Jan 11, 2012

New MailChimp features: video-friendly emails, discount for AlterEgo users, static segments

We’re launching some new features in MailChimp today (we’re at v6.7, if anyone’s tracking that kinda stuff). The new features should be completely rolled out to all 1.2 million users across all data centers by early Friday. We start the new features at our US4 data center, then US1, then US2.

Here’s what’s rolling out:

  • Automatic video conversion for RSS-to-Email campaigns
  • Discount on MailChimp if you use it with AlterEgo
  • Static segments: create segments fast by uploading a list of email addresses
  • Daily Deals is now an industry category
  • GMT +12 timezone support added. Welcome to MailChimp, Republic of Kiribati!

More details and documentation will be posted soon, but if you’d like a general overview…

Automatic Video Conversion for RSS Campaigns

Most email applications just won’t reliably display embedded videos within HTML email (because email apps pretty much block any code that might pose a virus risk). That’s why we created our video merge tags back in 2009 . These are great whenever you’re manually building a newsletter, but what if you have an RSS-to-email campaign that automatically grabs content from your blog? Nobody wants to stick special tags in their code when they’re writing a blog post (I sure as heck won’t). So we made MailChimp automagically detect videos in your RSS feeds, then insert our video merge tags for you. There’ll be a new checkbox in the campaign creation process that activates this feature. More details, plus some cool new video merge tag options, will be posted soon.

Update: apparently, our engineers made this work for ALL your email campaigns, not just RSS ones. Win!

 

Discount For Activating 2-Factor Security

We’re rewarding all our AlterEgo 2-factor security users for being good, security-conscious netizens of the email eco-system by giving them a 2% discount on MailChimp. (Get it? 2-factor security -> 2% discount?) If you manage a large list in MailChimp, this discount can be a pretty significant savings for you. And 2-factor security just might be able to save you from email breaches (which is significant no matter what the size of your list). If you’re an agency who manages clients in MailChimp, you should consider setting up AlterEgo for your clients, because it’ll make you look pretty darn responsible, and save them a little money.

 

Upload Your Own Segments

MailChimp’s built-in segmentation builder is pretty easy to use, but some of our more advanced users just want a super-fast way to manually upload a list of email addresses to build a segment (like a “do not email” segment, or maybe some complex segment that only they can build with their proprietary e-commerce systems). Since these aren’t dynamically constructed in our app, we call them “static segments.” Most people build these and then upload to MailChimp via our API, or with our new Hairball app. Well, in v6.7 we’ve exposed this functionality within the MailChimp interface for anybody to use. Screenshots and tutorials are in the works.

 

Daily Deals Industry

We thought it might be cool interesting for geeks if we did a wrap up of 2011 at MailChimp. One thing that came to mind was how many Groupon-style “daily deal” sites signed on to our service. There was definitely a trend there. We want to do an analysis of how this industry performed (anonymized and in aggregate, of course). However, we first had to make it an actual industry in our system (for those of you who don’t know, specifying your industry will show you how you compare to your peers):

If you’re in the “daily deals” industry, make sure you change your category (it’s under your contact information in MailChimp) so you can be included in our analysis.

 

GMT +12

We received a request from a user in the Republic of Kiribati to add their timezone in our options. Since we’re on a mission to spread our monkey love to every corner of the globe, we thought we’d add this really quick. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati

 

 

Posted By

Ben

Tagged

Discussion

    • Ben

      “By the way, your AlterEgo site is not 100% secure.”

      I don’t think anything is technically 100% secure. :-)

      “I get a ‘some elements are not secure’ error.”

      but we *can* do a better job making that error go away. FTR, that’s the promotional YouTube vid. We’ll work on that. Thanks for pointing it out!

      01.11.2012

      reply

  • Jim Dalton

    Question for you about the new web-based segmentation builder.

    Does adding members via the builder work the same way adding members to a segment via the API, in that no one is actually *added* to the list? LIke if I uploaded 1,000 email addresses to a segment which I wanted to exclude, but only 10 of them were actually members of my list, the other 990 wouldn’t be in my database, would they?

    We would like to be able to use it for suppression list functionality, but I certainly do not want to pollute my list with members I am trying to suppress.

    01.19.2012

    reply

  • richard norman

    But when are you going to make it possible to export email lists in .txt format.

    Richard

    01.19.2012

    reply

  • Nicholas Piasecki

    I know I’m probably the only user in existence, but any plans on bringing AlterEgo to Windows Phone?

    01.19.2012

    reply

  • walter arrighetti

    As your fan, I am really deeply sad you are not going to solve the troubles with embedding your sign-up form on wordpress based blog.

    I would keep on growing with you, becouse I like your platform and becouse I started my experience with you;
    but I am afraid I am forced to leave. Simply because i need easy copy-paste professional solution to embed sign-up form on every page I
    I suppose that worpress cms is not a strategical issue for you. :-(

    Yet I keep on thanking you for everything.

    bye

    01.19.2012

    reply

  • Bevianne Fitch

    Kiribati! My neighbours! And was surprised to see in Wikipedia that nobody lives on Starbuck Island. P’raps they’ve all gone to Brisbane for coffee? ;-)

    01.22.2012

    reply

Comment