You know that iPhone commercial, where they ask “what’s for lunch?” and then they shake the phone and a random restaurant shows up? MobileCrunch has got a fascinating interview with Urban Spoon co-founder Ethan Lowry, and how that commercial sent them up over 2 million downloads. Pretty inspiring entrepreneurial story. While reading I came across AdMob (the way Urban Spoon makes money) and thought some of our readers might be interested in trying it for their local advertising. Seems to work something like Google Adwords, where you prepay (a minimum of $50).

Each and every email campaign sent out with MailChimp is given a permanent, unique address in our Campaign Archive.  This is the location we link to from the campaign header text: Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. (click to view the example shown at left)

In MailChimp v3.4, we’ve added an elegant new feature that will automatically translate your campaigns into a mobile friendly version when viewed in a mobile browser.  It’s automatic and the feature just works! There is no need to change your opt-in form to provide a mobile option under “preferred format” because we’ve built this functionality into the system for you.

At left, you’ll see an email campaign sent from Soup Studios just as it appeared in my iPhone mail.  All I have to do to view the mobile device optimized version is click on the “View it in your browser” link in the email header.  This automatically opens the link in my iPhone’s Safari browser– which MailChimp can detect– and displays a mobile version of the campaign.  Pretty cool stuff, huh? (see screen shot below) Read More

We launched a slew of new features this weekend, which upgrades everyone to MailChimp v3.4. We’ll post more details about each feature soon, but here’s a quick breakdown of the major ones…

• View Mobile Version: When recipients on mobile phones click the “View this in your browser” link to see your campaign’s archive, we’ll redirect them to an automatically generated, mobile-browser-friendly version of your campaign. Speaking of mobile: See MailChimp’s versions for iPhone, Google Android, and Yahoo Widgets.
• Auto-Designed Email Templates: Whenever you create a new email template, MailChimp will visit your website, find your logo, look at your CSS code to determine your brand’s color scheme, fonts, etc., then he’ll automatically design an email template for you that matches your brand. It can be a real time-saver for people who don’t have their own graphic designers on staff. And it’s free!
• E-Commerce Integrations: MailChimp now integrates with Magento, ZenCart, and osCommerce so that you can track sales, conversions, who bought what (and more) from your email campaigns (kind of like our Google Analytics 360 integration). Plus, you don’t have to add code snippets to your website, and you don’t have to “tag” links in your campaigns. It’s all automatic. Just in time for the holidays! Read more about it here.
• New Language added: We’ve added Serbian to our list of languages (thanks to Nate and all our friends at the Serbian Cultural and Arts Center)! We’ve also added a few more “pseudo” languages, just for fun (including “Swedish Chef,” Jive, Hacker, and Elmer Fudd). This brings our list of languages to—honestly, I’ve lost count. Something like 25 or 30.

All of the new features are free to MailChimp customers (they’re already live in your account), and we’ll be posting details, screenshots, and tutorials shortly.

As the first service to offer iPhone and Yahoo! Mobile access for email marketing, we would be remiss in not keeping up with the current trends in mobile technology.  MailChimp is happy to announce that we have extended mobile access to all Google Android devices.  From your T-Mobile G1 (or future Android enabled device), just navigate over to http://m.mailchimp.com and you will be redirected to the account login page.  You can access your campaigns, check stats and even subscribe people on the fly.

You’re welcome.

MailChimp Campaign Stats on iPhone

The guys in the MailChimp Lab have just launched a mini-MailChimp for the iPhone.

MailChimp customers: just go to MailChimp.com on your iPhone and sign in (or go straight to admin.mailchimp.com), then we’ll redirect you to the iPhone version.

It’s not a fully functional MailChimp account where you can create a full blown HTML Email campaign. Think of it as “MailChimp Lite.” It’s a way for you to log in to your account, quickly check the stats (Mmmmm, pie charts) for your recent campaigns, read your “Chimp Chatter” to find out what’s going on with your email marketing, and it’s a handy way to subscribe people you meet (such as at trade shows and events) to your email lists.

Read More