Recently, some of our Twitter followers have noticed MailChimp’s Promoted Tweets.
wow, atlanta’s own @mailchimp ponying up for a promoted tweet — they must be doing alright…
Adam Wexler
thewordpainter
We’ve been experimenting and learning a lot, so we wanted to share our experience in hopes that you’ll find it interesting or useful.
We all know SPAM isn’t just limited to email anymore, especially if you’re a frequent Twitter user. And although Twitter has gotten better in its SPAM catching and annihilation practices, SPAM still manages to show up in the darndest places. Like next to the live stream of your TechCrunch event, let’s say.
Oops, I can’t believe I forgot to mention during the launch of MailChimp v5 that we added tweet tracking to your MailChimp Site Analytics360 report. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a great big button under your MailChimp Reports tab where our Google Analytics users can get the ultimate birds-eye-view of how your email campaigns, CPC campaigns, and referrals influence traffic to your website. All from within MailChimp.
It’s called the Site Analytics360 report, which I used in this blog post to troubleshoot some strange open rate behavior in my email list (see: Why did my open rates change?)
Anyway, now we’re also showing your tweets on the report’s timeline, so you can see if (and how) twitter is affecting your overall site traffic. BTW, if you like stats and reports mashups, and you’re a blogger, you might also enjoy our WordPress Analytics Plugin (more than 23,000 downloads and counting).
A while back, the folks from Flowtown contacted me about how they integrated with MailChimp via our API. To be honest, I wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about Flowtown. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s a service that lets you import an email list, then they cross-reference that data with public social profiles. I definitely understand how that can help a salesperson with a handful of local clients he wants to follow (and that scenario might even be where they got their name and logo). But what about my email marketing list of 25,000? Okay, so I can find out who among my subscribers is on Twitter and Facebook. It might even tell me who’s influential. What now? It’s not like I’m going to bug those subscribers with “more targeted emails” just because they’re “social.” I got one of those emails recently, and I can think of no better way to lose my hard earned subscribers. So I didn’t really think about this Flowtown thing much. Great for 1-to-1 sales, not so much for 1-to-many marketing.
But over time, we added engagement scoring, geotargeting, and the ability to download segments in MailChimp.
The combination of all these new tools changed my outlook completely…
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: