MailChimp’s list of built-in social media features just keeps growing.
Today, we launched a new twitter email template. The twitter template is perfect for social media power users (um, no “social media d-bags,” please) who want their emails to follow their twitter “identity.”
Here’s how it works:
When you go to create a campaign, select the “new email” tab:
Then choose the new “twitter” template option:
On the next screen (the campaign builder), you’ll see that MailChimp visits your twitter page, and automatically pulls in your colors and background image:
If you look closely at the right column, you’ll notice a nifty new twitter merge tag:
Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.
Clicking on “pop up preview” will show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:
As you can see, there’s even a little link to “follow.”
Setting Up The Twitter Integration
How does MailChimp even know your twitter account? Because by now you’ve used our awesome campaign tweeting and re-tweet tracking integration, right?!? If so, your settings are already saved. If not, just make sure you go to your account page, then click on Integrations:
and then enter your settings for twitter:
Finally, if you’re new to MailChimp’s social features, check out this video:
Somewhat related posts:
- Using twitter to rate email campaign effectiveness
- Trends in Email: Sharing with Facebook & twitter
- Forward-to-friend links dead? Smith-Harmon report on SWYN links (share with your network)
- Adding social sharing links to your MailChimp emails
- Follow @mailchimp on twitter for a chance at these cool new MailChimp t-shirts
Thank Ben. You rock! You do an awesome job of keeping us up-to-date in an easy-to-understand way.
I take it the new “TWITTER:FULL_PROFILE” merge tag is also available as a standalone item?
Great work pulling this together. The auto-generation feature for grabbing colors is awesome (like always), but I think the profile inclusion is even more innovative. Now instead of just a “Follow us on Twitter” link, you’ve got a full blown incorporation of your profile inside the email.
Mike, the merge tag can indeed be used as a standalone item. FTR, my original version of this article had an _underscore_ in that merge tag, but that was incorrect. The correct tag is: *|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE|*
I’m trying to get this to work on an existing campaign. Is that possible? What am I doing wrong? My tag looks like this, *|TWITTER:FULL_PROFILE|*, right?
Hi Adam, I don’t remember there being an underscore in “FULLPROFILE.” Try it w/out.
DUH. I wrote the article with the wrong merge tag. Sorry Adam, there’s no underscore like I typed in my example. I’ve edited the article. Thanks for pointing this out!
Perfect! Looks great. I pulled that out and it works great. I’m guessing as time goes on I’ll be able to hack it with some preferences? Like… having it display 2-3 tweets as opposed to 5 so it fits my content?
I know, picky picky. :)
Hi Adam, Yes. You definitely know our M.O. We launch something, see if anyone even uses it, wait for enhancement requests, then the team meets in the office thunderdome to “decide” which features to work on next.
Hi Adam, this part is less documented, but there are two other Twitter merge fields you can use to customize the output. *|TWITTER:PROFILE|* will show just your profile information and follow link without the latest tweets list. *|TWITTER:TWEETSXX|* will show your “XX” latest tweets, so *|TWITTER:TWEETS3|* will show the latest 3 tweets instead of 5. We’ll hopefully get these documented and up on the mergetag cheatsheet in the next day or two.
Chad- I will use those, thanks! I put it into a couple templates yesterday and it looked a bit odd. Those hacks will dip the whole thing in awesome sauce.
What video maker do you use? Camtasia?
It looks very good
Hi Thomas, we use Screenflow:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/making-cool-screencasts-with-vara-softwares-screenflow/
I saw in an earlier post – back in 2006(!) that you where using Adobe Captivate. Would you recommend Screenflow over Captivate?
They’re for different purposes, imho. Josh does um, “edu-tainment” kinda videos, where we need fast-paced action-packed pseudo-tutorials. But Jennifer, in our support department, might need to use captivate for step-by-step “real” tutorials, where someone has to learn all the nitty gritty details. We’re not at the point where captivate can be used yet, though. The app is still changing quite a lot, due to all the new feature enhancements. But if/when the app “matures” (God forbid), and features don’t change too much, taking the time to do full tutorials with Captivate might be worth it.
I’ve started using Camtasia for quick how-to tutorials. You can see my first attempts on our youtube-
http://www.youtube.com/user/MailChimp
[...] folks over at MailChimp just announced a very cool Twitter-themed email template for their email marketing service. Link your MailChimp account to your Twitter account, and you can [...]
Hi Ben,
sounds great! But unfortunately doesn’t work on my account… :(
Is the link “use template” may be wrong? Should it be …wizard/html-template?id=… instead of …wizard/html?id=… ?!
Any idea? I want to try it! :)
Hi Jan, Uh-oh, what’s not working? If it’s not pulling data from twitter, then try going to the integrations page in your account settings, disconnect from twitter, then reconnect. If you’re still having issues, definitely contact help -at- mailchimp.com, and they’ll look into it.
Hi Ben, no it is one step earlier when choosing the template.
It is a IE 7 problem…! It works fine in Firefox. It is great! Thank’s a lot.
..sorry IE 8
Very nice template! I love how you guys keep putting new templates out and keep integrating with other social media.
Keep up the good work!
Chimptabulous!
[...] MailChimp, a popular DIY email service, has announced a brand new Twitter email template. [...]
I *heart* Ben. I wanna be you when I grow up. :)
Not sure why, but I’ll take what I can get. :-)
I love this template!!! Thanks Ben.
I like this!
I do notice the tweet data gets pulled in at the time of sending the email so if there is lag of the recipient opening the email the twitter data is possibly out of date – however if they click the browser version link they will get a fresh load of twitter data.
(incidentally there is a “N” missing on the “Notify me of followup comment via e-mail” in the comment box)
This is definitely a cool feature. Unfortunately, I can’t use it yet for my clients, since the integration is account-wide.
A useful feature would be per-list integration.
For example, I have a client who runs a number of venues, each with their own Twitter account. Each venue has a separate list for subscription purposes. It would be great if I could somehow associate a Twitter account with each list either via the integrations section of Account Management or the list tools section of each list, just like I can with Google Analytics tracking.
I know I could open a new account for each venue, but that seems like over-handling to me. Much better to keep one account for the parent company and separate venues by lists.
Someone @mailchimp correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that for these twitter-specific merge tags, you actually can specify what twitter profile to pull data from. I don’t know the exact markup of the tags to use, but I’ve seen people do it internally.
You are correct, Ben.
http://eepurl.com/ffmo
Right now there’s only one full Twitter Integration with one account, but you can have multiple twitter feeds show on your campaign if you use the Merge tag listed on the link above.
Thanks for the reply Ben. I don’t see this option on the cheat sheet:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/resources/merge/
So I assume it must be either experimental or undocumented. To do this, the account would still need to be authenticated somehow and I don’t see any options in the control panel to authenticate more than one Twitter account.
Even if it’s just “in the works”, that would be excellent.
Not sure if our replies made it to you Bodog, I see Neil and I replied to the thread, but not to your comments specifically.
Right now there’s only one full Twitter Integration with one account, but you can have multiple twitter feeds show on your campaign if you use the following:
You can use the Twitter merge tag |TWITTER:FULLPROFILE:twitterusername| to pull in each specific profile. Only publicly available feeds will be pulled in, so if one account is protected, those tweets will not be displayed on the campaigns. Not authentication is necessary. You can see Merge tags in action by using the pop-up preview mode. If you see it not working, I’d contact the support department for further troubleshooting, but using that tag should work for you.
I’ll see about getting that added to the Merge tag cheatsheet so that it is documented.
Thanks for the replies guys, this is exactly what I need. I haven’t had a chance to test, but I bet it works just as I need it to.
Cheers.
It is possible to pull twitter profiles for any public twitter page using the merge tag *|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE:mailchimp|*. You would replace MailChimp with the profile you want to pull into your campaign.
[...] Twitter template and merge tags let you pull recent tweets, profile info into your email sidebars. Merge tags on this cheatsheet [...]
I don’t know how I missed this but I’m so glad I found it. It looks beautiful, slides in to play easy and allows us to bridge a little divide between those on the social vines and not. Keep up these ideas. A facebook badge like one in the future?
Yep, some sort of facebook-integrated template is in the works.
[...] also considered using our twitter email template, which showcases our twitter profile, recent tweets, faves, etc. While that template is great for [...]