Every 4 weeks, we add new features to MailChimp. This release (v6.9 for those keeping track) is kind of head-sploding:

Here are some details…

 

 

Drag and Drop Image Editor

We’re working on totally revamping our content editor in MailChimp. Our first step in that direction is this all new image editor. You can now just drag and drop images from your desktop into MailChimp:

and they get uploaded. No need to hit the “browse…upload” button! (but that’s still available for people who prefer that). There’s also an all new image gallery that’s been designed to make file management a lot easier. For starters, there’s a very spiffy, fast new search tool to help you sift through all those images you’ve uploaded over the years:

A more detailed post will go live soon, where we talk about everything that’s new in this image gallery.

Aviary Integration

We worked with the awesome guys at Aviary to build a much more customized image editing interface than our old one w/Picnik (and just in time, as it turns out). You can now crop, resize, rotate, and enhance your images right inside MailChimp:

This is using some new API tricks from Aviary, and we really want to thank them for helping with this. When I write my newsletters, the worst part is always when I have to stop and edit an image. I have to open up Photoshop or Fireworks, resize, crop, and upload. Hate it. Now, the experience is fast and seamless. I love Photoshop, but I hate waiting for it to open when I just want to finish an email.

Reports: Filter by list

Under the Reports tab, there’s a nice, big graph showing your open and click rates over time. This is nice if you only manage one email list. But if you have tons of different lists and lots of different campaigns, this graph becomes totally useless, because all your stats get jumbled into one big timeline:

Some of those lists up there are 10 years old, while some are only one year old. Not quite apples to apples.

So we added the option to sort that graph by list:

This should make things more sane for you.

 

Mooore Templaaaaates!

If you haven’t noticed by now, every 4 weeks we add a set of beautiful new HTML email templates to our gallery. We add so many, we sometimes forget to mention the darn things (ahem, next year you should totally check out those new Valentine’s Day templates).

This release, we’ve added some templates for sports (30 in all):

 

Some templates for school announcements:

 

and templates for iPhone and iPad app developers:

Don’t forget these templates are all designed to be fairly flexible. You can tweak colors and logos and graphics to better match your own brand. And since our template selection is growing like tribbles, we’ve had to re-organize the template gallery to include sub-categories (look under Holidays).

 

Target by default language

You can now send targeted emails based on your recipients’ default language:

This makes it easier to write custom-translated email campaigns for your customers (consider using our Straker integration).

 

Target by email client

You can also send targeted campaigns to people based on what email app they use (this is pulled from our user-agent stats):

So you can send campaigns designed specifically for people who use, say, mobile email clients, or get specific and target Blackberry users, or Postbox users. Related: MailChimp and Media Queries

Browse member profiles

Let’s say you launch a cool new app, and you get a flood of new subscribers who want to know more about it. You’re probably very interested in who those people are. You just want to sit back and browse your list to learn more about these early adopters and promoters. You care more about who those people are than you care about opens and clicks. MailChimp never had a really easy way to let you browse through your list and “meet” your subscribers, one by one. So we added little “next” and “previous” buttons. Very simple, but very powerful:

I’ve been using this and it’s great. I’ll browse my list and see an interesting gravatar (did you know we pull gravatars in for your subsribers?). When SocialPro is activated, I can see their klout score.  Or I can view their public twitter timeline. If they’re someone I think is a VIP, I mark them as a “Golden Monkey” like this:

 

 

which will then automatically sync up with my Golden Monkeys iPhone app, and send me push alerts if/whenever they engage with my emails.

There are more head-sploding features to discuss, but we’ll wait to post detailed tutorials later this week. Enjoy!