Timeline for New MailChimp

We’ve started rolling out the update, and it will be available to everyone within a few days. When it becomes available, we’ll prompt you to try New MailChimp after you log in. New MailChimp will be optional until July 15, so you don’t have to switch right away if you’re not ready. And don’t worry; if you switch to New MailChimp and change your mind, you can revert back to Old MailChimp in your account settings for the next few weeks.

And of course, your data isn’t going anywhere. All your lists, groups, campaigns, and reports will be waiting in your account, right where you left them.

What’s changed?

A fresh design

For starters, we gave the entire app a makeover. Our UX designers updated every corner of MailChimp and cleared out some of the clutter, so you can focus on what matters: your work. But there’s a lot more to it than a new look. Here are some of the not-so-subtle changes we made:

Optimized for tablets

New MailChimp has been optimized for tablets, so you can add subscribers, create and send campaigns, and view your reports from anywhere. Our lead UX developer Federico shows you what it looks like in this video.

Navigation, campaign builder, and search

The navigation is now on the left side of the app instead of up top, and we simplified several steps of the campaign builder. You can expand and collapse menus to create more space. When you click your account name, a menu slides out with account options, so they won’t be in the way when you don’t need them. Switch to Pro mode to simplify the icons and make more room to work. You can also search across the app from anywhere in the app, and we improved the search process itself.

Collaboration tools

We love teamwork around here, and we know that email newsletters are often a group effort. That’s why we added some features that will help you collaborate on campaigns with your team or clients.

You can now make comments right inside the drag and drop editor. You’ll see who else is online, and New MailChimp shows edits in real time on everyone’s screen, so you won’t have to wait for someone to sign out of the account before you can make changes to a campaign. You can send a test email and request feedback from the comments tab in the editor. And if your recipients aren’t logged in, they can just reply to the test email with their feedback, which will appear inside your comments section. Respond directly to feedback, add new notes, and mark comments as completed once you’ve taken care of business.

Fed explains those updates in this video.

Subscriber profiles

The layout and functionality of subscriber profiles have changed quite a bit. If you have a lot of fields in your list, you can scroll horizontally to reveal the fields, and the subscriber’s email address remains visible so you don’t have to scroll back and forth to figure out what you’re looking at. You can also toggle, hide, and reorder columns to customize the information that appears when you view your list.

We also made it much easier to manage subscribers from mobile devices, and you can make notes in individual profiles. See the new subscriber profiles.

New website

The app is MailChimp’s heart, but we didn’t forget about the product website! We wanted the new site to reflect our goal of making MailChimp a simpler and more intuitive experience for everyone. Just like our UX team did with the app, we lightened everything up and eliminated clutter where we could.

If you’d like to learn more about our research and design processes, look through the posts tagged “New MailChimp.”

Now, what do you say we all get back to work?

A few weeks ago, MailChimp’s DesignLab posted images of our User Personas to their blog. As Jason explained there, we wanted to find out who really uses MailChimp. It was a question posed to us by data analyst Allison last year. We could broadly generalize about our users (savvy, self-reliant, techie, motivated), but we realized that we couldn’t rattle off the four or five archetypical MailChimp users.

What we needed was a clear idea of our current users, so we could better empathize with them, and in turn design for and delight them—especially with a massive redesign on the horizon. To reconcile who we think uses MailChimp with who really uses MailChimp, fellow researcher Steph and I embarked on a long-term study of our customers to learn who they are; what, why, and how often they send; what kinds of issues they face; where they work; and what kind of people they are. This helps us understand how MailChimp fits into their day-to-day lives, which in turn empowers us to design smarter.

So, how’d we do it?

Step 1: Interview MailChimp stakeholders to see who we assume our customers are

Our interviews with decision makers here at MailChimp were illuminating. When we asked, “Who do you think uses MailChimp?” nearly all of our subjects identified the same characteristics: smart, self-reliant, and techie. Steph and I decided to model an “ideal user,” Fred, after the aggregate data we collected from those interviews.

Fred is a great tool for a couple of reasons. First, he exposes our biases and assumptions. Second, he reminds us of the level of expertise we’d ideally like to see in our customers. He tells us to design MailChimp to empower our customers to communicate smartly and efficiently.

Step 2: Rank our pool of active users by industry

We took a close look at the industries people selected when they signed up for MailChimp. Turns out, nonprofits, education, and the arts represent a huge number of MailChimp customers. This was helpful, because we thought specifically about them as we redesigned the app. We could start to contextualize where folks will be when they use MailChimp, and in what capacity.

Step 3: Identify subjects from popular industries and interview, interview, interview

We took several of the top industries and started contacting users for in-person interviews. We met those customers at their workplaces—to present us with not only a human face, but a sense of the environment in which a MailChimp campaign is created. For instance, is the office quiet, or is there a lot of foot traffic? Is the computer a newer model or something outdated? What terms or phrases did our customers use to describe their work, their situations, and their emotional states? We ended up traveling to speak to customers in North America and Europe, focusing on Atlanta, Paris, London, and Madrid.

Step 4: Analyze what we saw and heard

After we visited folks at their offices, we organized and tagged our findings, and then looked for patterns. We discovered a lot of similarities across different roles or types of customers. For example, we had initially thought of our advertising agency customers as much different from our communications consultant customers; we think of agencies as big groups with lots of moving parts, and consultants as independent operators. But both sets of users manage multiple campaigns for many clients simultaneously, and thus use MailChimp in similar capacities.

At the same time, both our public relations and administrative assistant customer groups described themselves as too busy to learn all of MailChimp’s features; they hardly have time in their days to set up and send a campaign—much less learn and implement new functions.

Step 5: Share our findings with the team

When all was said and done, we ended up with five archetypical MailChimp personas: Fred, our “ideal” user based on our internal interviews; Andre, our developer persona; Eliza, our PR manager; Ada, the receptionist; and Mario, the studio consultant. These personas are meant to serve as guides as we design and develop MailChimp—who struggles with time and tasks? Who is quick to adopt advanced features?

We wanted to share these personas with the rest of the MailChimp crew in a way that’s easy to grasp at a glance. Our UX Director Aarron suggested we turn our personas into posters. Using tags from our interview analyses, Justin and Jason from DesignLab went to work and created posters that now adorn the walls of MailChimp HQ. They’re hanging right by the espresso machine, where people from around the office congregate. Our hope is that the posters get employees talking about our users and their needs over a cup of coffee.

Some of the descriptions we used on the posters raised a few eyebrows around the office. “Isn’t ‘inefficient’ a criticism?” “What’s up with ‘profiteer?’” We strived for honesty in creating our descriptions. Profiteer is not a judgement—we have users who want to make buckets of money. How can we help? Likewise, inefficient is not a criticism—we have customers who need more hours in the day and acknowledge they could be working smarter. What can we do for them?

We realize that personas aren’t representative of all MailChimp customers; instead, we think of these personas as a snapshot in time of common users, knowing that their shelf-life is limited. In the short term, these personas were a big influence on our redesign process: we thought more about how teams collaborate and how individuals work in a multi-screen world. The personas also influenced our UX research team. Our five personas are a good start, but sometimes they could be the same person on different days, or there might be enough space to warrant additional, feature-specific personas to add a bit of nuance. They’ll help guide us as we consider new features and functionality for MailChimp users. Now, instead of wondering who really uses MailChimp, we can ask more pointedly, “Who would use this feature?”

As 2012 drew to a close, we started to build a new design studio for MailChimp’s user experience, marketing, and DesignLab teams. Each group has a well defined domain: UX works on apps; marketing works on MailChimp.com; and DesignLab is the avant-garde, exploring new ways to push the boundaries of design. Though each team has a unique mandate and team leader, the lines between us have always been fuzzy. Our skills are complementary, and we’ve found we do our best work when we’re working together, saying “we” instead of “me.”

These are truths we’ve always known, but it wasn’t until we created a unified design studio that we realized just how dependent we are on one another. It turns out, redesigning our studio directly influenced our work on New MailChimp. A collaborative space helped us create more collaborative tools for our customers.

Creating collaborative spaces

Last summer I visited the Stanford d.school to give a guest lecture in Enrique Allen’s d.media class. Students were busy working on prototypes, gathering feedback, and iterating in the spirit of a startup.

During my lecture, chairs and couches scattered around the room supported an attentive audience. Afterwards, the furniture was rolled to the perimeter of the room, and small tables were rolled in for collaborative conversations about student work. I was struck by how the dynamic of the room and behavior of its occupants changed quickly and effortlessly.

As the class wrapped up, Scott Doorley, co-instructor of the course, gave me a copy of his book Make Space, which shares the methods for creating collaborative spaces. It turns out the flexibility of the classroom was no accident. Scott told me they’d been experimenting with ideas to both improve the learning experience in their program and teach students how to think more creatively through the design of spaces. He took me on a tour of the school, showing me spaces for ideation, productivity, and quiet reflection.

The experience changed the way I think about workspaces. The artifacts of creative thinking were plastered all over the walls and scattered throughout rooms. It was clear that ideation and collaboration were engrained in student work, not only through the design of the curriculum, but also because of the design of work spaces. The timing of my visit couldn’t have been better, because back home in Atlanta, our creative director Ron and marketing director Mark were hatching plans for a new, more unified design studio—just in time for us to get to work on New MailChimp.

Designing the MailChimp studio

Ron was already doing some research of his own, visiting startups and design spaces in the Southeast to collect ideas that might influence our studio plans. After much debate, we arrived at a core set of principles that shaped the design of our studio, and in turn how we collaborate.

1. Commingle and cross-pollinate 

Because collaboration was our central motivation for creating the new studio, we carefully considered the seating chart. Between our teams we have design researchers, writers, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, developers, and interaction designers. It’s a diverse set of skills and personalities that make up this creative soup.

We put everyone in a wide-open space. Rather than segregate the teams, we mixed people up. We looked for complementary skills and personalities then positioned accordingly. We put analytics people next to design researchers, UX front-end devs next to Marketing devs, and designers next to writers. Commingling cross-disciplinary people encourages us all to look at projects from different perspectives. Regardless of what we each do day in and day out, it’s all connected and it’s all equally important. This turned out to be invaluable during our redesign process. It started conversations that wouldn’t have happened with our old studio layout, which led to design and copy improvements throughout the new app.

2. Facilitate movement

Sitting still for hours on end not only atrophies muscles, it softens minds. We left desks open throughout the studio to let people move closer to the folks they need to collaborate with on their current project, or just to get a change of scenery. Open desks also provide a landing place for smart designers who pass through Atlanta and need a place to be productive. James Victore, Dan Benjamin, Brad Frost, and many more have dropped by our studio and claimed a spot for a few hours. We love the energy and ideas guests bring to the studio—it keeps us inspired.

Couches and standing tables in various parts of the studio let people work in different places rather than remaining tethered to a desk. They also make great spaces for people to work side-by-side and have design discussions.

As we work on big projects, like New MailChimp, we’ve even moved entire teams to new spaces. The UX front-end developers and UI designers have temporarily moved into a space next to the Engineering and Mobile Lab teams so they can closely coordinate and build new mobile and web apps. This arrangement made sense when small groups needed to buckle down and focus on the new design. Open spaces make this sort of dynamic, collaborative experience easy. Drop in a few desks, move your laptop and monitor, and get to work. When we launch New MailChimp, we’ll reconvene to get started on the next project.

3. Ideas everywhere

Ron visited The Iron Yard and CoWork in Greenville, South Carolina, and loved the polygal walls that both defined spaces and served as giant whiteboards. Polygal is a corrugated plastic that lets light through and works just like a whiteboard surface too. We borrowed that idea when we built our studio. When the tools are always at hand, people are more apt to draw out their ideas together for all to see. It’s a great way to encourage collaboration.

We combined the polygal idea with one we discovered at the Stanford d.school. The rolling racks you find near the dressing rooms at The Gap can easily be retrofitted to hold a sheet of polygal, creating a rolling whiteboard. We roll them in to define space for creative exploration, then move them into studio when it’s time to build out our ideas. If you visited the studio right now, you’d find giant walls and whiteboards showing workflows, assets, and design ideas for both the new app and website. Now that we’re in the final stages of the process, most meetings and impromptu conversations happen in front of those whiteboards.

4. Create convergence

To the side of the design studio we have a common space for eating lunch and chatting where we all converge throughout the day. The heart of this space is a fancy coffee bar where we craft caffeinated indulgences on a LaMarzocco Linea. Great coffee draws not only the designer crowd, but the entire company. We see engineers, accountants, support staff, and everyone in between at the espresso machine pulling shots, which provides occasion to ask what colleagues are up to.

Convergence points like this keep a company connected, as our design researcher Gregg Bernstein wrote in his recent UX Mag article. Conference rooms designed to feel like living rooms encourage lingering conversations that lead to deeper collaboration. We’ve found that expenditures on anything that encourages convergence quickly pay for themselves. We even hung our user personas on the wall in the coffee area, to encourage people across disciplines to think and talk about our customers and their needs. People from around the office are interested and invested in the new design—the project isn’t limited to the UX and design teams.

5. Create retreats

There are times when large open spaces with inspiring conversation and music can distract. We furnished a few offices near the design studio with desks and chairs to give people a quiet retreat should they need to have a private conversation or take a phone call. We intentionally kept these rooms spartan so no one takes up residence and disengages from the studio. We want to keep our teams working together in the same space, but adjust their workspace as needed to be as productive as possible.

Even fuzzier teams

It’s not hyperbole to say our new design studio has changed the way we work. Walls divide minds as much as space. When the UX, DesignLab and marketing teams were in divided spaces, we worked more independently, collaborating only sometimes. These days, the lines are so fuzzy that visitors would have a hard time differentiating between teams.

Cross-disciplinary discussion is a daily occurrence now. Writers talk to interaction designers, photographers talk to design researchers. We’re all talking to each other and making our best work because of it. Research, words, pixels, and code blend effortlessly in open, collaborative environments. We’ve always known that making the best digital products requires a deep synthesis of skills, but now we’re living it.

And best of all, designing our new space helped us understand the value of collaboration, and it shed some light on things that were missing from our app. After talking to our customers, researching the way they work, and reconsidering our own workflow, we realized that we weren’t facilitating collaboration enough inside the app. So we added collaboration tools like comments inside the editor, real-time feedback, and multi-user accounts to better meet our customers’ needs.

A version of this post originally appeared in the MailChimp UX newsletter. You can subscribe right here.

As this feature is rolled out to all Gmail inboxes over the coming weeks, you should start to see a new “Activate Your Account” or “Confirm Subscription” button accompanying the email in your Gmail inbox. We’re including all of the necessary information behind the scenes automatically, so there aren’t any additional steps you’ll need to take to activate the feature. So now, when a new subscriber signs up, maybe even through the Twitter Lead Generation Card, confirmation is a breeze. The only thing the subscriber has to do is click the “Confirm Subscription” button, and they’re all set.

The technical details behind this feature are pretty straightforward. Gmail uses a schema to tell the Inbox Action button what to do and how to present the information. The thing that’s got us really excited is that these schemas are based on open standards. This means that potentially any other email client could adopt the same technology, and we could eventually see these Inbox Actions across multiple platforms.

If you’re not currently seeing this feature in your Gmail account, hang tight! They’re slowly rolling out an updated Gmail to all of their users (including Google Apps accounts). For more information on Gmail schemas and Inbox Actions, check out the official Gmail blog.

New MailChimp shows edits in real time, so you don’t have to wait for your co-workers or clients to sign out in order to make changes. Our new feedback options make it easy to exchange comments and get approval before sending a campaign, and you can resolve comments as you go. Here’s a look at our new collaboration features:

Hooray for teamwork! If you’d like to see more previews of what’s coming, check out our other New MailChimp posts.

Our Connect Directory features several eCommerce integrations that, when paired with our enhanced autoresponder features, make this type of engagement with your customers easy. Chimpified and MageMonkey (among others) allow users to subscribe during the checkout process and take advantage of MailChimp’s eCommerce360 functionality. With the data these integrations pass to MailChimp, you can segment your subscribers (and trigger autoresponders) based on a variety of factors, including purchase date, amount spent, and items purchased. Plus, thanks to a significant upgrade to Vextras Postmaster app, Volusion users can now take advantage of these features too. With Postmaster, customers who complete a purchase in your Volusion store will be added to a specific MailChimp list for continuing the conversation.

Getting Set Up

After setting up your Vextras account, there are only two things to do to get the ball rolling: connecting to your 1) Volusion store and 2) your MailChimp account. To get started, from the Vextras dashboard, click the Store tab. Vextras will need some basic information, including store name (if you have multiple stores, you’ll want to give it a recognizeable name), URL, email address, and Volusion API Key.

After you’ve connected your Volusion store to Postmaster, you’ll want to connect MailChimp. To get set up with MailChimp, go to the Apps tab from the Vextras dashboard and choose the Postmaster option. Vextras will then prompt you to log in with your MailChimp username and password to connect the account. Because Postmaster connects to a MailChimp account with OAuth2 (which is a fancy way of saying “with your username and password”), only account users with the “Admin” or “Manager” role will be able to connect in the account using this integration.

The last step is to pick the list to which your new Volusion customers will be added. From the Lists dropdown, choose a list to connect with and click Apply to finalize the connection process.

Adding New MailChimp Subscribers

When everything is connected, the Postmaster app will take care of all of the details automatically. When a customer purchases a plaid shirt, not only will Volusion send over the customer’s email address, first name, and last name, it will also send over the purchase information for that transaction, including total spent, per-item price, and the name of the item(s) purchased.

As an added bonus, because Postmaster uses MailChimp’s OAuth2 connection, you can also track and segment which subscribers have come from your Volusion store. Postmaster will include a signup source in the subscriber’s profile.

Autoresponders and Targeted Campaigns

Having information about your subscribers is always preferable, but information is only as good as your ability to act on it. With our autoresponder feature, you can send targeted, automated emails to anyone who’s made a recent purchase in your store. Using autoresponders, you can set up anything from a “thank you” email to a coupon for your customer’s next purchase.

When creating a new autoresponder, you’ll be prompted to pick a trigger for the campaign. One of the options is “any purchase recorded.” That means when subscribers have e-commerce information added to their profiles, this can potentially trigger an autoresponder to send to them within the hour (or any designated amount of time thereafter).

We can also turn that idea completely on its head. What if a subscriber hasn’t purchased from your Volusion store in a while? Using autoresponders, you can invite them to revist your store with a campaign set to send three months after their last purchase. Only subscribers who haven’t made a purchase in that timeframe will recieve the re-engagement campaign.

If you’re curious about setting up autoresponders based on e-commerce data, check out Neil’s blog post for an in-depth look at the process.

Lastly, let’s say that you add a new item to your store that would complement that plaid shirt, like a black driver’s hat. Using MailChimp’s segmenting, you can drill down to the subscribers who purchased the shirt, and send a targeted email to just those folks, letting them know about the hat.

Check out Postmaster for Volusion in our Integrations Directory.

(Was that inappropriate? Hmm, moving on…)

You can think of engagement-based routing as a reward for high member ratings. If you’re not familiar, member rating is the five-star metric that balances a subscriber’s open and click data with your sending frequency. Behind the scenes, this scale is based on something called activity score. That’s going to be important later, so you may want to read up on it.

Now for the fun part. Every time you send a campaign, MailChimp looks through the list and pulls out your biggest fans. These subscribers have proven how much they love your content, and they deserve some special treatment, right? We move them to the front of the list and route their emails to special engagement-based IPs. We have two tiers of these special IPs, and we call them “Active” and “Halo” to describe how good the traffic is.

Why does routing matter? Sometimes an ISP sees a lot of bounces or spam complaints, so they temporarily throttle an IP. They can even block an IP for a few hours. However, engaged subscribers don’t bounce and they rarely hit the “spam” button, so IPs that only send engaged traffic don’t have to worry about that stuff. Also, we purposefully under-utilize Active and Halo IPs, so your email goes out as quickly as possible—even during peak hours.

Curious about what it takes to send over an Active or Halo IP? Here’s the actual breakdown between IP tier, activity score, and member rating:

(There, that felt appropriate.)

As you can see, we’re a tad strict about our engagement-based routing. Even some five-star subscribers don’t go out over Halos. Using activity scores to determine engagement gives us the fine-tuned control we need. It may look strict, but as it turns out, 18% of our traffic is engaged enough to receive this special attention. So why don’t we lower the thresholds and let more email go over Halos and Actives? For a few reasons, actually.

First, having rigorous standards for our high-engagement IPs ensures they have the best possible reputation with the ISPs to which you’re delivering. Second, it’s important we send really good traffic over all our IPs. Makes sense, right? Every new subscriber starts out with no engagement, so we need to make sure all of our IPs adhere to MailChimp’s high standards. Finally, if we scoop away all the good traffic, we’d leave those normal IPs susceptible to the occasional bad apple.

In the course of a day, most traffic to two- and three-star subscribers is perfectly fine. But every now and then one of our users slips up and sends some questionable content to a questionable list. Without a little good traffic to provide balance, one bad apple could singlehandedly tank an IP’s reputation. By keeping three- and some four-star traffic in the “normal” zone, we’re giving Omnivore time to find the bad apples without endangering new subscribers for no reason.

Overall, engagement-based routing is one of many small optimizations we make behind the scenes. It’s not going to make or break your campaign, but if you have engaged subscribers, you’re kind of making it on your own anyway. This is just a free upgrade to first class.

But as Dropcam Marketing Manager David Corea quickly learned, not everyone is ready to drop three digits on a camera without a little convincing. Which is where the company’s MailChimp list comes in. Dropcam does quite a bit of segmenting, and has used autoresponders to turn potential customers into actual ones. “We’ve learned a significant amount from the experimentation we’ve been able to do with MailChimp,” David says. “Email is an effective marketing channel and a great way to help people learn about our product, ultimately converting them into users of it.”

We asked David to elaborate on the ways Dropcam…

…reduces irrelevance by segmenting:

“We had an app update that was a really big deal for people on iPhones. I was able to pull out all the folks from our user base that use iOS in some fashion and alert them to this app update they’d been waiting for. It was the easiest thing to do thanks to the ability to pull out specific interests and segment on that. So everyone who’s an iPhone user is in the iOS email segment. We didn’t have to upset any Android users by telling everyone to check out the update.”

…gets free, positive publicity from its biggest fans:

“Whenever we deal with someone who’s had a really great experience and they contact our support team and share a testimonial or a great story, we keep that address in a specific list. We segment those folks because we want to be able to reach out to them in the future and ask for product reviews on the internet. We’ll send an email to those folks and ask them to review us on Amazon or in the Google Merchant Center. We know we can expect great reviews from these people. It’s always great to know who our evangelizers are, and MailChimp makes it so easy.”

…and educates and converts prospective buyers with autoresponders:

“What I realized was that not everyone wants to buy a $149 gadget right off the bat, but they’re willing to learn more about it. Email is a really, really strong platform for us in driving sales and awareness in general. Our email list is our main method of communication to all of our user base. We find that most folks react best to email. So, when people would reach the landing page [set up with Unbounce, augmented with Ad Words], we didn’t ask them to buy a camera. We wanted them to learn more. So we put an email signup on the page, and the autoresponders would take care of nurturing the lead for us. We wouldn’t have to do any follow-ups. One hundred percent of the people who signed up converted after three autoresponders. It was mind blowing. A hundred percent of the people who signed up for information from us converted. It was the email that was really doing the job.”

And now, thanks to our recent integration with CASH Music, a nonprofit, open-source tool for musicians, we have another. By integrating your MailChimp list with a CASH account, you can seamlessly deliver fans a download of your choosing (song, EP, video, wallpaper?) whenever they sign up for your MailChimp list. Think of it as a “thank you” to your fans for permission to visit their inboxes when you have a new album announcement or concert.

At this point, you might be wondering why you should make an extra effort when you can just attach an MP3 to a campaign or use MailChimp’s autoresponder feature to deliver a song after a new subscriber signs up. Well, for starters, attachments aren’t permitted in MailChimp campaigns for a host of reasons that ensure your email makes it safely to your intended recipients. And while our autoresponders could deliver a hosted download linked in the campaign, there are a few problems with that method. First, the link in the autoresponders won’t be unique, so a fan could forward that email and link as many times as she likes. And while our autoresponders can deliver a particular email after a triggered action within the hour, there’s no way to deliver that email instantaneously. By using our CASH Music integration, you can deliver a song or other media file to a specific email address through a unique URL immediately after that person signs up for your  MailChimp list, alleviating the need for attachments or autoresponders altogether.

With the help of CASH’s simple mode, available in the public beta of their hosted version, if you’ve got a MailChimp account and five minutes to spare, you can set up your own email-for-download campaign. CASH isn’t just for musicians, either. The platform works well with all types of media. If you’re an author or filmmaker, CASH’s email-for-download feature could be a good tool to use in tandem with MailChimp. Sign up for a free CASH account here, and if you need a little help, check out the video tutorial below.  Looking for more ways MailChimp can help musicians? Check out the MailChimp for Music guide.

As of May 22, Twitter is offering a new type of promoted tweet: Lead Generation Cards. The card takes a promoted tweet and makes it actionable. By clicking on the call to action, Twitter automatically and securely sends the email address associated with a Twitter account through the MailChimp double opt-in process.

This integration will only work for managed Twitter users with a Twitter Ads account. From within your Twitter Ads dashboard, click on Advertising in the navigation bar and set up a new Card. Twitter allows you to completely customize your Lead Generation Card’s text, image, and call to action button.

To connect to your Lead Generation Card to your MailChimp account, navigate to your Lists dashboard in MailChimp and choose the list you’d like to connect. From within your list’s overview page, choose List Tools, and click on our new Integrations link.

From the signup form’s integration page, you’ll want to grab two pieces of information: Your Twitter Subscribe URL and the unique ID associated with your list.

From your Twitter account, make sure that the HTTP Request method is set to “POST” (that should be the default), and then paste in your Twitter Subscribe URL into the Submit URL field. Twitter also requires you to include a link to your website’s privacy policy before you can continue.

Now that you’ve got the subscribe URL in place, you need to add your list’s ID. Twitter will send certain information to MailChimp automatically, but they also allow you to add your own hidden fields. To connect your list’s ID to the Twitter Lead Generation Card, click to create a new Hidden Field. Use id for the Key, and your list-specific MailChimp ID for the Value.

With that information, Twitter users who see your promoted tweet will be able to sign up for your list directly through Twitter. And as an added bonus, every person who signs up using this method will be tagged with “Twitter” in your MailChimp account.

Now that you’re collecting new subscribers via Twitter, you can follow-up with them in a number of ways depending on your needs.

Engaging Your New Subscribers

Once you’ve identified those new subscribers, you can:

• Bring them up to speed right away with an autoresponder campaign that educates them about your product or service over the course of one or several emails.
• Schedule a “thank you” autoresponder to go out within the first hour after signup with a special gift or offer. Do you have a brick and mortar location? Maybe Pyow (our QR code generator) might fit the bill?
• Send a Gather sign up form to Twitter signups about an event you’re running to make sure you’ll be able to communicate last-minute changes and news about the event.
• Dig a little deeper and send targeted emails to those who’ve purchased a particular product (as tracked by eCommerce360) and also signed up via the Twitter LeadGen cards.

These are just a few of the many flexible jumping off points that you can take advantage of when collecting subscribers in this new and convenient way.

We’ve already seen the Lead Generation Card in action, too! Check out @NewRelic’s tweet:

What?? Free New Relic and a Free shirt? That’s right, we’re giving away both of those right now: cards.twitter.com/cards/98spr/1o

— NewRelic (@newrelic) May 22, 2013

For more on Lead Generation Cards, visit the Twitter Ads blog.