Merge Tags can look scary to the uninitiated, but these little guys are the secret to any handsomely tailored nonprofit newsletter. They allow you to personalize emails to donors, volunteers, and fans of your organization. For instance, you might want to address donors by name or highlight different calls to action for different audiences. Merge tags make this flexibility possible.

You and I know that fundraising appeals are more successful the more personal they are. If you’d like to send out an appeal for your latest fundraising campaign, it might be helpful to address your donors by name.

All you have to do is stick the following merge tag where their name would normally appear:

(Make those vertical bars by typing shift and backslash at the same time.)

The merge tag — the part between *| and |* — will tell MailChimp to retrieve their first name and stick it right in your campaign, personalized for each email address. If you’re skeptical this will work (like I would be), just click “Popup Preview” within the campaign builder.

Then click the “view live merge info” button. You can toggle between subscribers to double and triple check.

Even if you don’t have everyone’s first name, you can use dynamic merge tags to fill in the gaps. These are like IF-THEN statements in geometry (don’t worry, I slept through that part too):

This portion of the campaign will now read, “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,” if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name. You can put any text where “Ladies and Gentlemen” currently is: “Friend,” “Bozo,” “Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags,” etc.

Here’s what a functioning example looks like in the campaign editor:

Dynamic merge tags can get powerful quickly. Let’s suppose your organization does noble but complicated environmental advocacy work in Georgia. Your mission is to improve water and air quality and protect wilderness. The trouble is, Georgia has really diverse landforms — mountains, piedmont, coast, and everything in between.

The mountain people might not care so much about the piedmont, and the coastal people are plain sick of hearing about the mountains. Don’t even talk to me about the piedmont people. Merge tags make it easy to send tailored messages within the same campaign:

If you’re from Savannah on the coast, Helen in the mountains, or Atlanta on the piedmont, you’ll see what probably resonates with you the most. Everyone else sees a generic call to action.

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of dynamic merge tags in a much more robust way. We’ve put together a merge tag cheat sheet, a merge tag guide, and a primer on conditional (or dynamic) merge tags if you’d like to learn more.

You can also start at the beginning with MailChimp for Nonprofits, our introductory guide for your organization.

Litmus’ number was a little higher: 150% over the previous 6 months. I don’t know what the margin of error is in either study, but even being conservative and splitting the difference between the two numbers nets you a healthy increase. Either way, these numbers show that people are overwhelmingly choosing to view email on their Androids, iPhones, and iPads, and that means finding a way to optimize email for smaller screens.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that media queries are a way to optimize email for mobile devices, and MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow.

Now, chances are that if you do code your own templates, you already know what media queries are, you stopped reading at “MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow,” and have moved on to implementing media queries into your templates. For the rest, what follows is an overview of what a media query looks like, how to implement it into your code, and even how to set it up so that you can adjust the media query style rules within MailChimp’s campaign editor.

We’re starting with a simple, blank template…

A lightly-modified version of the “basic” template from MailChimp’s “basic layouts” library.

…and styling it with basic CSS:

The same template, after some styling and content.

If you’ve never worked with one, the idea behind a media query is basic: it’s pretty much a CSS stylesheet within a CSS stylesheet; a collection of CSS rulesets that are read and rendered when the trigger for the query is hit. Here’s what the opening lines of a media query look like:

The opening of the media query.

The media query contains two important components: “screen” and “max-device-width.” The “screen” component is the media type and the “only” is, as the W3C so eloquently puts it a keyword that’s “…used to hide style sheets from older user agents.” Whatever. The second component, within parentheses, is the actual query; the media feature (max-device-width), along with the trigger value (480px). In short, this media query says “These styles should only be used for screens, and only when the screen’s horizontal width is 480px or less.”

The W3C Article (or W3C Candidate Recommendation Document, if you’re feeling fancy) linked above lists out the other media features you can trigger on, but for the purposes of this email template, we’re only concerned with device-width.

While you can do all sorts of neat stuff with email-valid CSS, there are three things I’ll focus on: email width, header image width, and font sizes.

Since most emails are wider than 480px (the landscape width of the average device), most emails will trigger horizontal scrolling. For the sake of this post, we’ll assume we don’t want that. Thus, the two basic ways to change the width are by either setting a hard value like 300px for your email’s tables, or to set a hard upper limit with max-width, then set table widths to 100%. That’s what I’ve done here, targeting each table that gets its width set:

This method lets the email fill the viewport up to a limit of 600px.

Next, since the header image in this email is also 600px wide, we should scale it down in line with the email’s total width. The same method used above can be applied to the image (The vendor-specific style rule “-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;” is there to account for IE7′s inability to scale images down without making them look horrid):

The header image will fill adjust with the template, to the same limit of 600px.

Finally, we should increase readability on small screens, so bumping up the font sizes automatically is important. A good rule of thumb is a font size of at least 16px for your copy and 20px for your main headings. That might strike you as big, especially if you send tons and tons of content (which you shouldn’t). Our friends at Smashing Magazine posted an article that argues otherwise. The article isn’t specifically concerned with email, but it’s relevant and right. For this email, I’ve bumped the font size up to 18px:

An 18px font size allows for comfortable reading.

After adjusting font sizes in the preheader, body, and footer, and adjusting heading sizes, this is what the full media query looks like:

The full media query stylesheet for this email.

I’ve left one detail for last. If you look at the media query styles, you’ll notice I targeted my tables and table cells using an attribute selector ( table[id="templateContainer"]{…} ) instead of using the traditional CSS route ( table.templateContainer{…} ):

CSS attribute selectors

This method, discovered by Campaign Monitor, prevents Yahoo! Mail from reading the query styles and rendering them instead of the normal CSS.

Finally, here’s what the email looks like on both iPhone (4S) and Android (HTC Incredible):

Some basic media query CSS really helps produce a better mobile email experience.

Not bad, for such a small amount of work. You can even save yourself a bit more time by marking the CSS rules in your media query with MailChimp’s template language editable tags. This will allow you to edit the values of your CSS properties when inside the app’s campaign editor. Simply follow the same pattern already established by the template language:

Avoid digging into your code every time by making query styles editable in the app.

You can download and play around with the template I used right here. That’s all I’ve got. Time to dance.

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.

At some point, the proprietor of such a card-collecting eatery might pay her angsty nephew to hand jam those email addresses into a spreadsheet. Odds are that one of those addresses is going into that list with a typo. The same thing happens with a single opt-in webform (huzzah for double opt-in).

You might think most of these typo addresses are going to bounce when you send to them, so no big deal—typos are merely a minor annoyance and occasional source of hilariousness. And when they bounce, you’ll just clean them up then.

You’d be mostly right to think that. If you fat-finger the top-level domain, you’re going to get a bounce. If you mess up anything to the left of the @ symbol, chances are you’re going to get a bounce there, too.

But what if you fat-finger the domain? This past month, I was doing some big data wrangling for our Email Genome Project, and I saw something funky going on with fat-fingered domains of large ISPs and freemail providers—specifically, email to these typos wasn’t bouncing. We actually had great delivery to these domains, which was unnerving.

Typosquatting domains sit around sites like Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Comcast, etc., and many of them love to accept all the mail they can get. For example, just in November, MailChimp users successfully sent 100,000 emails to addresses at Gmai.com, Gmial.com, Gmil.com, and 15 other Gmail imposters.

I’m not saying that my doppelganger doesn’t have a gmai.com address, but I’d be willing to bet that while these sites accept all the email sent to them, they deserve slim to none of it.

In November alone, our users sent approximately one million emails to typosquatting domains.

Don’t navigate to these sites, please. I’ve done it for you. The creepy stylins of gmai.com:

It’s mighty good of them to thank you for your typo.

Who owns these sites? Darned if I know. Many of them have anonymized their WHOIS information. What if your doctor fat-fingers the email address your blood work results are going to? The hard-working folks at Gmai.com will know all about your iron deficiency.

Perhaps these sites are collecting email addresses, correcting the typos, and creating lists to sell. That’s bad.

Now that they have your content, they could copy it, correct the typo address, and send a customized phishing attack to one of your subscribers. That’s worse.

Why don’t we correct these typos for you? Even if we could identify all these domains and pass judgment on whether or not a particular email address is intentional, correcting the address gets into permission issues. On a single opt-in list, someone might have intentionally given a bad email address. From a data-science perspective, these typos are an excellent signal of list quality—and they’re useful in “scoring” campaigns before they go out the door (hint, hint).

So look out for typos, and seriously consider going double opt-in. After all, if you’re not careful, you may end up in a coma…cast. *rimshot*

In preparation, I’ll take a moment to highlight some templates and tools that can help you capitalize on the biggest consumer day of the year, and I’ll start with some templates.

First, a template styled specifically to this task:

You can find this template when you create a campaign and, on step 3 (template selection), navigating to ‘pre-designed’, then to ‘ecommerce’, where you’ll find the ‘Black Friday Sale’ template. You can then use the style editor to tweak the design to suit your needs, or just drop in your content and send away.

Maybe your users need a little more than just a product highlight, however. You can always sweeten the deal by sending out some coupons, using our selection of coupon templates:

You can find these guys in the same way: on step 3 of campaign creation, just navigate to ‘pre-designed’, and then selection ‘coupons’. You can use the style editor to customize the design however you’d like, and each coupon template also includes an example of our QR Code merge tag, which you can include to give users a simple way to redeem the coupon’s value using the Pyow! app.

Perhaps you’re looking for a template that’s a little more ‘seasonal’. If that’s the case, we’ve got you covered with our tons of holiday-themed templates:

The holiday season is ramping up right now (or it’s running full-bore, if my local Target’s decorations are any indication), and we have lots of template choices available. We’ve also got a great selection of Christmas templates on the way, courtesy of our friends (and certified MailChimp Experts) at Creative Media Farm. Here’s a taste of what we’ve got coming from them:

Selling stockings from your shop on Etsy? A book on Amazon? Maybe your band has released its latest album of death metal covers of classic Christmas carols on iTunes, perhaps? You can use our Autoconnect templates, which automatically pull your data from these services, saving you some work and letting you send campaigns quickly and easily.

Armed with this arsenal, you can take advantage of the Black Friday frenzy, but be sure you’ve set up adequate defenses. Sandbag walls, trenches, and an anti-aircraft gun or two usually does the trick. You know how people can get.

To help clear things up, we called Jeff from PageLever. His site provides really cool Facebook Analytics to all kinds of businesses, so he’s in a position to have a uniquely informed perspective.

Jeff was boarding a plane as we spoke (the life of a busy man, er, businessman), so our conversation isn’t something I can just cut and paste. However, he did provide a lot of solid insights that I want to pass along.

Open Graph

You’ve probably heard this term discussed in various blogs and videos, but what is Open Graph and how do you use it?

The answer to the first question is simpler than you might think. Open Graph is just a way to connect the friends people have with the things people like. The underlying assumption is that what your friends are a better measure of your interests than, say, your demographic.

To start using Open Graph, just add Facebook’s Like button to your webpage, videos, songs, restaurant menu, or just about anything online. For all I know, you can QR code a Like button on physical objects as well. As people “Like” the object, they strengthen their relationship to you as a company. If they comment on and share your object, they strengthen that relationship even more.

You’re not limited to the Like button, by the way. There are all kinds of social plugins you can associate with your content. Some plugins enable comments, while others focus on finding connections between friends and content. Personally, I think some of these plugins make your website look as cluttered as my facebook page, but they each encourage a different type of engagement with your fans.  Keep that in mind, because it’s very important.

Edge Rank

So great, you’ve integrated with Open Graph, and you’ve targeted the content you want your fans to engage with. Now, how do you optimize this experience? Jeff had a lot to say about this (it’s what he does), so let’s dig in.

First of all, Edge Rank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what content, updates, posts, and suggestions to show Facebook users on their wall. Much like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, Edge Rank looks at the salience of an item to determine placement. In other words, Facebook will only show your posts to engaged fans.

If a Facebook user isn’t a fan of your company, they won’t see your posts on their wall. If they’re a fan but not sufficiently engaged, they won’t see your posts. In fact, you can have an engaged fan who happens to be slightly more engaged with a lot of other content, and they still may not see your posts. It’s all about the rank.  Facebook is a middle-man between your content and their users. Remember, Facebook’s goal is to promote Facebook, not you.  So how does Edge Rank work?

Time Decay

The math itself is a mystery, but we know the basics. Edge Rank has three main elements. Let’s start with time decay. Over the course of time, possibly just hours, everything you share on Facebook becomes less and less visible to your fans. There’s really nothing you can do about this, so you might find that you need to post several times a day to stay relevant.

Affinity Score

The next element in Edge Rank is the Affinity Score. This measures the relationship between a particular fan and a particular content author. This is why no one can honestly tell you what your Edge Rank is. Each fan is going to have their own Affinity Score based on how many times they’ve Liked, commented, and shared your content. Oh, and remember when I told you there were different plugins? This is where it becomes important.

All actions were not created equal. Likes, comments, and sharing don’t all count the same. While we don’t have the exact equation, just keep in mind that Facebook is looking for engagement. I would imagine that comments and sharing count more the Likes and page visits, but that’s just a guess.

From what I can tell, Affinity is a one-way street. You can’t artificially increase the Affinity Score between you and your fans by visiting or commenting on their pages. On the other hand, if you can get them to revisit your page, the effect will be profound. Apparently most fans only visit your Facebook Page once.  Revisits are rare, so if you can get a fan to come back, you’re way ahead of the game.

Native Edge Score

This brings us to the final element in Edge Rank. I’m talking about the Native Edge Score. It turns out that some kinds of content are worth more than others. It’s easy to speculate that content with video and images is worth more than text-only posts, but Jeff assures me it’s technically a mystery. The way he explains it, photos and videos are just naturally more compelling than plain text. They come with an intrinsic social weight that is difficult to distinguish from any native score Facebook assigns.

That being said, you may not care about the philosophical nuances. The fact is, photos and videos should play a key element in your quest for Facebook domination. When I asked Jeff about the salience of videos, he confirmed they were rather hit-or-miss. The ones that make it big often get shared over and over, and that’s incredibly good. However, there are far more videos that were just good attempts. I guess a certain amount of luck is involved.

Focus

With all this subjective scoring, it can be easy to think Edge Rank is out of your hands. Fortunately, Jeff has tons of data on how effective brands use Facebook.  He had a few suggestions for marketers to focus on.

Visibility

The number one thing you can do is to encourage users to take action. You can do this directly by asking for likes and comments, but you can also create the kind of content that compels people to respond. This is an area where your creativity is definitely going to be rewarded.

Another cool way to increase visibility is to encourage connection between your fans. Getting your fans to Friend each other has a multiplying effect on the actions each fan takes. Think of your content like infectious laughter. People tend to laugh more in groups than when they’re all alone, so if your fans can see each other and talk to each other, that laughter is going to spread very quickly.

Growth

Fans beget fans. Starting out, you might struggle to get each new Facebook fan, but you’ve got to persevere. Jeff said the largest organic source for new fans is the list of Facebook Suggestions found on every user’s home page. The more fans you have, the more likely you are to be suggested to the friends of those fans. There’s a tipping point here, and with enough determination, you’ll make it.

Your Fan Page

Your fan page can sit around and collect dust, or it can actually do some work for you. Your fan page should have a singular focus. It needs to create engagement. A great way to do this is to segment your page into two tabs.

The first tab will be your landing page. Make this look nice, but keep the bulk of the content away. The landing page should focus on Likes. Everyone who visits should immediately see your brand and a Like button. I mentioned this before, but revisits are rare, so this might be your only chance to get that Like. Make the most of it.

Your second tab should focus on deeper engagement. This is where you put your content, your contests, your requests for feedback, and all that jazz. Get fans involved with your company on a more meaningful level than the Like. Remember, if you’re not focused on engagement, you become less relevant and less visible to your fans.

Does It Work?

The value of a Facebook page is that it lies somewhere between Twitter and email. The social network is a powerful tool for customers and companies, but the messages you can send have to be concise and focused. Email is more forgiving, more persistent, and allows for greater depth in your message than other social media outlets. Despite what Facebook says, I believe Open Graph encourages, possibly even requires, email. The two are complimentary.

The truth is, I’ve been fairly skeptical about the concept of branding and marketing solely through Facebook. Then I read an article about Chris “Drama” Ptaff and his company Young & Reckless. Drama specifically says, “We don’t do print ads, we don’t do commercials. We haven’t even considered that because our reach is so much better with social-media outlets.”

That’s a powerful endorsement, and it obviously works for them.

I asked Jeff if he thought social media was truly for the young, or if focusing all your marketing energy there was just reckless (I’m sorry, it’s been a long post). He said the effectiveness of Facebook stems from the social salience of the product and the marketing. It’s the difference between having a website that plays music and a website that lets you play music for your friends. Ultimately age isn’t the barrier. If you can add to the social experience your customers are already having, you “get it.”

So let’s take a look. The first two charts in our “Quick Insights” shows the email opens based on time of day and day in the week. The ‘y’ axis displays the percentage of opens on our tested data. This is an average per campaign rate and what the campaign can expect. It may look simple, but it’s very useful. (Scratching head) “So, what you’re telling me is Thursday around 3 pm is an awesome time to send my Morning Coffee Newsletter?” Not really. Keep in mind that you should use this data as a reference. You certainly don’t want to send your Morning Coffee Newsletter at 3 pm. That would be silly, but then again…some of us need a little afternoon pick me up.

(click on the images for a closer look)

Well, how can I really use this then? Say for instance you don’t send a Morning Coffee Newsletter and you normally send your campaign out at 10 pm. We encourage you to try something new and set up a Time Warp campaign and set it for example, at 3 pm. Or even create an A/B split campaign  based on your different campaign delivery times. See how it works for you. Ultimately, you want to send your campaigns where you see fit but, you may come to find that based on your industry, A/B split test results, or time warp campaign, that a different delivery time works better for your campaigns.

Next on the menu is “The Effects of Subscriber Recency on Open /Click Rates.” Recency is a fancy word for: occurring right before the present. So, when your subscribers sign up for a newsletter they are likely to be more engaged from the start. Again the ‘y’ axis presents the percentage of opens across our tested data. You might think its a bit odd to see a dwindling of engagement as time goes on however, dependent upon your industry and what type of campaigns you send, you can fine tune that engagement. If you start experiencing depleting engagement, it may be time to consider reengaging your subscribers.

Last but not least is the “Effects of Number of Links in Email on Click Rate.”
The ‘y’ axis presents the percentage of click rates across our tested data. As this graph shows, the more links you have, the more clicks you are likely to have. This is true, but remember it’s not always the case and could effect your engagement. We advise that the links are relevant and pertain to your campaign content. It is also important to minimize the use of shortened links and check for misspellings. If you use URL shortening, have a look here.  A healthy balance of links and general campaign content is always good. So don’t overload your subscribers with hundreds of links, as they may eventually stop opening emails in fear of a “total link assault.”

All in all, we want to provide you with rough benchmarks of our performance and what you can expect from your campaigns. Every data point should work symbiotic with each other to achieve optimal campaign performance. What you send matters to you and to MailChimp, which is why we created Chimp Charts. Now off to eat some banana bread!

It turns out that a lot of their customers were asking for an easy way to add a MailChimp signup to their WordPress blogs that looked as great as the themes that WooThemes creates. As always, we’re glad to help!

The Canvas Theme settings has a “Subscribe and Connect” section that allows you to select MailChimp as a subscribe option. It’s super easy to use and doesn’t require hacking up WordPress theme files like some previous MailChimp integrations.

WooThemes has said to expect more of their themes to support MailChimp as a newsletter option in the coming future. We are looking forward to it!

Check out the Canvas theme at WooThemes

Starting with Mail Designer 1.1, you can now export the emails that you author to a MailChimp template with just a couple of clicks!

We are really excited that Mail Designer now works with MailChimp. It looks to be a great option for our customers that don’t enjoy coding HTML or would like an alternative to the MailChimp campaign editor.

The best part of this integration is that the text from the campaigns you export from Mail Designer are fully editable in the MailChimp campaign editor. Just in case you need to make last-minute changes.

Learn more about Mail Designer

Preliminary Steps

When you’re setting up your drip campaign, planning is actually just as important as creating the content you’ll be sending out, apparently. So before you get started, the fine folks over at Marketingsherpa urge you to consider some of the following questions. (Seriously, I’m not an expert on this stuff but am happy to point you toward helpful resources from folks who are.)

What’s the goal of your autoresponder campaign? For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you might want to remind someone about the items they’ve left in their shopping cart and encourage them to come back and purchase. Do you have your content sorted out? Content is still king, and having well-written, informative and relevant content will help engage your subscribers and keep them interested. What’s the trajectory and duration of your campaign? What key marketing messages are you trying to convey? What’s the time period over which you plan to send your emails? Are they leading up to a specific event? These sorts of questions will help you figure out how often you want to send, and the specific content in each message.

Getting Started

Let’s imagine that you’re a wedding photographer who finds potential clients through word of mouth, via a signup form on your website, and by using Chimpadeedoo for iPad to let interested parties sign up at bridal shows.

You’ll want to make sure your signup form is capturing all the pertinent information for your autoresponder series– first and last name, email address, date (which I’ve relabeled so it refers to wedding date) and gender. Perhaps even use the 2 line description to entice people with a special offer for signing up, as I’ve done here.

Setting Up Your Autoresponders

Remember, the whole point of this tutorial is how to count down to a special date using autoresponders. Since we’ve collected the wedding date of our prospective clients, that’s the date we’ll base our series of emails on.

When I created my signup form in Chimpadeedoo, I offered an incentive– a free wedding photography consultation. In order to make good on that offer, I scheduled my first autoresponder (containing the free consultation offer) to send a few days (3) after signup. This gives the subscriber enough time to process all the information from the Bridal Show, but not so much time that they forget they ever signed up for my list. (Note: Experiment here! Is five days the sweet spot, or do you get better results from waiting a week or maybe even nine days? Leave a comment and let us know what you discover, as my guess is that things will vary by industry and use case.)

Then I created my campaign:

Next, I’ve decided that to stay in contact with my subscribers and help pique their interest in my services, I’ll send out a “tips” type newsletter one month after the subscription date. Again, in my autoresponder setup screen I’ll click the big “add autoresponder” button, then select the list I want to send to– Georgia Bridal Show 2011. Under “send settings” I’ll set my autoresponder to send 1 month after the subscriber’s signup date:

And again, I’ll then go in and create my campaign full of wedding tips and tricks. I’ll segment this one by gender, because let’s face it, you guys need a lot of help when it comes to wedding stuff. I’ll include pointers about how not to look like a total goofball in your photos, how far in advance of your wedding you should get your hair cut so you don’t have that “freshly shorn sheep” look, and even some common dance steps so that you’re not as nervous while twirling your lady during that first dance.

Once you’ve set up your autoresponder and are ready to jump into the design process, simply set the segment of your list you want to send to in Step 1 of the Campaign Builder.

Next, you know that (according to the wedding planning checklist) couples will be seriously auditioning photographers nine to ten months prior to the date of the wedding. In order to capitalize on that, I’ll set up two autoresponders– one that will send 10 months before the date of the wedding, and the other that will send 9 months before the wedding. These are specifically intended to remind my subscribers that it’s time to pick a photographer, while also suggesting my services.

Ten months out, I want to remind the subscriber where we met (the Georgia Bridal Show on June 26, 2011 at Gwinnett Center), provide some education and links to my website and portfolio, and offer my photography services for the big day. Since I collected gender information on my signup form, I might even consider segmenting on that criteria and including a bit more concrete information for the men on my list. Guys don’t always understand the nuances of wedding planning, so it might behoove me to educate as opposed to trying the hard sell.

There’s a lot that goes into planning a wedding, so when my autoresponder sends 9 months prior to the date of the wedding, I want to assure my subscribers I know what they’re going through and that LauterCo Photographers are here to help. This might be a good time to include offers from dress shops, tuxedo rental places or caterers that my company has prior working relationships with. You can even make sure those companies know you sent them business by using Google’s URL builder to generate a unique link for each vendor.

Google URL builder

Some other ideas you might want to consider

• 8 months before the wedding, send a PYOW-powered QR coupon code to a segment of those folks who “opened or clicked” your email from the 9-month autoresponder offering a discount on your photography services

• Post a QR Code outside your studio so that visitors who stop by can quickly signup for your email list