As described in our v6.7 release, we launched some updates to our video merge tags. For those who don’t know about them, our video merge tags are little snippets of code that look like this:

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

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Each week, Customer Love offers a quick snapshot of one of MailChimp’s awesome users.

Who: Ernest Alexander 

What: A men’s clothing and accessories label

Where: New York

Why we love them: Durability is in the details of every item Ernest Alexander makes, from the strap of a messenger bag to the stitching on the back of a wool necktie. Founder and creative director Ernest Sabine (his middle name is Alexander) obsesses over craftmanship. His grandmother and great-grandmother were seamstresses, so manufacturing is in his blood—and that comes across in everything his company creates.

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For more than 35 years, Schecter Guitar Research has worked to become a top-shelf guitar company, and it’s hard to argue that status, considering its history. Originally a repair shop in Van Nuys, CA that provided replacement parts for Fender and Gibson guitars, Schecter eventually started making its own instruments, which are now played in more than 150 countries. Its clientele, meanwhile, ranges from hard-rock household names (Seether, Avenged Sevenfold, Papa Roach) to legacy acts (The Cure, Prince, Stone Temple Pilots).

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Every once in a while a MailChimp customer will ask me, “Hey, MailChimp’s been great for keeping in touch with my loyal customers. But is there any way to buy or rent an email list from you guys, so I can promote my business to potential customers in my area?” That’s when I explain to them the perils of purchased emails, and the virtues of organically growing a permission-based list. I also tell them they could just look around for other local merchants who might have newsletters (or similar publishers in their industry), then partner with them. In the back of my mind though, I’ve always dreamed of creating a tool for MailChimp customers to make that process easier.

That tool would analyze your list, then scour the vast database of MailChimp customers, looking for similar publishers to recommend. But this idea has been on the back burner for years, because such a tool would require 1) a vast database of MailChimp customers, and 2) the ability to analyze it–fast. Well, going freemium back in 2009 kinda helped with requirement #1. We’re at 1.2 million users, and manage over 800 million email subscribers for them all. And launching our Email Genome Project helped with requirement #2.

Helloooooo, serendipity. Finally, we have all the pieces we need to build Wavelength: a MailChimp service that uses a massive amount of email data to help you find publishers who share something in common with you:

Wavelength doesn’t help you send a promotion to another list, and it definitely doesn’t give you other lists or email addresses. It simply shows you screenshots of other newsletters that some of your subscribers read. The goal is to help you contact those publishers and maybe form a relationship with each other. Ideally, you can link to each other and help each other grow your lists organically.

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One of the questions we sometimes get from customers who are new to email marketing is ‘how do I send attachments with my newsletter?’ We’ve always had to tell them that they can’t send attachments with MailChimp. If you want to send a document or pdf to your subscribers you need to upload it to MailChimp and then link to the file in your campaign.

This is a good solution for some of our customers, but not all of them. For example, many of our customers want to offer a free guide or white paper as an incentive to opt-in to their email list or as a reward for their loyal subscribers. But, they may be selling the paper or guide to their general audience. They need a way to send unique, restricted download links just to their email subscribers.
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