Tomorrow morning, around 8am ET (see in your timezone), we’ll start rolling out some new features. It’ll be a rolling release, starting at our us2 data center, then moving across to us1. If all goes well, the upgrade will be complete across all accounts by the end of Thursday. We’ll be going into more details after everything’s live, but here’s a quick overview…

Campaign reports revamped

Over the years, we’ve added tons of tracking and analytics options to MailChimp. subscriber activity, ROI tracking, Google Analytics integration, social sharing stats, Facebook comments, timewarp charts, domain performance, and more. We decided it was time to clean all that up and organize campaign reports a little nicer. One cool addition is our “Campaign Reach” stats, that tell you how many people your email reached, including social channels:

 

More FEED:XYZ merge tag customization

We have a great RSS-to-email feature that automatically sends emails whenever you update your blog. But some people wanted the ability to plop RSS content into a regular newsletter. So we created the FEED:XYZ merge tag. It actually lets you insert multiple RSS feeds into any campaign you want. But then people wanted the ability to do more custom styling on those feeds. Starting tomorrow, the tag will support the ability to break it into RSSITEMS (like title, author, etc) so you can apply CSS to each element. Code examples are forthcoming.

 

Co-branding options under VIP Reports

Last month we launched co-branding, so that you can make MailChimp feel a little more like home. We’re extending that functionality over to our VIP Reports, so that your shared campaigns will match your branding better too.

 

Downloadable Backups

Ever wanted to just back up everything in MailChimp? Your lists, your campaign stats, your templates, etc? We’ll be giving you a button for that. Partly because we’ve always felt it’s your data, so you should have access to it. But also partly because we want your dusty old data off our servers. Seriously, there’s so much old campaign data sitting on our servers, we need to start cleaning it up. Very high volume senders with large lists or frequent campaigns notice significant performance improvements when they delete old campaigns and stats. One day, we plan to make this mandatory. But for now, we just want to get the backup process in place.

 

Miscellaneous

There are some other tiny tweaks we’ll talk about over the next few days, as well as some infrastructure and backend optimization we’ve done to make things speedy. One thing I’m particularly excited about is how we’re making changes to our billing system so that we can eventually bill you in your local currencies (instead of requiring USD). Stay tuned!