Bear with me for a sec for a quick jaunt down memory lane. The first iteration of the MailChimp logo was quickly thrown together by Ben in 2001 using Fireworks. Over the years, each revision of the logo made it slightly less clumsy, but it still wasn’t quite right. So in late 2007 we got in touch with Jon Hicks (who designed the Firefox logo and most recently worked on the user interface design for Opera Mini 5), and he was really busy at the time. But good things come to those who wait, and by August of 2008 we had a shiny, new Freddie complete with a body and everything! (If you’re interested in reading more, check out Ben’s original post here.)

OK, back to the life sized chimp suit.

The first order of business was working with Maydwell Mascots to get the technical renderings together.

When he saw this drawing, Dan’s first thought was, “What the heck? This suit is gonna suck!” They assured him they knew what they were doing, and all faith was restored when Dan received the first production pictures of the head.

Ah yes, now we’re talkin’! With the head approved, the fur was then selected and applied.

Things were starting to look kinda cool and just a wee bit creepy at this point, but Dan was liking it. Up next was the body.

Hmm, but it seems like something is missing…

Ah, much better! With the proper chimp butt in place, he’s alive! And aside from being just plain awesome, this suit is amazingly hi-tech.

The chimp feet actually have Vibram rubber soles, making the Freddie suit a complete all-terrain vehicle.

Since you’re likely to get hot in there, Freddie’s head includes a built-in battery powered fan that sits inside of his hat and vents through a hole in the top. You turn it on with a tiny switch just inside his left ear.

Last but not least, every chimp needs to be able to use their iPhone or iPad when wearing the Freddie suit (especially for say, an iPhone app promo video), so we had these chimp hands customized with a special slit for your index finger to fit through. Our video guy Josh is really happy about this one.

Oh, and speaking of video, check out how some unsuspecting MailChimp employees react to Freddie when he unexpectedly comes alive in MailChimp Freddie Big Hidden Camera Crazy Time!

BTW, a lot of people ask me, “who’d you hire to do your logo?” I used to say, “Jon Hicks, but he’s not freelancing anymore.” But it looks like he’s back on the market.

It’s hard for me to believe that we ever thought it would be difficult to give away 1,000 tshirts. On September 10th when we launched the promotion, all 100 shirts we made available were claimed within two and a half minutes. That’s one tshirt every 1.5 seconds. I was well aware that people love MailChimp, but it was amazing to witness in that way.

For the sake of comparison, I’ll tell you that when we announced Freemium pricing on September 1st, I recorded 425 tweets containing the term “mailchimp”. On average, that’s one tweet mentioning MailChimp every 3.5 minutes, and it was the highest explicable one-day tweet volume we had seen up to that point.

A few days later on September 10th when we began giving away tshirts, I recorded 244 tweets mentioning “mailchimp”. Free tshirts literally created more than half the amount of buzz as our announcement of a new pricing model. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

Fulfillment

To state the obvious, it takes a lot of time and numerous pairs of opposable thumbs to pack 1,000 t-shirts. So when we started seeing tweets from people getting impatient that they hadn’t received their shirts yet, we got the whole office involved. Below, Mark from Marketing is camped out next to our catered burrito lunch. If you ended up with some inexplicable grains of rice or a few shriveled black beans in your package, just think of it as a holiday bonus!

Paul the Unicorn Intern even helped out! Even though he had zero opposable thumbs to contribute to the cause.

The real hero in all of this is our office manager April. She developed what you might call a rather special relationship with the employees at the post office down the block. Apparently they have a rarely enforced rule that you can only mail fifteen parcels at a time. And since April was a “chronic offender,” she had to endure dirty looks and lots of attitude while spending hours at a time standing in line, sending her fifteen parcels, and then standing in line again. But it was all for you, dear customers!

Pro tip from Co-Founders Dan Kurzius and Ben Chestnut: “We stuck our business cards in with a some of the packages to get feedback from people.”

I Wish We Had…

1. There are a few things I think we could improve on or do differently in the future. I would like to have some sort of “remaining t-shirts” counter that actually refreshed its numbers in real time as folks filled in the form. Since the tshirts were repeatedly being claimed within minutes of tweeting that they were available, I think it would have been reassuring for people who were trying to win one but weren’t having any luck.

Kind of an affirmation that yes, we really are giving away tshirts and no, this is not some kind of exercise in frustration or just a hoax. Ultimately, a counter would have added an additional element of credibility for those less familiar with the MailChimp brand.

2. Another thing that we didn’t do the first time around but implemented with our winter promo was using the Google Analytics URL builder to create custom links each time we tweeted that shirts were available.

Since the link that the Google Analytics URL Builder spits out is a long beast of a thing, I ran it through eepurl.com (our in-house URL shortener) to get a short, sweet, custom link that I could then tweet and track.

3. It would also have been a good idea to start collecting email addresses of people interested in hearing about tshirts and other MailChimp swag in the future. Particularly when the form was turned “off” and basically just lying dormant.

We did this for our winter promo, but I wish it was something we had implemented earlier.

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some related posts you might be interested in checking out:

• Using Posterous to Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• App Sketchbook uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitter To Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter Signup Form to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Twitter-to-email Tutorial
• How MailChimp Uses CoTweet

Our goal wasn’t necessarily to amass more Twitter followers or Facebook fans just for the sake of increasing our follower count. After all, with both Twitter and Facebook the number of fans or followers you have isn’t significant in any real way. Sure, the more fans you have the larger the group of people who will see your message, but that doesn’t necessarily dictate their level of interaction/engagement with your brand or business.

Chart showing a 42% increase in our Facebook fan growth

During the brainstorming process, our t-shirt promotion idea went through a bunch of different iterations. In a nut shell, we didn’t want to do anything spammy that might piss off Twitter (a la the #moonfruit debacle), or worse yet, annoy our users. As Chief Twitter Officer (CTO) around these parts, I’m particularly protective of MailChimp as a brand as well as our public perception. Not to mention the fact that my ass was on the line considering I’d be the first to hear about it if the t-shirt giveaway was not properly executed and managed.

a small selection of the people we sent shirts to

Let’s face it, asking people to re-tweet your message and include a hashtag is unoriginal and boring, not to mention really annoying. And it would be especially problematic for a brand like MailChimp that uses Twitter as a support channel for users. Think of all the questions and customer love we’d miss out on due to the influx of promotional tweets.

Anatomy of A Promo

We came up the idea to work with the chimps downstairs in the MailChimp DesignLab™ to create a landing page for our t-shirt giveaway. The page would have two basic modes– on, meaning the name/address/t-shirt size form fields were visible and able to be filled in, and off. The DesignLab™ would build a simple back end for the page using PHP and MySQL that would allow me to login, turn the form on or off, and export a CSV file of everyone who had successfully reserved a shirt. I would make the shirts available in batches of 50, which was just an arbitrary set number that we decided on– not too big and not too small.

t-shirt form in 'off' mode (click for full size image)

We asked our users to follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook so that we could notify them (by tweeting or posting a status update with a link on our fan page) when a new batch of t-shirts became available.

t-shirt form 'on' (click image to view large)

People Love Free Stuff

It turns out that people love free stuff. Especially well designed, awesome looking free tshirts. In Part II of this post, we’ll be delving into more charts and graphs, analyzing what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned the second time around.

In case you missed it, last Saturday at 12:01 AM EST Facebook gave both individuals and fan pages the ability to register their own vanity URLs. The main reason this is awesome is that it allows you to market your Facebook page much more easily. Instead of a long string of letters and numbers, you now have the benefit of something short and tidy. Like facebook.com/mailchimp. During the recent NBA Finals, for example, I noticed brands like Vitamin Water promoting their fan page URLs instead of their main company website in their commercials. And this type of cross promotion is definitely working! Vitamin Water currently boasts over 500,000 Facebook fans.

There are some caveats to note about getting a vanity URL for your fan page right now. Unfortunately, if you have fewer than 1,000 fans you’ll have to wait until June 28, 2009 to secure your vanity URL. In an effort to mitigate copyright issues and naming rights, you will have the opportunity to report that someone is infringing on your intellectual property rights by filling out this form. This may not be entirely helpful if you’re an admin without a registered or trademarked name that you can protect though.

Have you claimed your own small piece of social media realestate yet? Be sure you do– Facebook was reporting that nearly 6,000,000 custom usernames had been claimed as of Monday 6/15. After that, be sure to stop by and connect with MailChimp on Facebook at facebook.com/mailchimp.

One of the most exciting things about our new chimp is the fact that he now has a body– unlike before when he was just a floating head. We thought that this definitely called for a celebratory gesture, and what could be better than a life-size cardboard cutout?

We like to think of ourselves as trend-setters, meaning you’re probably asking yourself where you can procure one of these for your business. We ordered our chimp from Party Standups, a company based out of Bradenton, Florida (near Sarasota). All of their cutouts are made from weatherproof corrugated plastic and can range in size from 1 ft. 4 in. up to as large as 8 ft. The image itself is printed on white 4mil vinyl using 6-color process inks, and then laminated to the corrugated plastic before it’s cut to shape. The ordering process is super simple– just upload your artwork (most standard image formats are accepted, although the company recommends a resolution of at least 100 dpi), choose your desired options (like size), add to your cart and voila! In 5 to 10 business days you should have your very own life size friend.

In typical MailChimp fashion, the folks around here have been thinking of all sorts of creative things to do with our new pal. (No, not those kinds of things.) If you’re in the Atlanta area, he is rumored to be making a guest appearance on Friday, October 3, at the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session. (Bananas may or may not be involved.) The Webmaster Jam Session is a two day event that brings together web designers, developers, marketers and visionaries to learn about the latest ideas and trends in web design, development, search engine optimization and social media. On Friday, MailChimp Co Founder and Email Marketing expert Ben Chestnut will be talking about designing for email. In his own words, “email might suck but it should still look good”. You can also catch Aarron Walter, MailChimp’s user experience designer, in these sessions on topics ranging from web standards to what’s important when building a website.