Who: Turntable Kitchen 

What: A website that pairs locally sourced recipes with great music

Where: San Francisco

Why we love them: Kasey and Matthew connect food to music, as their tagline goes, but they do so with great design and obvious passion. Plus, their monthly pairings box—which includes a seven-inch vinyl single, a digital mixtape, dried ingredients, and recipe cards—is just plain rad.

Sign up for Turntable Kitchen’s newsletter.

“I think it’s because we keep it simple—a nice cartoon to brighten your day, delivered to your inbox every morning,” Hugh tells us. “People like getting that a whole lot more than, say, a daily, long-winded spiel about why y’all should give me your money, make me rich, yak, yak, yak…”

Instead of marketing himself to his readers, Hugh delivers his business-card cartoons into the inboxes of his extraordinarily engaged readership every day, then they send those cartoons to their friends, building up his list in the process. Pretty simple, right?

Hugh first started doodling on business cards in 1997. He had done around a thousand by the time he started posting them in batches to his website. Eventually, he’d start blogging in 2001 on a “crude and very expensive” early version of what would become gapingvoid.com, the website that collects his myriad cartoons and musings (and just turned 11 over the weekend!). After “messing around with a newsletter format” in 2003, then abandoning it to focus on the blog while people realized that “feed readers were not the answer, that they required too much time, work, and attention,” Hugh came back around to email.

“We realized it was important to be able to reach out to people in a more deliberate way,” he told us. “What email does, in part, is allow you to touch your core constituency at an interval and pace that suits them. As our business developed into the realm of retail and consulting around the cartoons, it made more sense to reach out to people, rather than just letting them come to us via the blog.”

And each cartoon is a textbook example of what Hugh calls a Social Object, “the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else,” as he defines it on his site. We asked Hugh how the cartoons play into the bigger picture.

“Everything else—company news, stuff to sell, etc.—is very secondary,” he told us. “The whole Social Object idea is based upon the premise that good ideas spread naturally. We are hard-wired to share stuff worth sharing. I’m blessed because my little illustrations are the definition of a Social Object, so when I put them out there, they spread like virtual pollen. In part, this is fundamental to our proposition that we can help other businesses do this.”

In this way, he focuses on the content he’s producing, not the traffic it generates. His content varies in size from tweets to books, but is all striving to achieve the same goal.

“Blog posts allow for longer, more thoughtful discussion, while Twitter is obviously the opposite,” Hugh says. “But the email is really about short content and a little illustration that delights people. It’s all interrelated, and it always comes back to our core purpose, which focuses on the idea of empowering people. It sometimes seems paradoxical that these little cartoons can do this, but that is exactly what they do.”

But is it really as simple as just creating good content?

“Heck, no,” Hugh told us. “‘Just produce good content,’ though essential, is just the beginning, sadly. Be interesting. Don’t waste people’s time, be nice, give them something of value. If you’re consistent in this way, and are giving in how you market, then your reach and open rates will be awesome like ours.”

Hugh MacLeod’s third book, Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear, was just published. Sign up for his newsletter, visit his blog, and follow him on Twitter.

I just sent a MailChimp email update to almost 1.8 million recipients (here’s a copy if you’d like to read it). Whenever I do this, I normally get over 10,000 of those “I’m on vacation!” or “I have a new email address!”  auto-replies in my inbox. It’s sort of an ironic reward for growing your email list. I appreciate irony as much as anyone, but the auto-replies can really put a damper on the fun I get from checking my stats, and replying to actual human recipients. So I hooked up our new app, ReplyTo.

Above, you can see it in action. So far, it’s prevented 3,200 of those autoreplies from flooding my inbox, and it’s even updated a few email addresses for me.  With all this free time, maybe I’ll take a vacation or something.

For example, whenever marketing people talk about mobile, they usually talk about how “people are on the go!” which–since we’re talking about marketing people here–always leads to, “so we have to find ways to blast relevant messages at them *while* they’re on the go, like SMS marketing and near-field wifi fence blah blah blah.”

They also tend to use cheesy stock photos like this “business man on the go:”

He's on the go! He's so busy and productive!

Now, I like technology as much as anyone, but I always wonder: “Is this what people really want?” More importantly, “Is that guy in the picture for real?”

When designers talk about mobile, it’s usually about responsive website designs, “renderability,” media queries, obscure code hacks and workarounds for different email apps. This is all extremely useful, but designers serve clients. Often, their clients are marketers. And so I can’t help but wonder if our clients are asking those designers to target that theoretical “on the go” guy:

Does this theoretical “on the go man with cell phone” really want that daily deal coupon email to render properly on his Android while he’s on the go? Of course, but I wonder if we’re still missing some opportunity to use design to help our man on the go.

Computers in our pockets, email in our beds

What happens when that guy’s not on the go? Does he check his mail when he’s on the couch? Or out shopping with his wife? Or walking the dog, or taking his kids to the playground? Yes, he does. We all know he does, because that’s what we do. So how does that change the way people use email? What’s that mean for email marketers?

Our study attempts to reveal more about mobile email behavior. There are statistics, but there are also some recommended best practices.

Here are my personal takeaways:

• Stop saying “people are on the go.” For the love of all things holy, stop saying that. Yes, some people are on the go. More importantly though, it’s the computers that are on the go. People are buying and using Androids and iPhones instead of desktops. People are computing while they’re on the couch. This changes behavior, and it changes our expectations (not just screen resolutions). See page 11.
• We “filter” emails on our mobile devices (IBM calls it “triage“), and we do this in weird places and at weird times. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is that email, which was once separated between “work inbox” vs. “home inbox” is now all dumped into a single “always-on stream” of information on our phones (and this makes us think of email differently). Most marketers jump to the conclusion that “we need to make our message fast and to the point and less than 140 characters!” Maybe that’s true, but I think it’s more important to realize that your marketing message is now appearing at the dinner table with family, or in bed. There are interesting little ways you can make your brand look more considerate of that fact (design tweaks, read later tools, etc). See page 14.
• People expect a sucky experience when they visit websites on their smartphones (for now). We’re just not there yet, apparently. So it’s actually a differentiator when your emails look mobile-friendly, because it suggests your website just might be mobile friendly, which makes people more likely to click your email. See page 16.

Download the Email on Mobile Devices research paper from our resources page.

Related:

• Andreessen: There Is No Tech Bubble (And the Smartphone Is Still Under-Hyped) - “Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it’s so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.”
• The Future of Mobile by Henry Blodget “but the really interesting stuff people do on mobile is what they don’t do online”
• What the BetaMax Case Teaches Us About Readability – not specifically about smartphones, but read it knowing that a lot of this controversy centers around reading more on smartphones. Also see: “For Your Reading Pleasure” and tap that Reader icon in your iPhone’s Safari
• Using Media Queries to Improve Email Readability (MailChimp)
• StyleCampaign has a lot of great mobile email studies, like this one.
• MailChimp’s Mobile Apps, built-in mobility features, and resources for mobile developers

The internet was a different place four or five years ago. Social media was certainly a thing (remember Friendster!?), but it was way different from the omnipresent social layer that’s now built into everything from running shoes to bathroom scales. Facebook didn’t hit the one-hundred million user mark until August of 2008, and that’s right around the time that we launched our customer community, The Jungle.

At first, The Jungle was a nice way to connect with customers. Over time though, it’s become an overgrown and inhospitable place, full of weeds and confusion.  Inevitably, the bots and spammers decided to invade, which made us force account setups, and get more strict on moderation. That’s not a complaint about moderation, by the way. We actually believe strongly in it, in order to protect your community. It’s just that customers started to perceive these spam-protection barriers as hurdles and hoops that they had to jump through when all they wanted to do was submit a new feature idea.

Meanwhile, Facebook has grown to just over 900 million users, and is projected to cross the one billion user mark in late summer 2012. With the world population hovering around 7 billion humans, that means roughly 15% of us are on Facebook. And I’d venture a bet that in the business and technology communities, the actual percentage is much higher. The trend is undeniable, and it makes us question the need for our own private social network.

Okay, but what about “community”?

We do a good bit of thinking about community at MailChimp. We just last year launched LongReply for Twitter and Social for WordPress. LongReply was developed out of the very real need for more than 140 characters when helping folks via Twitter. With Twitter quickly becoming the first place people turn when they’re looking to avoid call centers and automated contextual menus, LongReply allows us to give technically thorough, and thoroughly human responses to customer tweets. Social is a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate WordPress with Twitter and Facebook, so you can collect everything people are saying about your blog in one place. More and more, people use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web, and Social lets commenters log in and leave a comment using their preferred social identity. They can also publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account from your blog. (If you’re curious to see the plugin in action, just scroll down to the comments section of this post!)

The point here, is that every day more and more people are joining Twitter and Facebook not only to connect with their friends and family, but also to connect with brands. This also happens to be why we integrated Facebook comments into your MailChimp campaigns back in 2010. You’re using these channels, we’re using them too, and so it makes perfect sense to meet in the middle and use these platforms to engage in an open dialogue with one another.

Our experiment with fostering community through The Jungle has allowed us to make some interesting observations over the past few years, in particular about what’s working for us and what is not:

• We don’t believe you should have to authorize an application or sign up for a service just to give us feedback. Sounds like common sense, but the Jungle’s Ning platform was initially used as a simple way to discuss topics and form friendly, virtual roundtables with customers. Over time, it eventually turned into the default place to send customers if/when they had feedback or feature requests. To that end, having to create a Ning profile just to submit a simple suggestion got silly.
• Spam messages and accounts led to the necessity to moderate comments and approve users, which made our social network closed off to the point that it became extremely cumbersome for folks to share feedback. This contradicts the reasons we established it in the first place!
• The Ning platform  was acquired by Glam Media last year, and we ultimately feel that it’s not going to meet our community’s needs in the long term.
• The conversation has naturally shifted to Facebook and Twitter as adoption has increased for both services. Shameless plug: you can connect with MailChimp on Facebook (and Twitter and Google+).
• The vast majority of the tech support questions that are asked in the Jungle have been thoroughly detailed in our Knowledge Base, which we’ve invested heavily in over recent years–but that’s worth another blog post entirely.

That being said, we’ve decided to make some changes that will make it easier for our users to send us quick feedback and “wish list requests,” and make it more natural to talk with our users on the social networks they already use.

To that effect, as of May 1, 2012 we’ll no longer be approving new member requests for joining The Jungle.

Note: We originally planned to keep the Jungle live for another month  so that users could log in and download anything they might need, but this security report made us decide to take it down completely until we’re comfortable with the idea of making it live again.

Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or contact us directly if you have questions or concerns.

So what’s next?

We’ve set up a feedback form on our site, and when you submit your thoughts they go directly to MailChimp’s CEO Ben, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder Dan, and a few other key humans on our User Experience (UX) team. We’re also constantly monitoring Twitter and Facebook to answer technical questions and field feedback. Our hope is that all of these options make it easier and more convenient for you to get in touch, because we’re genuinely interested in hearing what you have to say!

Lastly, the MailChimp blog will form an important cornerstone once we officially shut down The Jungle. Ben started the blog waaay back in 2006, and it continues to be one of the key ways we keep our customers up-to-date with changes, industry news, and application upgrades. To be perfectly honest, the blog has been better at fostering community than The Jungle ever was, and we’re cool with that. It allows us to have topically relevant discussions in a way that makes sense, and get you the answers you need in the most timely manner possible.

So keep doing what you do– asking questions and sharing your feedback– just in a slightly different (but hopefully more natural) way now. We look forward to continuing the conversation!

Related Reading:

• 6 Ways to Kill Your Community
• Matt Haughey: Lessons Learned from 11 Years of Community
• Facebook Pages Aren’t A Community
• Ditch the Community Manager. Hire the Community Analyst.

Here’s the thing, though: Nonprofits can totally use the templates that aren’t specifically designated for nonprofits.

This isn’t exactly news. But maybe your micromanager needed to hear it from someone else. At the very least, the next time some know-it-all suggests that you “run your nonprofit more like a business,” you can say that you use the same newsletter templates that businesses use. (Maybe this happens just before you issue a swift kick to said know-it-all’s shin.)

I’ve highlighted some templates that nonprofit organizations might like to use or edit to fit their brand guidelines. Let’s take a look at them, knowing that—yes—there are more, and—yes—you can always design your own from scratch.

Mobile

More and more of your subscribers are reading email on mobile devices. Mobile templates help get your message across without readers having to zoom in, zoom out, or ignore a bloated email on principle.

Holidays

While these examples aren’t exactly timely, I suspect Fabio is working day and night to create an International Tuba Day template. Meanwhile, there are a lot more holiday templates where these came from.

Surveys

You might not find our SurveyMonkey templates with the rest of the designer templates right away. That’s because they appear only after you activate our SurveyMonkey integration. Just like the other templates, you can edit these to match your organization’s brand or personality.

Once you send out your survey, go to the Advanced Reports section to find your SurveyMonkey stats.

eCommerce

If your organization has some sort of retail arm, you might appreciate our eCommerce-specific templates. They don’t even care about your 501(c)(3) designation.

Events

Event templates deliver your invitation without having to worry about any additional newsletter content or design.

Stationery

Sometimes it’s best to send out word on something a little more formal. Say, if you’ve been awarded a major grant, or if your executive director is feeling important, or if the celebrity on your board has recently been arrested.

Nonprofit

Right now we’re boasting a handful of templates specifically for nonprofits. If you really like these (like I do), or if you’re a newsletter-template-title purist, these are for you.

Who: Ken Segall 

What: A creative director and author

Where: Dobbs Ferry, NY

Why we love him: Working alongside Steve Jobs for a dozen years, Ken Segall named the iMac and helped develop the company’s “Think Different” campaign. With his new book, Insanely Simple, he explains and illustrates the 10 elements of simplicity that Jobs enforced as he built the Apple empire. “How is it that Apple could so consistently outthink and outmarket monoliths who possess greater resources or market share?” Segall asks on his website. “The answer is surprisingly uncomplicated.”

Sign up for Ken Segall’s newsletter.

Thanks to our $1 million integration fund and HootSuite’s new Engagement API, we’ve launched a MailChimp add-on for HootSuite. The integration allows users to view and search for campaigns, share campaigns to any of their social networks, view campaign results, and more—all from within their HootSuite account. Here’s how it works:
Add a MailChimp stream to your HootSuite dashboard by clicking Apps in the Add Stream menu and selecting the MailChimp App.

Next, click Connect to MailChimp to authenticate HootSuite’s connection to your MailChimp account.

HootSuite will pull in your MailChimp campaigns, along with some basic stats about them.

From here, you can share a campaign with your audience on any of the social networks you’ve set up in HootSuite.

The link to your campaign will be shortened with HootSuite’s link shortener, ow.ly, instead of our link shortener, eepurl. The ow.ly link shortener allows HootSuite to track how the campaigns are shared across your social networks. Now you can see stats on your email campaigns’ social reach in context with the rest of your social-media metrics, from within HootSuite.

Want to see a little more info on the campaigns in your MailChimp stream? Click the name of the campaign, and you’ll get more detailed campaign stats.

This integration is a perfect fit for our greater philosophy on social features. We love to see people integrating their MailChimp accounts with social networks, but we don’t want to help anyone “blast” campaigns across every social network they can get their hands on. We’d rather help our customers share campaigns across social networks they already use, in a way that’s natural for them. If you use HootSuite and MailChimp, then this integration might help you have meaningful conversations with your audience and make your life a little easier.

You can add the integration to your HootSuite account from HootSuite’s App Directory.

• 36 Templates: A boat load of lovely new templates for musicians, holidays, and kid-centric businesses. You’ll find these in the “Design” section of the Campaign Builder and in Templates as well.
• Persistent Messaging: A new messaging system that shows up at the top of any page when your lists are done importing, or there’s something to address with your account.
• Unified Contact Info: Edit all of your administrator, billing, and list contact info in one place (Account > Contact Information)
• Sending Meter: A simple little meter in the Account menu showing how close you are to your monthly sending limit.
• Link Dialogue: An updated interface making it easier to add links to websites, files, or anchor points in your email campaigns.

For this month’s release, v7.1, the majority of the new templates being added in the library come from two very talented outside sources.

The first of those sources is Rob Weychert, a pixel-pusher extraordinaire who’s worked at Happy Cog, which is famous for… well, pretty much everything web, and Harmonix, famous for best-party-game-in-history Rock Band.

Rob’s created an awesome selection of music templates for the library, with designs representing genres like punk rock, hip-hop, and pop:

The addition of these templates means the addition of a ‘Music’ category, which we’ll expand as we move forward. As an aside, Rob also wrote the placeholder copy in the templates. It’s all hilarious and worth a read. As another aside, Rob – or Windhammer, as he is known – is also a U.S. Air Guitar champion. He’s one of those folks who can do it all.

The second source is a great group of folks located in Charleston, South Carolina: {e} house studio. {e} house has created some great email templates for their clients and they know MailChimp, so we thought, “Hey, we should ask them to design some templates for us.” Thus, we did and they did:

We really enjoyed what {e} house came up with, so you’ll be seeing more of their great designs showing up in the library in the coming months.

Finally, we’ve added a category, ‘Kids’, for templates with a wartime theme.

Oh, sorry. No. For templates with children’s themes. The first batch of templates in this category are day care and toy store themed:

Expect to see lots more robots in this category as we go along. MailChimp is a pro-robot workplace, and everyone loves robots, right? Well, not John Connor I suppose, though I don’t see why he’s so scared of them (wait for it).