click to view large

During a recent update, we added the ability to include RSS feeds inside of both regular and A/B split campaign types. This is great if you want to add a feed of your most recent blog posts to the side column of your newsletter, for example.

In order to create the campaign shown above, I started out by selecting Create Campaign ==> Regular Ol’ Campaign in my MailChimp dashboard. In step 3 I chose the 3:1 Start From Scratch template because I knew I’d be showcasing meaty, longer form content in the body of my email before pulling in my RSS feeds below.

Read More

We’ve added a new merge tag in MailChimp that lets you insert Facebook’s like button in your campaigns: *|FACEBOOK:LIKE|*

The Like button has two functions: 1) it enables users to make connections to your page, and, as we’ve implemented it here, 2) to share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click.

Once you add it to your campaign, the button looks like this:

Read More

We’ve implemented a new merge tag that allows you to quickly gauge subscriber sentiment about a question or issue, using a rating scale of 1-10. This is a great little addition for all sorts of different users. Imagine you’re a restaurant that just launched a new lunch menu. Why not ask people how they’re enjoying it? Or if you’re an auto shop, you could ask how likely your subscribers are to recommend you to a friend. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Read More

In the latest MailChimp upgrade we developed an easy way for you to add a table of contents to your newsletter.

The * | MC:TOC | *  dynamic merge tag works by pulling anything from your email that is formatted as Title text, and displaying it as an ordered list complete with bullet points. Each item in your table of contents is then anchor linked to the corresponding blurb in your email.

To add a table of contents to your email, simply insert * | MC:TOC | * where you’d like the contents listing to appear. In the example screen shots you can see that I added some Title text (“In this edition of The MonkeyWrench”), and then added the merge tag below it.

You can also insert a Table of Contents in either the right or left column of a two-column template and the merge tag will work exactly the same way.

(I’ve used extra spaces between the elements of the merge tag so that it will render correctly for those who subscribe to the RSS-to-Email version of the blog.)

Here’s a video of some neat things you can do with MailChimp’s merge tags (formatting tricks, dynamic content based on interests, etc):

also see: Personalizing your welcome emails w/merge tags