You’ve probably noticed the “view this in your browser” link we include in our templates to take your subscribers to the online archive of your newsletters.
It’s pretty handy in case people can’t view the correct version of the email in their email clients, but have you ever wished you could hide that link when people actually go to the archive page? Or, have you been hoping for a way to change the text to some other content instead?
Well, with our dynamic merge tag: *| IF:ARCHIVE |*, you can!
I’ve been running into a lot of people who are using their blog as their CMS lately, and who want to combine them with MailChimp. I usually recommend they create content in their blog, then publish it to their email list automatically via our RSS-to-email tool. Believe it or not though, there are people with valid business cases for going in the opposite direction: from MailChimp to blog. All we could do for them in the past was recommend they change their business model (not exactly an ideal pitch to customers).
Thankfully, Mark Parolisi has created a WordPress plugin for MailChimp that “fetches your campaign archives and either creates them as posts in your WP database, or just displays them live by fetching them from MailChimp upon request.”
Give it a shot and let Mark know if you find it useful. Oh, and some other WP plugins for MailChimp you might like:
We’re going to be really busy in 2010 making subtle but powerful refinements to the MailChimp app. We kicked things off in v5 with the new Design Genius, then Aarron talked about how we’re using CSS3 to make the UI more crisp and quick.
And now, a teeny-tiny refinement you may not have noticed yet. Your campaign archive toolbars are now slightly translucent, and hovers over the page:
Here’s another quick tip from Aarron. After he sent his wife’s email campaign for Soup Studios (which we just showcased here on our blog), he jumped over to her Facebook Fan Page, selected the “Send an Update to Fans” option:
and then sent her fans a link to her campaign archive. If you’re an artist that’s using MailChimp and Facebook, you might want to consider combining the two.
Here’s how to find your campaign’s archive link (hint: it’s not the link at the top of the email that you sent to yourself)…
MailChimp users: you can build a “newsletter archive” page on your website that gets automatically updated whenever you send a new campaign. It’s called the “Campaign Archive Folder” and it’s totally free with every MailChimp account. All you have to do is add a little snippet of code to your web page.
Here’s how to do it…
Once you have a page that links to all your archived newsletters, you should place a link to this archive page in your welcome emails. That way, new subscribers can always see your most recent campaigns. You might also want to place a link to your archive right on your signup form, so people can “see past issues” before they decide to signup.
Speaking of campaign archives, we just enhanced them in two ways: