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.

• We have 1.2 million users in 158 countries. That’s quite a growth curve since going freemium in 2009 w/100k users.
• Those MailChimp users upload an average 472,000 images per day.
• We serve about 115 million of those images per day (using about 3.5TB of daily bandwidth)
• Currently, we run MailChimp on 117 servers. 134 total, counting all our different services and products.
• We send between 80-100 million emails per day (using 3.29TB of bandwidth per day)
• Our servers track an average 20,305,881 email opens per day.
• We track over 4 million clicks per day

Who: Baratunde Thurston 

What: A comedian and writer who loves politics and technology

Where: Brooklyn

Why we love him: Baratunde Thurston wears many hats. He co-founded a political blog, wrote a book, hosted a show on Discovery Science, currently serves as The Onion‘s Director of Digital, and lives on Twitter (where he says hilarious things on a regular basis). It’s kind of unbelievable, actually, how much he does. But expressing himself is clearly important to Thurston, and he’s found plenty of avenues for that so far. Here’s to loving what you do, even if that means doing a dozen different things.

Sign up for Baratunde Thurston’s newsletter.

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.

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

Customizing Video Merge Tags

In the past, whenever we generated the thumbnail of your video, we added a border. In many cases, we also added the video’s star ratings, number of likes, number of views, and other “flair.” Now, you can take all that away and leave it barebones. Here’s an example:

On the left is how this Youtube video is embedded into your MailChimp campaigns by default. On the right is how it looks when we customize the video merge tag like this:

* |YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXX, $max_width=250, $title=N, $border=N, $trim_border=N, $ratings=N, $views=N]| *

You can tweak Wistia, Vzaar, Blip and Vimeo movies as well. Here’s the full documentation for that.

Automatically Converting Videos

These merge tags are cool, but where they really come in handy is in your RSS-to-email campaigns. For example, you can subscribe to receive daily emails from the MailChimp blog (ahem, signup form over in the right column). Our system checks my RSS feed every morning at 10am (that’s when I decided to schedule them) and if it finds new content, it pulls it into a MailChimp campaign. From time to time, I embed videos in my blog posts. I knew those videos would break when they got emailed, but I wasn’t about to modify the way I blog so that the email would work better. On the blog, the blog experience is what matters most.

Anyway, now I can just set my RSS-to-email campaign so that any embedded video it detects will be automatically converted into a video merge tag.

1. Open RSS-to-email campaign

First, I open the smart folder that shows all my RSS-to-email campaigns:

2. Pause campaign to edit

Next, click on “MailChimp Blog Updates” and then I get a list of all the recent blog updates that have been sent. The top one is the “source file” I need to modify:

3. Activate video conversion

Go to step 3 of the campaign builder:

and you’ll see all the different campaign setup and tracking options. In the lower right of the screen, look for “Content Controls” and check the box to autoconvert videos:

Hey, if you’re tinkering around with your RSS campaigns, this might be a good time to tweak your delivery time. Ages ago, when we launched RSS-to-email, we didn’t have the ability to pick a time or frequency. We’ve since added more control, so you might want to go to Step 1 and take a look at the options:

4. Save and re-activate the RSS campaign

Now that the video control option is set, click “Save & Exit” and you’ll be prompted to re-activate the RSS campaign:

Moving forward, any embedded videos we detect in your campaigns will be automatically converted to an email-safe format.

By the way, this automatic video conversion option works on regular MailChimp campaigns, too.

Related, IMHO:

• Build Your Own Content Digest With MailChimp – a tutorial we found by Jesse Rand
• We’ve launched tons of new email templates in recent months, many of which would be perfect for RSS-to-email campaigns. Check them out in the template gallery.
• If you’re a blogger, you probably have some VIPs on your list whose engagement you monitor closely. Our Golden Monkeys app can help with that. Get a push notification to your smartphone if/when a special someone opens your campaigns. Every time my blog post gets sent, my VIPs open and monkeys start screaming from my pocket. No better validation for writers than screaming monkeys.
• Other MailChimp features we think bloggers might like
• I’m often asked (usually by bloggers) for tools that can connect them to similar bloggers out there, so that they can promote each other and help each other grow their lists. Here ya go: Introducing Wavelength

Who: Ernest Alexander 

What: A men’s clothing and accessories label

Where: New York

Why we love them: Durability is in the details of every item Ernest Alexander makes, from the strap of a messenger bag to the stitching on the back of a wool necktie. Founder and creative director Ernest Sabine (his middle name is Alexander) obsesses over craftmanship. His grandmother and great-grandmother were seamstresses, so manufacturing is in his blood—and that comes across in everything his company creates.

Sign up for Ernest Alexander’s newsletter.

Schecter remains a pretty small business, currently employing just more than 40 people. So when it was named the official sponsor of the Uproar Festival, a month-and-a-half long trek that took 10 bands all over the United States and Canada, they recognized an opportunity to attract some new customers. But they still needed a manageable solution for their staff. “We knew gathering user data would be key on the road, but were unsure just how we were going to do it,” Schecter Vice President Marc LaCorte told MailChimp in our recent feature case study. “It had to be simple and easy, not only for our employees onsite, but also to encourage people to interact with us. We hoped to find an iPad app that would fit this need without much configuration. As luck would have it, Chimpadeedoo was sitting there on the MailChimp site, waiting for us to implement! As soon as I saw it, all my worries were calmed.”

Here’s the Chimpadeedoo skin Schecter created for Uproar:

Not bad, right? With a couple iPads all Chimpadeedoo’d and ready for action, Schecter hit the road, opting in fans to the company’s newsletter, and entering those same concert goers into weekly guitar giveaways. Here’s what the line to sign up looked like at an average tour stop…

…and here’s one of Schecter’s giveaways, the iPad setups, and some scary band t-shirts:

The Schecter folks created a list for the tour, picked the winners when the trip was finished, and shipped a bunch of guitars. The results? Well, they rocked. Schecter grew its email list by more than 22,000 users over the course of 32 dates, which averages out to almost 700 subscribers per stop! LaCorte was pretty pleased about all this. “Our lives were made simple thanks to Chimpadeedoo and MailChimp,” he says.

Additional resources:

Chimpadeedoo feature page

Chimpadeedoo on the iTunes App Store

Chimpadeedoo on the MailChimp blog

That tool would analyze your list, then scour the vast database of MailChimp customers, looking for similar publishers to recommend. But this idea has been on the back burner for years, because such a tool would require 1) a vast database of MailChimp customers, and 2) the ability to analyze it–fast. Well, going freemium back in 2009 kinda helped with requirement #1. We’re at 1.2 million users, and manage over 800 million email subscribers for them all. And launching our Email Genome Project helped with requirement #2.

Helloooooo, serendipity. Finally, we have all the pieces we need to build Wavelength: a MailChimp service that uses a massive amount of email data to help you find publishers who share something in common with you:

Wavelength doesn’t help you send a promotion to another list, and it definitely doesn’t give you other lists or email addresses. It simply shows you screenshots of other newsletters that some of your subscribers read. The goal is to help you contact those publishers and maybe form a relationship with each other. Ideally, you can link to each other and help each other grow your lists organically.

How Wavelength Works

Basically, Wavelength analyzes your MailChimp list, then compares it to all other MailChimp lists (really, really fast). It looks for subscriber overlap, then recommends similar publishers by showing you screenshots of the email campaigns they’ve sent.

For example, let’s say I own a local pub, and I’d like to find some email newsletter publishers in town to partner with.

I’d go to Wavelength:

and authorize it to connect with my MailChimp account:

Wavelength will ask me which list to analyze, and it’ll ask for some descriptive tags for that list:

Then, it starts thinking:

It usually takes under 20 seconds to compare a list with about 1 million other lists containing 800 million emails.

And in order to deliver the results really fast, we pre-generated over 3 million campaign screenshots in the system (#NBD, as the kids tweet).

Once the analysis is complete, I get screenshots of email newsletters that my customers are also interested in.

They’re listed in order of “similarity” (subscriber overlap):

As one tester put it, this is where you meet all your “email cousins.”

From here, I can drill down to see an archive of past campaigns by each publisher, and then subscribe to any of their lists.

See your subscribers, and maybe even yourself, in a new light

The example scenario above is very typical for what we’ve been finding in our initial tests. You’d think that other local pubs would be listed first, but you’re more likely to find local theaters, beer-related iPhone apps, local coffee shops, etc.

When I ran my various MailChimp lists through Wavelength, I expected to see mostly email marketing or design related results. Instead, I saw that my customers subscribe to newsletters about social marketing tools, CRMs, content management systems, productivity apps, design publications, and newsletters about company culture and innovation.

Here’s a snippet of my newsletter’s wavelength:

But what’s really fun is when I manage different lists in Wavelength, I get some different results. For example, we manage a list that talks about our various giveaways (t-shirts, monkey hats, plushies, etc) that I think is mostly composed of very loyal (and obviously very stylish) MailChimp fans, and the Wavelength for that list looks like this:

Yet another list I set up for an event we hosted in London had a Wavelength like this:

which actually gives me some ideas for other international events to sponsor.

When’s this available?

We plan to open up access to Wavelength in about a month. Why the wait? Well, it scans our system for what it perceives to be public email campaigns, and it makes an attempt to exclude any email campaigns that it thinks are “private” (I’ll explain what that means below). But instead of just relying on algorithms to tell us what to exclude, we thought it’d be good to let our customers manually exclude themselves. We want to give you plenty of time to do that.

Public vs. private email campaigns

MailChimp was built for email marketing, which is an inherently public activity. So what in the world should be considered a “private” campaign, and why would someone use MailChimp to send one?

Usually, it’s an internal company newsletter, or a wedding invitation, or a one-time prize notification or transactional kind of message.  The information in the email is not usually super private or sensitive (email is just not an extremely private medium), but it might be something that you don’t exactly want promoted, or something with expired content. Wavelength will almost always exclude these, because it won’t search lists that were only imported manually, it won’t include tiny lists or fresh new lists, and it won’t show campaigns sent to a segment of a list. For a campaign to be shown in Wavelength, its recipient list must be greater than 200 members, and show signs of being public. Namely, opt-ins were received from its public signup form, or the campaign archive bar (that thingy with all the social sharing buttons) is activated.

But if you want, you can manually override everything, and totally exclude your list from Wavelength searches.

For example, I have my list where customers can sign up for a chance to win a t-shirt. For some reason, I just don’t want this to show up in Wavelength results. Maybe the t-shirt designs are top secret prototypes or something. For that list, I can go to “Publicity Settings:”

And then mark its campaigns as private:

You’ll notice that while we were at it, we combined two other previously released features that have publicity and privacy options (the archive toolbar and the subscriber count chiclets). We figured it’d be nice to consolidate everything in one place.

Using data to make email better

Wavelength is a project I’m happy to finally see the light of day, but we’ve only just begun. In 2011 we brought on a server/devops guy to help us handle all this “big data” and we hired an internal data scientist to analyze that data (here’s some fun stuff he’s found). We’re already heavily using EGP behind the scenes here to prevent abuse and protect the email ecosystem. For example, about a year ago, a hacker stole someone’s identity to create a MailChimp account, then used it to send spam (one reason we’ve added so many security features to MailChimp, and why we make free 2-factor security apps like AlterEgo). After that incident, we analyzed their list and found other accounts that had lists very closely matching the hacker’s:

The “evil doer” is in the center, with similar lists surrounding (users’ names obviously have been obfuscated). See any common theme here? What we found was fascinating. Some of the “similar” accounts were legit users, and some appeared to be accounts that the hackers were in the midst of setting up. But this kind of graph raises questions like, “Why are they all London arts / entertainment organizations? Did they initially steal their list from some London theater? Or did they all scrape their lists from the same source?”  We’re also able to test incoming new accounts for the presence of stolen/purchased/scraped lists (based on data we’ve accumulated from accounts we’ve shut down for abuse), with the goal of keeping our system clean and our deliverability high (and also, you know–protecting email). And most exciting of all (to an email nerd like me), we can use what we’ve learned while fighting abuse to build cool new features like Wavelength that help us improve our email marketing. Who knew math could be so useful?

To be notified when Wavelength goes live, sign up to this list.

For general announcements about our Email Genome Project, subscribe here.

Related reading:

• Fun with data science (and dendrograms): http://blog.mailchimp.com/fun-with-data-science/
• Slightly scary: What happens to email typos? http://blog.mailchimp.com/comacast-and-gmai-all-your-typo-email-are-belong-to-us/
• Pesky tweets from scantily clad fembots: http://blog.mailchimp.com/dealing-with-tweets-from-scantily-clad-fembots/
• MailChimp’s Email Genome Project: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimps-email-genome-project/

This is a good solution for some of our customers, but not all of them. For example, many of our customers want to offer a free guide or white paper as an incentive to opt-in to their email list or as a reward for their loyal subscribers. But, they may be selling the paper or guide to their general audience. They need a way to send unique, restricted download links just to their email subscribers.

Other customers want their file attachments to reach as many people as possible, but they also want to keep track of who’s downloading the file and who’s forwarding it on to more people. They might want to send a personal thank you to their biggest supporters, the ones who helped spread the word the most.

Digioh is an online service that makes sending digital files to your MailChimp subscribers fast, easy and secure thanks to their new MailChimp integration. In fact, over 10,000 files have already been downloaded and tracked by MailChimp subscribers using the integration.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Go to digioh.com/mailchimp
Step 2: Create an account (you’ll only need to enter your email and a password to get signed up)
Step 3: Upload your file & select your file security level
Step 4: Paste the secure link that Digioh provides you into your MailChimp newsletter

Want to offer a free download to people who subscribe to your mailing list? Just paste your secure link into your welcome email in MailChimp and you’re good to go.

After you send out your newsletter you can log in to Digioh to monitor how many times your file has been downloaded, who downloaded it, and who forwarded your file on (if you decide to allow non-subscribers to download your file).

For more information on Digioh or to sign up for an account, visit digioh.com/mailchimp.