A while back, the folks from Flowtown contacted me about how they integrated with MailChimp via our API. To be honest, I wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about Flowtown. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s a service that lets you import an email list, then they cross-reference that data with public social profiles. I definitely understand how that can help a salesperson with a handful of local clients he wants to follow (and that scenario might even be where they got their name and logo). But what about my email marketing list of 25,000? Okay, so I can find out who among my subscribers is on Twitter and Facebook. It might even tell me who’s influential. What now? It’s not like I’m going to bug those subscribers with “more targeted emails” just because they’re “social.” I got one of those emails recently, and I can think of no better way to lose my hard earned subscribers. So I didn’t really think about this Flowtown thing much. Great for 1-to-1 sales, not so much for 1-to-many marketing.

But over time, we added engagement scoring, geotargeting, and the ability to download segments in MailChimp.

The combination of all these new tools changed my outlook completely…

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Flickr is one of the most well known online photo sharing networks for both amateurs and professionals. And because they’ve been around since 2004, it’s also one of the most widely used.

In the MailChimp V5 release, we’ve made it super easy to link your Flickr photos to your MailChimp account, pull them into your image gallery, and use ‘em in your email campaigns. Read More

A couple days ago I mentioned the interesting use of flickr in Steve’s App Sketchbook email campaign. This morning I got this Halloween-ish email from ChoppingBlock that also used flickr in an interesting way: they invite you to post a high-res image from flickr to your blog, to see if you can name all the spooky characters in their latest tshirt:

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!