We’ve been working on some long overdue upgrades to one of MailChimp’s more popular features. While sifting through all the feedback emails we’ve received from customers over the years, we noticed that most of the requests made perfect sense for our audience, but some of the requests seemed strange (and those are the ones that pique my interest the most). We needed a little clarity, so we decided to send a survey to our customers. But surveys can be really intrusive. You’re asking a customer, who’s already giving you money, to give you something more precious: their time.

So here’s how we used list segmentation to maximize response, while minimizing annoyance.

Our customer list is over 2 million. It was pretty damn tempting to send the survey to that entire list, to be honest with you.

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I’m really excited to announce the latest integration to launch from our $1 million integration fund, a drag-and-drop campaign creator for Etsy sellers called Craftmonkey.

Craftmonkey makes creating a professional-looking newsletter that showcases your handmade wares as simple as possible. The application uses both MailChimp’s and Etsy’s open APIs to make signing up for an account and getting started quick and easy. Just connect your MailChimp account, enter your Etsy shop name and you’re ready to create a great looking campaign.

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TwitterKeys is a service developed by the folks over at The Next Web Blog that allows you to insert certain Unicode characters in your tweets. Instead of posting that you have a conference call and coffee date before you head to the airport this afternoon, you might tweet something like “☎ then ♨ before ☞ ✈” To address the challenge of trying to remember all these great characters, @bomega and @sandervdv created a bookmarklet that brings up Read More

Ever since we launched our Google Analytics integration, eRetailers have been eating it up, and sharing all kinds of great ROI stories with us.

One that really caught my attention was APMEX (American Precious Metals Exchange), and how their email campaign got them $157,000 in sales. Wow. And here’s another case study, from NavySeals.com.

One common thread in all the stories we’ve heard is that our customers keep logging in to Google Analytics to see revenue generated. Then, they’d pull out a calculator to figure out the ROI of that campaign (don’t ask me for the formula—I always have to Google it, then Wikipedia whatever Google tells me. I suck at math).

Anyway, we thought, “Why not just pull their campaign stats from Google Analytics, calculate the ROI, and stick all this into their MailChimp campaign reports?”

So we did that. We call it MailChimp Analytics360 (Get it? Full circle?) It’s powerful. It’s insightful. It’s easy. And it’s free.

Web designers and developers: ever help a client with an email marketing project, then started to get this weird, uneasy feeling in your stomach that maybe—just maybe—you were helping your client spam? You were probably more concerned about your karma, but did you know it can also hurt your client’s email reputation (and potentially yours?). Once that happens, good luck getting your email delivered, no matter what server or service you’re using.

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

• The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
• The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
• How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
• How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble