As described in our v6.7 release, we launched some updates to our video merge tags. For those who don’t know about them, our video merge tags are little snippets of code that look like this:

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

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We’re launching some new features in MailChimp today (we’re at v6.7, if anyone’s tracking that kinda stuff). The new features should be completely rolled out to all 1.2 million users across all data centers by early Friday. We start the new features at our US4 data center, then US1, then US2.

Here’s what’s rolling out:

• Automatic video conversion for RSS-to-Email campaigns
• Discount on MailChimp if you use it with AlterEgo
• Static segments: create segments fast by uploading a list of email addresses
• Daily Deals is now an industry category
• GMT +12 timezone support added. Welcome to MailChimp, Republic of Kiribati!

More details and documentation will be posted soon, but if you’d like a general overview…

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We recently introduced a new RSS-to-email merge tag: RSSITEM:SHARE

Using this tag allows your subscribers to share individual articles in your RSS feed, as opposed to sharing the entire email newsletter. So if your code looks like this:

your final emails will look like *this:

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You know you should be sending email newsletters to your clients and customers on a regular basis. But you never find the time to write them, do you?

The truth is, you’ll probably never find the time to sit down and write an email newsletter. That’s exactly why we created MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email tool. It takes content from your blog (or any RSS feed), and sends it as an email newsletter to your subscribers. Automagically.

If you’re a heavy blogger, you’re probably wondering if it’s anything like Feedburner or Feedblitz or the other bajillions of RSS-to-email tools out there. No. Mainly because with MailChimp, you can use your own highly-customized HTML email templates, and we provide open and click tracking, bounce management, list cleaning, spam filter check, and more.

But here’s the part that’ll make you really poop your pants. RSS feeds don’t just come from blogs. Your e-commerce cart probably publishes an inventory RSS feed (think email alerts when products are back in stock). Most event calendar services publish RSS feeds (think event alerts). Social networking sites like Facebook and Ning have RSS feeds. Airfare alerts are often in RSS format. They can all be turned into automated, trackable email campaigns with MailChimp.

Sound interesting? Here’s how to get started…

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Chimpfeedr - Stupid simple RSS mixer

While working on the MailChimp RSS-to-Email tool, we wanted to mash up a bunch of RSS feeds into one huge “master” feed, to test our template designs with lots of content. But we couldn’t find a “stupid-simple” RSS mixer that was easy, free, reliable, and that didn’t require registration.

We came across Yahoo! Pipes, which is amazingly powerful (check out how you can auto-translate your RSS-emails in the latest issue of MonkeyWrench). But Yahoo! Pipes is a little complex for the average blogger.

So we said “screw it, let’s just make our own and post it.”

Introducing: ChimpFeedr

Just feed MailChimp a bunch of RSS URLs (you can simply type the domain of the blog, and we’ll hunt for the exact URL of the RSS feed) and then hit the “CHOMP” button. Done.

Now you’ve got a master RSS feed that you can add to your RSS reader, or send via email with MailChimp.

BTW, the underlying technology here will be worked into MailChimp shortly, so you can combine all your company’s different RSS feeds into one handy HTML email message. Look for it in an upcoming MailChimp upgrade.

RSS what? Learn more about MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool.