why not use that as email content? Frankly, I thought it was a very sexy feature, and would take the world by storm.

It did not take the world by storm. At the time, watching its usage grow was like watching water boil. RSS, as it turns out, is the exact OPPOSITE of sexy. It’s boring and confusing to most people. It needs a fun name, like “twitter.” So I stopped watching the feature. Recently, we were checking some RSS usage stats, and noticed that we have more than 70,000 RSS-to-email campaigns being sent daily. Even more interesting is how many major publications are using the feature.

So we’re starting to add some more enhancements. The first one we want to announce is an RSSITEM:IMAGE merge tag that designates a “lead image” in your feed, which helps you code out some better, fail-safe formatting for HTML email…

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Wanted to highlight a slightly obscure feature we released a while back, but never really discussed. When you organize your campaigns into archives in MailChimp, our archive toolbar has a couple handy links:

The first is to “view past issues,” which is useful, but the 2nd one is the interesting one. We actually generate an RSS feed of all your past campaigns. Your subscribers can follow your campaigns via RSS reader, but more importantly, you can use this feed to publish your archives elsewhere (like on your own website). See what else is on the MailChimp archive toolbar.

Blaine, from the MailChimp customer support team, is on a cross country vacation. He’s traveling with friends and family by motorcycle.

What’s really cool about this is he’s posting updates, photos, and video to his Tumblr blog, and he’s connected MailChimp to his Tumblr’s RSS feed in order to send an RSS-to-email newsletter. All Blaine has to do is post to Tumblr, and the email newsletters go out automagically every day. He never even has to log in to MailChimp.

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