I’ve been at MailChimp for a while, so I still have memories of foreign-language help requests being about as frequent as Halley’s comet (and usually treated with equal fanfare). Some of these requests were so remote and isolated, it was hard to see how it all fit in with the overall MailChimp application. Fast forward a few years. We’re at a point where not only do we have to tailor our content to a growing global audience, but we have to accept unforeseen consequences like being big in Turkmenistan. Even our CEO Ben’s shameful lack of a passport hasn’t stopped MailChimp from spreading the message of easy email newsletters worldwide.

So how do we overcome the language barrier? Stick our head in the sand and hope that everyone learns English in the next six months? Frankly, that’s not our ethos at MailChimp. We don’t ignore difficult issues.

The webinar team is here to help. We’ve been working on a full barrage of educational materials for our international users. We’ve spent a lot of time lately on Getting Started videos in a few different languages, to help you cross the language divide. German, French, and Portuguese tutorials are coming soon, in addition to the Spanish videos that are already available. These videos will cover the same topics as the videos and live webinars from the Getting Started program that’s already available in English.

These videos may sound easy-peasy, but in the name of all things simian, believe me when I say that they’re quite complex to put together. The intricacies of internet-speak across different languages and cultures are very delicate. The creation process for these videos has to be somewhat meticulous. We have to be careful when we’re trying to say “click here” in a foreign language, because we might accidentally say something we regret. And it’s not just the politeness factor—the big idea behind these videos is to give our international users the same level of training that our anglophone users get. Which means that beyond just being understandable, these videos have to have the same usefulness and level of instruction as our English presentations.

To make these educational videos in another language, we start off with our English recordings as a template. With this template, we painstakingly translate the content in a script style. This is usually the longest part. Eventually, we stop correcting every little detail and move on to the sound track portion, which is where the fun begins. We lock ourselves in the recording studio  and start speaking in all kinds of foreign languages. Once the sound track is laid (and our office mates thoroughly confused), the last bit is adding the video and post production. Once we say the magic words and tap with the magic wand, Presto! Brand new recordings for everyone.

While working on this linguistic challenge for our training videos, we realized that some of you may be experiencing a similar process. You may remember that we recently announced an integration with Straker . This integration allows you to translate the content of your emails on the go, so that you don’t even have to think about it. I don’t say this lightly: This integration borders on miraculous. If your audience is growing ever more multilingual, accept no substitute. We’re working on a video with the good folks at Straker to show you the ins and outs of the integration,how to make it all work for your campaigns, and other ways MailChimp can help you connect with your international audience. Whether you’re selling chimp-themed snuggies in Lithuania or organizing submarine tours off the Falkland islands, the idea here is to help you sort out how to make your content speak to your target audience—even if you don’t actually speak their language. Consider us your very own email babel fish.

If they’re already on the list, we’ll send them an email with a link to update their subscription preferences. Clicking the “update your preferences” link in the email will then take the subscriber to a web-based version of your signup form with their current values pre-filled. The subscriber can then make and submit their changes.

This should be especially helpful for those of you who rely heavily on interest groups for list segmentation.

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!

We’ve added a new “Birthday” field that you can add to your signup forms:

Unlike the “date” field, the “birthday” field doesn’t require entering the YEAR (some subscribers just don’t want to reveal their exact date of birth).

We also added a few new pre-designed email templates for birthdays, so that making birthday autoresponders would be drop-dead easy…

When you’re building a birthday autoresponder (here’s a tutorial on how to do that), and it’s time to design the email, go to the pre-designed templates list, and choose “birthday:”

You’ll find the following new designs to help you get started:

Of course, you can always build your own using our other awesome template options, or by downloading our HTML email blueprints.

For those of you who prefer to take an offbeat approach, remember that it’s also possible to send belated birthday autoresponders by tweaking your send settings:

The birthday field can technically also be used for “Anniversaries” but we wanted to keep the button label simple.

Finally, you can choose two different date formats:

Related:

• Creating Effective — and Profitable — Birthday Emails by Jeanne Jennings, Clickz
• If you’re using our Chimpadeedoo iPad app to collect signups at your store register, our Mobile Lab team is working on an update as we speak that supports this new field.

It’s a quick way to see, across all the campaigns you’ve ever sent, which ones:

• Had the highest open rate of all time
• Had the highest click rate of all time
• Your most clicked links of all time (my personal favorite, because it helps me see what my readers are most interested in)

If you’re familiar with our other “360″ integrations (as in degrees, full circle)– like Analytics360 or Ecommerce360– you’ll know that we refer to them as such because your email leaves MailChimp, does a little data mingling with another service or services, and then that data ultimately gets pulled back into our application. Truth in advertising!

Our SurveyGizmo 360 integration follows the same scheme. When you send out an email containing a specially generated SurveyGizmo link and your subscribers answer your questionnaire, that data gets pulled back into your MailChimp Reports. While not as visually appealing or robust as SurveyGizmo’s built in reporting features, it will allow you to view responses at a glance.

In order to create the special link for your MailChimp campaign, click on the “Publish” tab of your launched survey and then click the “MailChimp Campaign” button. When the dialog box appears, be sure to select “Display MailChimp Subscriber Info” and then click the “save” button. This will ensure that your subscribers’ names are matched up with their survey responses in your MailChimp reports.

Once you click “save” you’ll end up back on the “Publish” tab. You’ll see a new MailChimp listing with it’s own custom URL under “Existing Links/Campaigns”, and that’s the link to your survey you’ll use in your MailChimp campaign.

Now jumping back over to MailChimp, you’ll find your survey responses under Reports ==> Advanced Reports. Your question(s) will be pulled in as column headers, and that’s really helpful when you’ve got a meaty survey with lots of questions to keep track of. You’ll also be able to see a time stamp associated with each response, and the subscriber’s name (assuming you have that option selected when you create your special SurveyGizmo link). When you elect to keep subscriber info anonymous, you’ll see IP addresses instead. Be sure to click on the image below for a larger view.

Related Content

• How do I use SurveyGizmo with MailChimp?

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.

There are a plethora of options for formatting the RSS content you want to include in your campaign, but for this example I simply wanted to include the 5 most recent posts from three different feeds. In order to do that, I used the following syntax:

|FEEDBLOCK:URL| and |END:FEEDBLOCK|

We developed the |FEEDBLOCK| merge tag to give you explicit, fine grained control over which elements of your feed you want to include in your campaign.

First you’ll need to create the beginning and ending flags for each RSS feed. The stuff between gets replicated for each post in the feed. So if you want to use individual FEED:ITEM merge tags, use

*|FEEDBLOCK:URL| * *|FEEDITEMS:| * and *|END:FEEDITEMS| * *|END:FEEDBLOCK| *
as your open and close tags surrounding the following items you want to include.

For a full list of available tags and how to use ‘em, check out this handy article from our Knowledge Base!

This “training in your comfort zone” maxim has been the guiding star for all of our endeavors here at MailChimp’s webinar team. We stay up nights (ok that may be an exaggeration…although not by much) thinking up new ways to teach people how to get the most out of their MailChimp account.

As some readers may remember from earlier posts our webinars have been an ever-evolving process. From the early days of twice a week to its current format, we are perpetually looking for new and better ways to deliver useful information in a concise, fun and dare I say professional manner.

Let me tell you, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. We have to come up with new content to then test our new material, as well as calibrating new bananas for strategic “good luck charm” purposes. It is time consuming and more often than not a creative process we love and respect dearly. We love it because it is the mechanism by which we express ourselves. We respect it because of how often we see what we teach reflected in successful campaigns and accounts.

With this in mind, we are proud to announce a restructuring of the webinars that we all know and love. Up until now, the webinars have been a giant monolith of awesome. The “Getting Started Webinar”  is one massive session where we cover most basic functionality from top to bottom. A “one stop shop” for information on your MailChimp account. Although this has worked, we are now moving to a more academic template. Which is to say, separating the “Getting Started” session into easier to digest, shorter to watch, bite-sized doses of useful information.

Starting April 4th the Getting Started webinar is now 3 separate sessions, which are:

MailChimp 101:

• List Creation: how to get your list in sending order ASAP
• Campaign creation: Where to start and which options to choose
• Reporting: ‘Cause who doesn’t like to crunch number and stats

MailChimp 102:

• Embeded forms: Getting subscribers right from your website
• RSS to Emails: Emails with live content from your blog or website
• Advanced Merge tags: Above and beyond the run of the mill merge tags

MailChimp 103:

• Reporting: an in depth look at the data your campaigns are generating
• A/B Split: a look at how to test specific components in your campaign
• Advanced Segmenting: how to use information for targeted campaigns

I know I’ve talked about this feature before, but sometimes the best features are the quiet, shy ones that hide in the corner, and people forget about them.

Poor little automagic color grabber.

How does it work? Well, when you setup an account in MailChimp, you tell us your domain name. We need it to make sure you’re not a spammer, we use it to help you setup your CAN-SPAM required contact information, and on and on. But we also visit your website and attempt to grab your logo (assuming it’s named in some standard way) and we grab any colors you’ve specified in your CSS file.

We actually make an attempt to automatically design your first email for you, but the outcome of that attempt depends a lot on your file naming conventions.

Anyway, it’s a nifty thing that’s worth reminding you about again.

Other nifty things:

• Subject Line Suggester
• Delivery Doctor
• TimeWarp
• AutoConnect Templates
• Design Genius
• Email Beamer