When you take a screenshot of an app on your smartphone, it looks so boring, doesn’t it? Before you use that screenshot on your website or blog, you usually want it inside a shiny iPhone or Android body. So now you have to go Googl’ing around for an iPhone image, open one up in Photoshop, lay your guidelines, splice in your screenshot, and export it. Complete pain in the android.
So we built a tool that does all that automagically for you:
MailChimp offers great built-in campaign reports, but high-volume senders who are especially concerned with their list size might be looking for more detailed analytics on their lists, as opposed to individual campaigns. This stuff’s important—especially if you’re sending campaigns daily, and your business revolves around email. A closer look at your list’s health can help you understand your subscribers’ behavior and make sense of MailChimp’s campaign reports. What percentage of your list is opening your emails? What about the click rate for your “power users” list? Is the open rate better when you send on Sundays or Mondays? MailChimp Labs created a new app called ListMD to answer these questions and more.
When the MailChimp user list was small, it was fun sending out campaigns and then receiving replies in my personal inbox, because I’d occasionally have nice little conversations with customers. But now our list has grown to 1.6 million recipients. That means every time we send an email out, I get a little more than 10,000 “away on vacation” auto-replies that I have to sift through, only to find about 10-20 actual replies from humans. OMG. Sure, I have a bunch of mail rules that help, but that doesn’t change the fact that my inbox is getting totally hammered for the next few days. So what’s a sender with a large list to do? Use a @donotreply email address? That’s so inhuman (and can have some unexpected consequences). We thought there had to be a smarter way to deal with auto-replies.
So we built ReplyTo. It’s an app that analyzes all the auto-replies you get from your email campaigns and forwards only the human replies to your inbox.
And it can do a lot more than that.
In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.
The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.
This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…
The nerds in MailChimp Labs just unveiled a new experiment called the Subject Line Suggester. It’s kind of like Google’s Keyword Tool, but for email marketing. It’s a free feature for all MailChimp users.
You basically enter some words or phrases that you were planning to use in your subject line, then MailChimp will compare it to all subject lines ever used in our system, their resulting open rates, and then tell you how they performed.
For example, let’s say you want to send a holiday campaign, with the subject line “Holiday Gift Ideas:”
When you create a campaign, look for this link!
Hmm, maybe you’d like MailChimp to suggest other words or phrases…
