We’ve created a little “chiclet” that you can add to your website that shows off how many subscribers you have on your list (actually, there are 4 different chiclet designs to choose from).
Just add a little snippet of JavaScript code to your web page, and we’ll display an automatically updating count of your subscribers.
You’ll find the code snippets under your /lists/ tab ==> design signup forms and response emails ==> “integration code” area. While we were at it, we created a special merge tag that you can insert into your email campaigns that shows how many subscribers you have. So you can say stuff like, “Wow, this newsletter has *|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|* members!” We’ll insert that merge tag with your current list count. There’s actually a PLEH-thora of new merge tags we just launched, which you can find in the new “advanced merge tag reference” described here.
Update: Several more different styles of chiclets have been added:
Honestly, I’m not sure if I like this one. It puts too much focus on the size of the list. I’ve see time and time again that when this size is the focus, the quality suffers. We need to focus on the customer relationship and experience. If that is sound, the subscribers will come.
@Jonathan – The assumption here is that, so long as sound list management practices are in place (cleaning unsubs, spam complaints, bounces, etc), and so long as a sender only practices permission-based email marketing, then having a large list is a direct result of having a good customer relationship and experience.
I like the Chiclets, but I wish there was one without the MailChimp branding. Don’t get me wrong — you guys deserve all the credit you can get — but I’d like my users to just see me as the owner, manager and yes, even, the “power” behind the mailing list they are thinking of joining as opposed to a third party.
It’s for much of the same reasons that I like that MailChimp chooses NOT to include their branding in the emails it sends out on my behalf. For better or for worse, when it comes to my interactions with my potential customers, I just want it to be about us.
Just my 2 cents…
This is nice, but could you add a feature where you can enter a multiplier that the actual numbers will be multiplied by? A small, randomly changing prime number should be subtracted from the total to avoid numbers that look suspicious.
Interesting, but I’m not sure that I’d want this. There’s one part that wants to brag and say how big our list is but then there is another part of me that doesn’t want to divulge that number to competitors…
This will bring up some discussions internally I’m sure.
Craig – It’s definitely not for everyone. But it’s quite nice if you’re an email “publication” that also sells advertising (like Smashing). This is a case where you want everyone to know your “circulation.”
Would also be nice if the chicklet is incorporated in an image we can add it as a image in the email signature! (such as Feedburner has for rss feeds a dynamic GIF see for example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/modation-online-marketing.gif
This is no good. I want a way to just retrieve the number itself and style in my website in a way I see fit. This is not useful at all.
Agreed. That’s what I want as well as the ability to have it show a segment.
Indeed! Please provide us with some code (like PHP) to display only the number of subscribers. Not only the styling is important, but also the text ‘subscribers’. I don’t want that English word on a Dutch site. That’s looks odd and is not really pro looking.
A good example is this WordPress snippet that displays the number of fans.
My website has a dark background and none of the chiclet styles displays well (“powered by MailChimp” area bleeds). Could you either provide a styling for dark backgrounds or make more of the existing styles use transparency? Thanks!
Is there a way to embed the chiclet on my sign up form?
I see others have already asked, but since it was a while ago, I thought I’d pose the question again…
Is there a way to display the subscriber count in text only, without chiclets?
We’ve done that for inside campaigns:
*|LIST:COUNT|*
but not for signup pages. Will ask around if we can do it.
Love this,
but would it be possible to change the word “subscribers” into another word?
Our native language isnt English.
If you’re wanting to add the subscriber count to your email campaigns, we have a merge tag that only displays the number, w/no text. So you can drop the number in anywhere:
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|*
If you’re wanting to do this for your website, I’ll ask if we can build a “number only” chiclet. Thanks!
Hi there, thanks for the response!
It for my mailing form on the website indeed, could you reply to this message if it gets realised? Thats the only way I would know. Thank you.
I just wanted to put in my vote for the ability to pull just the subscriber count as plain text for my web site.
I’d love to have the same think..
Still no good, can’t we just have a simple way to pull the number of subscribers, using PHP, for display on a webpage?
I’ve passed the suggestion (for number-only-chiclet) on to our team. Thanks!
Hi Ben,
do you have news ?
Thanks
Hi Simon (and all), in v6, which we released Monday, we created a version of the chiclet that displays number only. It’s a JavaScript snippet that you can embed on your websites, like: “See why over __snippet__ are subscribed to the Acme Newsletter…”
Hi Ben,
Where can we find that chiclet ?
Thanks,
Hi ! Is there any way to display the ciclet without Javascript, i.e. on a sign up page ?
Choosing JS isn’t very handy because it forces the browser to load the JS function *before* the rest of the page. If the chiclet is displayed in your sidebar, it’s quite embarrassing when your browser waits until the JS has loaded before displaying the footer…
Ideal solution would be : display the number of subscribers as plain HTML, through the Mailchimp API.
Your list count can, in fact, be directly pulled from our API. But you can still run into the same problem that you’re running into — sometimes, grabbing data can be slow. Speed is relative, and we think our API is pretty fast, given what it’s built for (grabbing your MailChimp data, integrating it with CRMs or whatever). But when you embed stuff on a website, and page load times are at stake, that’s different. So what we recommend to API users (and what we do ourselves for some things) is to pull the data you want from the API, then cache it. Then, pull from that cache. You need the coding chops to do that. For those who don’t, inline JS is the easiest, most universal way to drop stuff like this into websites. One trick you could try is loading the JS into some other page, then loading that iframe into your sidebar instead. I’ll admit though that this is getting awfully close to just circling back around to the original chiclet modules.
Hello,
It would be great if this chiclet would validate for XHTML. Currently, ampsersands are not escaped, causing it to fail validation at validator.w3.org.