Even if you weren’t able to make it this time, hopefully these animated gifs will help you feel like you’re right in the mix.

View from the 5 Seasons Brewing roof deck

The King of Pops helped folks cool off with his delicious, handmade popsicles

Ben chatting

Plenty of monkey hats to go around and swag galore!

The Mystery Men shared stellar surf rock tunes that were totally weather appropriate.

Our beloved Freddie appeared to share hugs and fist bumps with all

Preliminary Steps

When you’re setting up your drip campaign, planning is actually just as important as creating the content you’ll be sending out, apparently. So before you get started, the fine folks over at Marketingsherpa urge you to consider some of the following questions. (Seriously, I’m not an expert on this stuff but am happy to point you toward helpful resources from folks who are.)

What’s the goal of your autoresponder campaign? For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you might want to remind someone about the items they’ve left in their shopping cart and encourage them to come back and purchase. Do you have your content sorted out? Content is still king, and having well-written, informative and relevant content will help engage your subscribers and keep them interested. What’s the trajectory and duration of your campaign? What key marketing messages are you trying to convey? What’s the time period over which you plan to send your emails? Are they leading up to a specific event? These sorts of questions will help you figure out how often you want to send, and the specific content in each message.

Getting Started

Let’s imagine that you’re a wedding photographer who finds potential clients through word of mouth, via a signup form on your website, and by using Chimpadeedoo for iPad to let interested parties sign up at bridal shows.

You’ll want to make sure your signup form is capturing all the pertinent information for your autoresponder series– first and last name, email address, date (which I’ve relabeled so it refers to wedding date) and gender. Perhaps even use the 2 line description to entice people with a special offer for signing up, as I’ve done here.

Setting Up Your Autoresponders

Remember, the whole point of this tutorial is how to count down to a special date using autoresponders. Since we’ve collected the wedding date of our prospective clients, that’s the date we’ll base our series of emails on.

When I created my signup form in Chimpadeedoo, I offered an incentive– a free wedding photography consultation. In order to make good on that offer, I scheduled my first autoresponder (containing the free consultation offer) to send a few days (3) after signup. This gives the subscriber enough time to process all the information from the Bridal Show, but not so much time that they forget they ever signed up for my list. (Note: Experiment here! Is five days the sweet spot, or do you get better results from waiting a week or maybe even nine days? Leave a comment and let us know what you discover, as my guess is that things will vary by industry and use case.)

Then I created my campaign:

Next, I’ve decided that to stay in contact with my subscribers and help pique their interest in my services, I’ll send out a “tips” type newsletter one month after the subscription date. Again, in my autoresponder setup screen I’ll click the big “add autoresponder” button, then select the list I want to send to– Georgia Bridal Show 2011. Under “send settings” I’ll set my autoresponder to send 1 month after the subscriber’s signup date:

And again, I’ll then go in and create my campaign full of wedding tips and tricks. I’ll segment this one by gender, because let’s face it, you guys need a lot of help when it comes to wedding stuff. I’ll include pointers about how not to look like a total goofball in your photos, how far in advance of your wedding you should get your hair cut so you don’t have that “freshly shorn sheep” look, and even some common dance steps so that you’re not as nervous while twirling your lady during that first dance.

Once you’ve set up your autoresponder and are ready to jump into the design process, simply set the segment of your list you want to send to in Step 1 of the Campaign Builder.

Next, you know that (according to the wedding planning checklist) couples will be seriously auditioning photographers nine to ten months prior to the date of the wedding. In order to capitalize on that, I’ll set up two autoresponders– one that will send 10 months before the date of the wedding, and the other that will send 9 months before the wedding. These are specifically intended to remind my subscribers that it’s time to pick a photographer, while also suggesting my services.

Ten months out, I want to remind the subscriber where we met (the Georgia Bridal Show on June 26, 2011 at Gwinnett Center), provide some education and links to my website and portfolio, and offer my photography services for the big day. Since I collected gender information on my signup form, I might even consider segmenting on that criteria and including a bit more concrete information for the men on my list. Guys don’t always understand the nuances of wedding planning, so it might behoove me to educate as opposed to trying the hard sell.

There’s a lot that goes into planning a wedding, so when my autoresponder sends 9 months prior to the date of the wedding, I want to assure my subscribers I know what they’re going through and that LauterCo Photographers are here to help. This might be a good time to include offers from dress shops, tuxedo rental places or caterers that my company has prior working relationships with. You can even make sure those companies know you sent them business by using Google’s URL builder to generate a unique link for each vendor.

Google URL builder

Some other ideas you might want to consider

• 8 months before the wedding, send a PYOW-powered QR coupon code to a segment of those folks who “opened or clicked” your email from the 9-month autoresponder offering a discount on your photography services

• Post a QR Code outside your studio so that visitors who stop by can quickly signup for your email list

Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author, gave two fantastic presentations, and the day was rounded out by local creative entrepreneurs, including Michael Tavani of Scoutmob and new Atlanta fave The King of Pops!

We have a lot of creative people on the team here, and I know we have a ton of creative users as well.  It’s easy to get wrapped up in the “fun” part of creating (coming up with awesome ideas and sharing them with people) and forget that the end result should be…well…a result.

Most of us have so many ideas, all the time, and many of them never see the light of day. The mission of “Making Ideas Happen” was to light a fire and help creative people to also be productive people and bring their best concepts to life.

Here are some of my favorite tips from the presentations:

• Resist the urge to jump ship. Pair up with someone organized.

It is often easier, especially for the folks Scott calls “dreamers”, to start to pursue a new idea than to follow through with the first great idea. Once it gets difficult or boring, the impulse is to chase thrills (new ideas) instead of finishing.   This is why it’s great for “dreamers” to pair up with “do-ers” who can help them get through the less-fun parts and make it to the end product.

Here’s a great video of one of Scott’s talks called How to Avoid The Idea Generation Trap.

• Seek competition and community.  Instill accountability.
  

If you’re an artist, a freelancer, or an entrepreneur, you may find that a lot of your work is done on solo time.  It can be easy to lose touch with others who are doing similar work and to feel isolated.  That isolation can stall productivity and follow through. Go out and seek ways to interact with your community and with others in your field.

City planner Aaron Fortner reminded us that humans are about relationships, and the environments we create for ourselves affect us on deep levels. You might improve the quality of your work by having regular interaction with your community. This can be anything from setting up your laptop at the neighborhood coffee shop or scheduling a work-play date with other freelancing parents to a monthly artist’s meeting where you’re required to share new work.

Maybe someone has a project very much like yours — rather than being threatened, take that as incentive to work harder and faster and you may produce better work than you would have in your safe bubble.
Telling people about your ideas can also make you more likely to follow through on them.

• Show off your “wins”!

No, I’m not advocating bragging to everyone you meet about how awesome you are. But when you struggle with finishing projects, it’s easy to get bogged down in the insecurity that comes with failures.
Keep a portfolio or a whiteboard or some other type of display that includes your or your team’s accomplishments in a visible place. By including all of the great things you’ve done successfully so far in your workspace, you’re motivated to add to the list and finish strong.

Overall, it was a fantastic day and I enjoyed meeting so many creative people, many of whom were already MailChimp users. I love that we attract so many creative customers! I’m still soaking up everything I heard on Friday and look forward to talking more about it with folks here.

If you’re feeling inspired too, stop by and see me in the Jungle to share what you’ve learned!

Thing is, we’d rather focus on what we do best: making email marketing awesome. “Events” is not our specialty, so we felt we’d never be able to make it awesome enough.

Then we discovered Eventbrite, which is the best events management tool we’ve ever used. And it just so happens they also have an API.

So we’re really excited to announce that MailChimp is partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp (and so much more).

Here’s how the integration works…

Let’s say I run the PTA (parents, teachers association) for a local elementary school, and we want to hold a car wash fund raising event for the 5th grade class. Just so happens that MailChimp user Morris Brandon Elementary did this very thing recently, so I’m going to use them as an example.

1. Create Event & Sell Tickets in Eventbrite

The first thing I’d do is create an event in Eventbrite. This is very easy, so I’m not going to walk you through all the steps, but I will point out some cool features.

First, you can sell tickets for your event. I’m going to create “PTA Members” tickets, and “Non-members” tickets. PTA members pay less for tickets, of course:

How do you collect money, you ask? Eventbrite makes that easy too. You can choose Paypal ,Google Checkout, or just let Eventbrite handle the credit card processing on their end. They take a teeny-tiny bit of commission on orders, but it’s cheap. Way cheaper than trying to handle it yourself. You can also let attendees “pay at the door” or pay with a combination of the above. Super flexible.

If your event is free, then you use Eventbrite free. And as you know by now, we like free.

2. Design Awesome Invitation in MailChimp

After your event is all setup in Eventbrite, you go to MailChimp, connect your account to your Eventbrite account, import the event details (all done seamlessly through our APIs) and design your invitation.

So I’m going to log in to my account, and create an email campaign. As always, the first step is to select the subscriber list I want to send to:

When it’s time to select my template, MailChimp has a new Eventbrite template as an option:

It’s under the “My Templates” tab, then scroll down to the “pre-designed templates.” Yeah, that’s sorta new. We’ll be adding lots more cool templates there soon. You’ll also notice the new twitter template there that we introduced a few days ago.

Anyway, the Eventbrite template will have a blue button asking you to “connect to eventbrite.”

When you click that button, we’ll ask you to enter your API key (you can get that from your Eventbrite account settings):

Just copy-paste that key into our little screen, and we’ll connect to Eventbrite using the magic of APIs.

After the connection is made, I select the event I want to import to MailChimp:

Next, it takes me to my pre-built template, with all the event details ready to go:

Notice it pulls in the event date, location, description, and even includes a Google Map.

Here’s where we can use MailChimp’s template design features to take this invitation a step further.

First, I’m going to create and upload a header graphic:

I’m a decent “photochopper” myself, but if I didn’t have a design application, MailChimp’s picnik integration would come in very handy here.

Once my header’s uploaded, I can tweak the template design a little by selecting one of MailChimp’s built-in color palettes:

And then I can use MailChimp’s handy iStockphoto integration to search for “car wash kids” photos:

and insert one into my invitation:

After the template’s looking the way I want, I just hit the send button like I always do.

But just for kicks, I actually backed up a step, and went to MailChimp’s campaign setup screen, and tried our new Subject Line Suggester to see if it would give me some ideas for a better subject line. I want as many parents to open this email as possible, afterall.

I typed “school, invitation, and invite” and here’s what I got:

Hmm. Based on these suggestions, I might try, “Exclusive invitation to Morris Brandon parents” vs. “Morris Brandon invites you to our 5th grade car wash fundraiser” in an A/B subject line test.

Twitter Integration & Tracking

If you’ve got a twitter account (who doesn’t?), be sure to choose MailChimp’s twitter integration option and let us post a link to your campaign. It uses our eepurl link shortener, which allows us to track who tweets and re-tweets your campaign:

Ticket Sales Stats, too!

Did we mention that MailChimp will pull your Eventbrite stats in to show you total ticket sales? It’s in the “Eventbrite360 report” and it looks something like this:

We’ll show you how many tickets you sold, and who bought them.

Followup Emails, Segmentation, and more…

What if the event needs to be postponed? This actually happened with Atlanta’s recent floods. The school had to send an email out postponing the car wash. Easy enough to send a followup email to the same list in MailChimp. And with our automatic mobile campaign feature, you can be confident that even parents “on the go” will receive your alert, properly formatted.

In another scenario, we might use MailChimp’s A.I.M. Reports in combination with our easy segmentation tools to send out a followup to all those who didn’t open or click the campaign.

Or, we can segment the list by proximity to a ZIP code:

For larger events with lots of lead time, I might even create an autoresponder sequence of reminders and followups before and after the big event. To maximize deliverability and click rate, I’d also suggest passing your event invitation through MailChimp’s one-click Inbox Inspector. It’ll render my campaign in all the major email programs, and check it in all the major spam filters to help pinpoint any problems with my campaign before I send.

RSS-to-email alerts for new events

If you host lots of events on Eventbrite, they’ll actually build an RSS feed that alerts people whenever you create a new event. You know where I’m going with this? Automate your alerts by using MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool with Eventbrite’s RSS feed.

Powerful Combination

As you can see, Eventbrite and MailChimp make for one extremely powerful, easy-to-use combination.

We think this video shows how excited we are about this (warning: there’s smooching involved):