Way back in May of 2008, we came up with a feature called Chimp Chatter (boy, that old blog post brings back memories). The idea behind Chimp Chatter was to provide useful updates about your campaigns, right on the MailChimp Dashboard. You could even subscribe to its RSS feed (pretty forward thinking, back in the day when RSS was gonna kill email and all). Anyway, Chimp Chatter’s been long overdue for a revamp.

You may also recall a cool feature we launched last year called MailChimp Faces. It showed subscribers’ avatars and gravatars right there on your Dashboard, making your list feel less like a bunch of stats, and more like — well, people. And our users seemed to genuinely like seeing the faces of their subscribers. But changes to the Social Pro data set forced us to drop Faces.

Which really, really sucked for me because I think it’s kind of important to make email marketing a little more human. It’s kinda what we do here at MailChimp.

So when we recently redesigned our app, we updated two birds with one stone:

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You know the hardest part about (and therefore the secret of) good email marketing? Telling a good story. Those quarterly newsletters you write should all come together to tell the story of your brand. If your story is all about saving money, then your daily email coupons should tell that story. Starving artist? That automatic email campaign you hooked up to your flickr or dribbble should tell your story (in pictures).

But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.

There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…

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Our recent redesign of the application has been a long time coming. We had to take our time because redesigning too quickly with hundreds of thousands of users would leave some folks behind. For that reason, we took 6 months to make slow, steady changes that improve the user experience and lay the ground work for some cool stuff to come.

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I try to keep up with what you’re doing out there.  Every day, I track the public eepurls that customers share on Twitter and check them out, looking for cool stuff to feature or interesting tricks you’re using in your email campaigns.

Recently, I was browsing through some holiday campaigns that are going out, hoping to find something neat to show you, when I stumbled on one from Ollie & Boo that I thought was really cute:

It’s short & sweet, not too “in your face” and has a really pretty palate of colors that aren’t your typical holiday fare.  Just as I was about to mark it down as one to feature, I realized that it’s one of our holiday templates.  Whoops!

Rather than wallow in my embarrassment at not recognizing one of our very own, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out our holiday templates to those of you who  may not know we have ‘em.    If you have a special event or holiday campaign that needs to go out and don’t want tocreate a whole new design for it, you can look under templates and select “pre-designed,” then “holiday.”

There, you’ll find a bunch of templates for all sorts of holidays, ranging from casual to more elegant styles.

If you’re hosting a holiday event, you’ll definitely want to check out our Eventbrite integration to manage tickets or RSVPs.  You could even include a QR COUPON merge tag for a cool giveaway, then use Pyow! to scan them as folks check in to your event (or check out at your store.) We recently did this at our customer appreciation event in Atlanta to give away pints of Chimpenheimer Crunch, created by Jake’s Ice Cream.  Everyone who checked in with a QR code from the email we sent got to take some MailChimp ice cream home with them. Pretty sweet.

Are you doing a cool holiday promotion?   We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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.