There’s a page in MailChimp that gets no love.

And it’s a real shame, because it’s packed full of really awesome, obscure, and advanced tools.

It’s called the “List Tools” page:

and here’s all the cool stuff you’ll find there…

Tracking Archive Page Traffic

Every MailChimp campaign you send gets a free campaign archive version that we host on our servers. Since we’re hosting them, you may be wondering how you can track visits to that page. If you’re using Google Analytics, here’s how to do that.

Email Your Content to MailChimp

Ever wish you could just use your favorite email program (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail,  etc) to create an email campaign, then forward it to MailChimp to stick it into a newsletter template? Yeah, you can do that. We call that feature the “Email Beamer” (here’s a quick demo video). It’s really handy if you send emails from a mobile device, or if you like using Apple Mail’s built-in stationery. Get your list’s secret email address from the List Tools page:

Webhooks for MailChimp!

Webhooks are really awesome. So I’m told. See, I don’t really understand them. But if you’re a techie, you probably would, and you’d probably love them. I think they help you sync data from MailChimp back to just about anything you want. But I’m not positive. Usually, when I have to write about our webhooks feature, I just default to my stock pirate photo, and yell AAAAAAAARR!

Maybe if you see the webhooks screen, you’ll understand webhooks better than me:

There’s also this wiki that explains webhooks in more detail, but chances are if you care about webhooks, you don’t need anymore explanation. See, aren’t webhooks cool? Aaarrr!

Blog Publishing URL

There are some really powerful desktop applications out there for bloggers. For example, Windows Live Writer is a program that you can download, then link to your blog. Why on earth would you ever want to do such a crazy thing? Because it’s actually a pretty awesome content editor. It lets you do really nifty photo uploading (and it integrates with flickr), plus you can create borders and edge/tilt effects. You can plop in videos, and it’ll automatically upload them to YouTube for you. It’ll tweet new posts automatically, add Digg links, handle multiple languages (with spellcheck), and it’s compatible with WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Windows Live, and more.

What most people don’t realize is that behind the scenes, we’ve built MailChimp lists to kinda work like blogs too. So you can actually use Windows Live Writer to build MailChimp campaigns! Just look for your special “Blog URL” and use that to setup your blog software.

iCal Calendar Sharing

Not a lot of people know this, but MailChimp outputs a calendar that you can import into your iCal or Google Calendar, where you can see all the campaigns you’ve sent, and all the campaigns you have scheduled for the future. If you send a lot of campaigns, your campaigns list in MailChimp can get really long. Viewing it in your calendar organizes things, plus lets you see where your campaigns are in relation to holidays (great if you’re an e-retailer). Also really handy if there’s someone else out there who needs to know what your publishing schedule is, but you don’t want to give them access to your MailChimp account. Learn more here.