We’re happy to report that early last week we pushed a change to the Facebook app that will automatically scale your MailChimp signup form to fit the new custom tab dimensions. There’s no need to reinstall the app or alter your signup form from within MailChimp so no worries, mates!

Having your subscribe form connected to your Page is especially useful because it keeps your Fans from having to leave Facebook, or even your page, to sign up for your list. When you make things easy for your Fans and followers, they’re more likely to take action. And since they don’t have to leave Facebook, this makes your page more interactive and more sticky with very little additional effort.

And installing our new application (as opposed to employing the aforementioned hack) is nice because it’ll pull in your list’s actual signup form design (so go make ‘em pretty). But if you’re still not convinced and want to see what it looks like in action, you can check out how we’ve set it up on the MailChimp Fan Page.

Installing and Setting up The App

To get started, we’ll be connecting to MailChimp from within Facebook. Sounds a bit counterintuitive, but bear with me. Head over to Facebook, where you’ll find the MailChimp Signup Application.

When the Application’s profile loads, click ‘Go to Application’.

Next, you want to click “install”, which will ask you to  authenticate your Facebook login credentials and allow the application to have access to your Facebook account.

Then, connect by filling in your MailChimp username and password.

Finally, go ahead and select the list that you want your subscribers added to:

Adding A Signup Form to Your Personal Profile

This part of the set up process involves adding a form to your personal profile. Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, and then go to Account (top right) ==> Application Settings.

‘Add’ the MailChimp application as a tab.

Click “Okay” and you’ll see a dialogue that let’s you know you’ve successfully linked a MailChimp list to your personal Facebook profile. Head over to your profile page to make sure:

Adding A Signup Form to Your Fan Page

First of all you need to make sure you have a Page associated with your Facebook account (you need to have Page admin privileges). Note: this won’t work for Groups.

Head over to the MailChimp Facebook Application page. The best way to find it again (after you’ve already connected your MailChimp account with Facebook) is going to Account ==> Applications Settings, and then clicking on the “profile” of the MailChimp application.

Next, click “add to my page”:

and then select which Page you’d like to add it to (if you administer multiple Facebook Pages). Then you’ll need to navigate over to your Page to manage the application settings (Account ==> Manage Pages). Then click “edit page” so that you can see the list of all the Facebook applications installed on your page.

Click “Application Settings” in order to add a signup form Tab. (Although you’ll see an option for adding the application as a Box, it is not currently available as such.) Additionally, you’ll need to choose “edit” in order to select which list you want to associate with your Fan Page.

Head back to your page and you should now see an Email Signup tab on your Fan Page. Additionally, if you don’t like the position of the tab, you can drag it to reorder.

Autoposting to Facebook

Once you’ve connected your MailChimp account to Facebook, you should have the ability to autopost your email campaign to either your profile, or any fan pages linked to your Facebook account:

When you hit the 10,000 fan mark, Facebook gives you access to new and exciting metrics for your wall posts– impressions (the number of times a story has been seen on your wall and in the news feed of your fans) and feedback (the number of comments and likes per impression), which provides a rough approximation of how engaging your content is. These Insights show up for the page admin when you mouse-over.

They’ve also implemented a much improved Insights dashboard where you can view all your Page, Application, and website analytics, and this is available regardless of the number of fans you have. The Insights dashboard provides more data than before, plus a host of new visualization tools including the ability to view full screen, print, and save graphs. These visualization tools are pretty handy if you need images for a presentation or report, or just want to show your aging boss with the bad eyes a full screen version so she can read it more easily.

Here’s a peek at our Daily Active Fans graph (above).

On a somewhat related note, here’s an interesting little stat I discovered while digging through Google Analytics recently. Referrals from facebook.com account for 13.20% of all visits to campaign-archive.com, which is the domain that hosts the archived version of the email campaigns you send. According to the data, only 5.70% of traffic comes from Twitter, which is the next highest referrer.

Based on the numbers, it looks like Twitter users are slightly more engaged though, spending an average of 41 seconds on the site versus Facebook users’ 36 seconds.

It’s hard for me to believe that we ever thought it would be difficult to give away 1,000 tshirts. On September 10th when we launched the promotion, all 100 shirts we made available were claimed within two and a half minutes. That’s one tshirt every 1.5 seconds. I was well aware that people love MailChimp, but it was amazing to witness in that way.

For the sake of comparison, I’ll tell you that when we announced Freemium pricing on September 1st, I recorded 425 tweets containing the term “mailchimp”. On average, that’s one tweet mentioning MailChimp every 3.5 minutes, and it was the highest explicable one-day tweet volume we had seen up to that point.

A few days later on September 10th when we began giving away tshirts, I recorded 244 tweets mentioning “mailchimp”. Free tshirts literally created more than half the amount of buzz as our announcement of a new pricing model. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

Fulfillment

To state the obvious, it takes a lot of time and numerous pairs of opposable thumbs to pack 1,000 t-shirts. So when we started seeing tweets from people getting impatient that they hadn’t received their shirts yet, we got the whole office involved. Below, Mark from Marketing is camped out next to our catered burrito lunch. If you ended up with some inexplicable grains of rice or a few shriveled black beans in your package, just think of it as a holiday bonus!

Paul the Unicorn Intern even helped out! Even though he had zero opposable thumbs to contribute to the cause.

The real hero in all of this is our office manager April. She developed what you might call a rather special relationship with the employees at the post office down the block. Apparently they have a rarely enforced rule that you can only mail fifteen parcels at a time. And since April was a “chronic offender,” she had to endure dirty looks and lots of attitude while spending hours at a time standing in line, sending her fifteen parcels, and then standing in line again. But it was all for you, dear customers!

Pro tip from Co-Founders Dan Kurzius and Ben Chestnut: “We stuck our business cards in with a some of the packages to get feedback from people.”

I Wish We Had…

1. There are a few things I think we could improve on or do differently in the future. I would like to have some sort of “remaining t-shirts” counter that actually refreshed its numbers in real time as folks filled in the form. Since the tshirts were repeatedly being claimed within minutes of tweeting that they were available, I think it would have been reassuring for people who were trying to win one but weren’t having any luck.

Kind of an affirmation that yes, we really are giving away tshirts and no, this is not some kind of exercise in frustration or just a hoax. Ultimately, a counter would have added an additional element of credibility for those less familiar with the MailChimp brand.

2. Another thing that we didn’t do the first time around but implemented with our winter promo was using the Google Analytics URL builder to create custom links each time we tweeted that shirts were available.

Since the link that the Google Analytics URL Builder spits out is a long beast of a thing, I ran it through eepurl.com (our in-house URL shortener) to get a short, sweet, custom link that I could then tweet and track.

3. It would also have been a good idea to start collecting email addresses of people interested in hearing about tshirts and other MailChimp swag in the future. Particularly when the form was turned “off” and basically just lying dormant.

We did this for our winter promo, but I wish it was something we had implemented earlier.

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some related posts you might be interested in checking out:

• Using Posterous to Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• App Sketchbook uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitter To Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter Signup Form to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Twitter-to-email Tutorial
• How MailChimp Uses CoTweet

Our goal wasn’t necessarily to amass more Twitter followers or Facebook fans just for the sake of increasing our follower count. After all, with both Twitter and Facebook the number of fans or followers you have isn’t significant in any real way. Sure, the more fans you have the larger the group of people who will see your message, but that doesn’t necessarily dictate their level of interaction/engagement with your brand or business.

Chart showing a 42% increase in our Facebook fan growth

During the brainstorming process, our t-shirt promotion idea went through a bunch of different iterations. In a nut shell, we didn’t want to do anything spammy that might piss off Twitter (a la the #moonfruit debacle), or worse yet, annoy our users. As Chief Twitter Officer (CTO) around these parts, I’m particularly protective of MailChimp as a brand as well as our public perception. Not to mention the fact that my ass was on the line considering I’d be the first to hear about it if the t-shirt giveaway was not properly executed and managed.

a small selection of the people we sent shirts to

Let’s face it, asking people to re-tweet your message and include a hashtag is unoriginal and boring, not to mention really annoying. And it would be especially problematic for a brand like MailChimp that uses Twitter as a support channel for users. Think of all the questions and customer love we’d miss out on due to the influx of promotional tweets.

Anatomy of A Promo

We came up the idea to work with the chimps downstairs in the MailChimp DesignLab™ to create a landing page for our t-shirt giveaway. The page would have two basic modes– on, meaning the name/address/t-shirt size form fields were visible and able to be filled in, and off. The DesignLab™ would build a simple back end for the page using PHP and MySQL that would allow me to login, turn the form on or off, and export a CSV file of everyone who had successfully reserved a shirt. I would make the shirts available in batches of 50, which was just an arbitrary set number that we decided on– not too big and not too small.

t-shirt form in 'off' mode (click for full size image)

We asked our users to follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook so that we could notify them (by tweeting or posting a status update with a link on our fan page) when a new batch of t-shirts became available.

t-shirt form 'on' (click image to view large)

People Love Free Stuff

It turns out that people love free stuff. Especially well designed, awesome looking free tshirts. In Part II of this post, we’ll be delving into more charts and graphs, analyzing what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned the second time around.

One-click Social Share

We’ve made it super simple to connect MailChimp with Twitter, allowing you to automatically tweet a link to your campaign as soon as you hit the send button. Just go to your Account settings, and click on Integrations. Under Twitter, just click the big authorize connection button and oAuth will take it from there. This is a safer and better way of integrating with Twitter because it means you no longer have to enter your Twitter username and password directly into MailChimp.

It’s also a snap to share your email using Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Digg or Delicious using our social share feature. In your Campaigns list, just click on the “social share” link underneath the email you’d like to share with your network.

You’ll be taken to an intermediate screen (which will open in a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your web browser configured) where you’ll need to enter your username and password for the service, and then voila! Easy peasy.

Twitter Template

Are you a social media power user who wants to be able to include your Twitter identity as part of your email campaign branding? If so, the Twitter template is perfect for you.

When you go to create your email campaign, you’ll want to select the “new email” tab when it’s time to select your template. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the Twitter template.

On the next screen (the campaign builder), you’ll see that MailChimp visits your twitter page, and automatically pulls in your colors and background image:

When you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve included a new Twitter merge tag in the right hand column. Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.

Then when you click on “pop up preview,” we’ll show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:

Tracking Twitter Tweets & Re-tweets

As you probably already know, every time you finish a MailChimp campaign and send it off, you can post a link to the campaign archive on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. In order to make this work on Twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted their email campaigns. So we did that, and you can now access those stats through the Reports tab in your MailChimp Dashboard.

1. How many people tweeted about the campaign
2. How many people re-tweeted
3. Who the tweeters are
4. Timeline of tweetage from original tweet

Social Site Merge Tags

We’ve made it super easy to insert social sharing links into your emails with just a simple merge tag.

So instead of having to go grab icons and links individually for sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, you can just add *|MC:SHARE |* wherever you’d like your social links to appear.

If you only want to include certain social sites, there’s also a way to do that using MailChimp’s merge tags.

Here’s how…

*|SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2| *

So for example, to just include Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Digg, you would insert the code:

*|SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg| *

Resulting in the following:

Eventbrite Integration

We’re excited to announce that MailChimp has partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in Eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp. Ben wrote an excellent tutorial that covers all the nitty gritty details about the integration, so I won’t go into all that here.

Essentially though, you can create and sell tickets using Eventbrite. Then design a great looking invitation using MailChimp, track ticket sales and stats, and even create follow up emails using Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools!

We think this video shows how excited we are about this, and why you should be too! (warning: there’s smooching involved):

Video Merge Tag

If you want to include a link to a video on Vimeo, YouTube or Blip.tv, we’ve got a new merge tag to help save you time. It’ll automatically generate a screenshot of the embedded video player, which will link to the location of the video online.

Just use:

*|YOUTUBE:xxxx| *
*|VIMEO:xxxx| *
*|BLIPTV:xxxx| *

Where “xxxx” is the unique video identifier at the end of each link.

J—aiyznGQ in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—aiyznGQ

2753436 in:

http://blip.tv/file/2753436

6223439 in:

The resulting email will look like this:

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some additional posts you might find interesting:

• Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Trends in Email: Sharing Via Facebook and Twitter
• Using Posterous To Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• Using Facebook Fan Pages in Conjunction With Email
• App Sketchbook Uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitterkeys and Special Characters For Email Marketing

With a full-blown WordPress blog, in addition to our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you might be wondering why in the world I’d want another site to maintain. The simple answer: the more I use Posterous, the more I love it! — Especially for the particular niche it serves. (more on that after the jump)

I like to think of Posterous as a miniblog– something that gives you greater freedom of expression than Twitter’s 140 characters (known as microblogging), but often is shorter and more sketchy than a fully fleshed out WordPress post. One of my favorite Posterous features is autoposting, which allows you to link any content you send to Posterous with sites like your Facebook page or Twitter stream. The autopost feature currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress and Xanga, with more integrations on the way.

For MailChimp, I’ve made the decision to only link Posterous to our Facebook Fan Page. So when I’m finding and adding content, our Facebook Fans are the audience that I generally have in mind.

So you might be wondering: but MailChimp, now that you have over 3,500 Facebook fans, how do you make sure your content is relevant to everyone?

The candid answer is that I don’t. I have to assume that if someone becomes a MailChimp fan, they’re interested in what we have to say. Much like email marketing, becoming a fan is a way of opting-in. In the case of Facebook, this means that someone is electing to receive updates from MailChimp in their home feed. (Side Note: Facebook does give you the option of hiding updates from a particular person or page if you find the number of updates annoying or excessive.)

As far as the content is concerned, often times I’ll post information and photos about what’s going on in our office (chimps are people too, you know!), links to interesting articles about design, small business and entrepreneurship, and even the occasional funny monkey photo.

Two things that have worked well for driving engagement on Facebook (measured in terms of “likes” and comments) by way of Posterous have been 1) making sure to maintain variety in the type of links and content posted, and 2) not treating the Posterous to Facebook autopost feature as “set it and forget it.” How can you expect people to engage with your business or brand– on Facebook, Twitter or your blog– if you don’t maintain an active presence there? I’ve made a habit of consistently responding to what our fans and followers have to say and have noticed a measurable correlation in their level of engagement thanks to Facebook Page Insights. So after posting something to Posterous and properly tagging it (I like to keep things categorized and organized), I head over to Facebook to see what, if anything, our fans are saying about it.

A fan page is it’s own little ecosystem, and it needs to be nurtured and treated that way. This becomes even more important if you’re feeding content into it from auxiliary sources.