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.

When we were first given access to the Promoted Tweets beta, I spent lots of time brainstorming with Ben and our marketing team. We wanted to be sure that if we were going to run any tweet campaigns, they absolutely wouldn’t annoy our users or reflect poorly on the MailChimp user experience.

Our first idea was to align our Promoted Tweets to a particular event that we were sponsoring, like the dodgeball Tournament of Chimpions, part of the Interlink Conference in Vancouver. The idea was to login to Twitter and set up a promoted campaign targeting the #interlinkconf hashtag, and have it run through the duration of the event. This means that anytime someone searched Twitter for #interlinkconf, they’d see MailChimp’s promoted tweet at the top of the list. Kind of like this:

The problem with promoting tweets that have a definite start and end time, however, is that they come and go and are easy to forget to schedule. (D’oh!) And while we missed out on a number of event-based opportunities, we did have some fun with this promoted tweet for An Event Apart Atlanta:

Most people attending the event found this amusing, but one fellow wasn’t so pleased:

Fast forward to sometime last week when we noticed that a competitor was creating Promoted Tweets and bidding on our brand name as a keyword. That’s not really a big deal in and of itself, since it’s the kind of thing that happens with Google Adwords all the time. But the content of these particular tweets was unsavory and misleading, and literally had nothing to do with MailChimp. So we did what any self-respecting brand would do, and started our own little “brand integrity” Promoted Tweets campaign.

Overall, the effects seem positive. We’ve got a nice place to highlight useful tips or blog posts, and when people retweet them, that provides some extra brand exposure perhaps leading to some new followers. Increasing our follower count definitely isn’t our goal though, and we genuinely want to provide useful information about using MailChimp that you may not be aware of. Furthermore, since the lifespan of a typical tweet is relatively short, I’m making sure to update the promoted content every 48 hours or so.

Haters Gonna Hate

As I mentioned before, the biggest challenge we’ve faced with Promoted Tweets has been the annoyance factor. If you’re at a conference and have an ongoing Twitter search for a particular hashtag that we’ve purchased as a keyword, the Promoted Tweet can encroach on screen real estate. The problem becomes exacerbated if you’re using an iPad or netbook, since those have even fewer on-screen pixels available.

And this guy got pretty pissed off about the whole Promoted Tweets thing in general, so we went ahead and shared the backstory via LongReply. But overall, the response has been positive and people seem to enjoy learning about the neat little MailChimp hacks we share.

There are two ways that SPAM can make its way into this feed– either by using the #tcdisrupt hashtag when you send your spammy tweet out into the world, or by logging into your Twitter account through the event’s Twitter Chat and posting it directly.

The fact that spammers would want to target the event is simply a numbers game. Trending topics, especially when there’s a hashtag associated, mean a lot of people are watching or paying attention. Eyeballs mean potential clicks, and that’s exactly what Twitter spammers are after.

So what can you do about it?

Use a curation platform that gives you (the event organizer) more control over what’s being displayed, and more importantly, what isn’t. One company that’s providing an innovative solution in the curation space is TweetRiver. Another option is to roll your own aggregator, like the elegantly executed A Feed Apart. My personal prediction? Annotation and curation will be one of the next explosive areas of growth within the Twitter ecosystem. Apps, plugins, you name it.

On a final note, Marketing Ninja Amy and Client Relations Rock Star Lance are actually in New York right now representing MailChimp at TechCrunch Disrupt. If you’re there, please say hello!

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).

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…

Okay, first things first.

This stuff is new. There are “experts” riding on the social bandwagon who recommend you send targeted offers to the more “social” members on your list, because they might be “more viral.” I can see that working once. Not twice. Forget that. Social media is not about spamming people just because you found them on twitter (“hey, I’m on twitter too!”). Social networking is about — well, being social.

Thing is, I’m not a very social guy. I’ve been called “snuffleupagus” by someone in the email industry (and I really, really, love that name, DJ) because I rarely go to email marketing events. Or any event for that matter. So on those rare occasions when I do go somewhere, I need all the help I can get.

Facebook (no, an actual face book)

For example, I’m going to be speaking at an event in San Francisco next month. Now, I’m absolutely horrible with names, but I’m great with faces and even better with company names. It would be great if I could invite my customers who live in San Francisco (or within a 50 mile radius around the city) to attend that event. Maybe give away a guest pass, or send them a discount code. And if they do attend, it would be awesome if I could recognize them. Maybe even memorize a stat or two about them or their company (yes, I actually do that).

So I log in to MailChimp, go to my Lists tab, click on my “MailChimp Newsletters” list (which I assume only my loyal customers would actually subscribe to) click “view all members,” and run this segment:

These are my most engaged subscribers to my MailChimp Newsletter list, who live within 50 miles of San Francisco (using our new geolocation service). Sending them an invitation is super easy now. But wait.

Notice the Excel icon there? I can download this segment. Then, I imported it to Flowtown, and created a new group with this list called, “engaged subscribers in SF.” It churns away for a few minutes (about 2 seconds per email address), and I get something like this:

Each one of those icons is clickable. Yeah, that’s pretty cool, right?

Anyway, the first thing I do here is ignore Facebook. It’s not like I’m going to try to “friend” all these people. That’s just annoying.

But I do click into a bunch of profiles to learn more about my subscribers. Before you begin, you might want to sort “by Klout,” which is a service that scores people based on how connected they are. I’m not that interested in their connectedness, but I’ve found that the higher their rank, the more likely they are to have more of a public social profile (more pics to look at). Click the little “K” logo, and boom:

Once I see the most connected people sorted towards the top, I open them all in new browser tabs.

Mainly, I look at their twitter avatars. I always want to see what my subscribers look like, “IRL” as the kids say.

When I click into a profile, it looks something like this:

What Flowtown knows about yours truly

Wow, that guy’s handsome! Okay, that’s just me, but imagine a page like that for every one of your email subscribers. You can learn so much about your readers this way. I opened up a couple dozen tabs in my browser all at once, and just clicked through them, memorizing faces and business information of my subscribers.

I actually recognized quite a few faces from a little happy hour that we threw in SF a few months ago. Makes sense. They’re customers, they’re engaged, so they’re most likely to attend one of our events. I wish we had these tools back when we actually threw the event!

So I spent most of my time learning about those customers. I remembered a lot from talking with them over some drinks and food. I remember some were new, some had been with us since 2005. Some were non-profits, some were startups. Flowtown refreshed my memory of those customers. I made a mental note that if our DesignLab creates new t-shirts, we should send these guys the first run.

Segment by Gender, Age, Location

Speaking of t-shirts, we recently ran a promotion where we gave away 1,000 MailChimp t-shirts via twitter, facebook, and email (we learned a lot;  here’s the case study). Anyway, on our t-shirt promo landing page, we collected emails from people who wanted to be notified when we had more t-shirts available. I’ve actually integrated that “t-shirts list” with Flowtown, so that in MailChimp, we can segment our list based on gender. Really handy if we have a ton of extra ladies shirts. Here’s a segment I created by gender from that list:

Flowtown integration also lets me segment by age and location, too. So if I want to send our whacky wolf-meme shirts to a younger female crowd, but only want to pay for shipping in the states, I can do that:

You’ll notice that the segmentation criteria above start with FT-. That tells you it’s pulling that data in from Flowtown. This is really handy information. I can print this list and ship t-shirts to them as a surprise. Or, use the segment to send a quick, personal note asking them for their t-shirt sizes, shipping address, etc. I’d most likely ask them to fill out a Wufoo or Formspring form (they both integrate with MailChimp too, btw) with that info, so I can very easily print shipping labels with them.

Okay, where were we?

Oh yeah, I was looking at loyal subscribers in San Francisco in preparation of this event I’m speaking at…

For some of the profiles on my list, I could click to see their flickr photosets and learn a little more about their interests. By the way, I spend a significant portion of my days watching customers talk to us on Tweetdeck, and I often click into their twitter profiles, then to their company websites, about pages, linkedin profiles, and on and on. Just helps me understand my customer. Flowtown makes this process much easier, especially with their flickr integration:

I see some customers are into cars. Awesome. I’m like Rain Man when it comes to memorizing cars, so I can talk about classic Porsches with one customer, and GT-Rs with another. Some are into travel, some are foodies, and some like parrots. Note to self: include parrots in a future email newsletter.

Demographic Insights

One nice feature in Flowtown is their “Contact Insights” link. It shows me general demographic information about the San Francisco segment that I imported:

Just for kicks, I imported a segment of my most engaged subscribers from the Atlanta area and compared them:

It looks like San Francisco has more people in the 55+ age bracket than Atlanta. Hmm. I would’ve thunk they were all 20-somethings building the next big twitter over there. Upon closer inspection of profiles, I realize that San Franciscans just lie more often in their social profiles than Atlantans.

For example, I know this guy’s not 55:

So yeah, as with all stats, take these with a grain of salt.

Flowtown Helps You Write Better Content

You know what the secret to being a good email marketer is? Send useful stuff. Don’t have anything useful to send? Shut up until you do. That’s all I have to say about email marketing anymore (see why I don’t go to email marketing events?).

Anyway, one secret to sending useful stuff is to know what your subscribers like.

MailChimp’s reports already help you see what links people are clicking in your newsletters. Over time, you can tailor your content to their tastes. MailChimp will even show you where they’re opening from on a map, so you can decide whether or not you should include, say, automagic translation options for your campaigns.

But when you combine MailChimp with Flowtown, you get even more insight about your subscribers. Down to a one-to-one, human level.

Flowtown Helps You Be More Social

What do I mean by “more human level?” Well, I currently use Tweetdeck to monitor mentions of @mailchimp, and I always take note of who (in my hometown of Atlanta) tweets something about @mailchimp.

But Flowtown makes this process so much easier.

I can segment my MailChimp subscriber list like this:

and just generate a big report in Flowtown, then look at all those faces.

Here’s the human part I was talking about. When I’m out and about, and I see one of those subscribers — um, people at the local coffee shop, I buy them a drink (yes, I actually do that). If I run into them at a meetup, and I recognize their avatar — um, their face, it’s much easier to start up a conversation with them. If one of them invites me to sponsor some local event, I just might be more likely to do that. And if one of them works for an advertising agency, and she invites me to come in and pitch our services, even though we’re a completely do-it-yourself product with 260,000 users and I haven’t given any form of pitch whatsoever in years (and all my dress shirts are in boxes somewhere), I absolutely go! Why? I just want to learn who my customers are, so I can write more useful content for them, or build more useful features into our product. Also, to thank them for being a subscriber. IRL.

Basically, be more social.

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:

* um, without the ginormous red arrows.

It’s a nice, easy way to make sharing specific articles in your emails easier.

Previously, the only option was to share the entire email.

Note that if you just use our

RSSITEM:SHARE

tag all by itself, we’ll include a bunch of social network icons.

If you prefer to limit the choices to, say, three networks (like in my screenshot), you can do this:

RSSITEM:SHARE:Facebook, Twitter, Digg

And here’s the list of options:

• BlinkList
• Delicious
• Design Float
• Digg
• DZone
• Facebook
• Google
• LinkedIn
• MisterWong
• Mixx
• MySpace
• Netvouz
• NewsVine
• Propeller
• Reddit
• Slashdot
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• Webnews.de
• YahooMyWeb

If you’re going to be tweaking merge tags and RSS campaign templates, here are some other features you might want to try:

• Twitter template and merge tags let you pull recent tweets, profile info into your email sidebars. Merge tags on this cheatsheet
• Turning twitter faves into RSS-emails
• Official MailChimp Merge Tag Guidebook

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.

You "fav a tweet" by clicking the little star in the corner

we click the little “favorite” star, and it gets saved in our list of favorites. It’s basically like bookmarking a web page, but for tweets. We then dynamically pull those favs into our MailChimp website (such as on our testimonials page). On the side, we’ll occasionally send those nice tweets around the office by email.

Then Amanda, our Chief Twitter Officer, realized something cool: all our favorites are available via RSS feed, so we can actually use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool to automatically send twittermonials to our entire team. Here’s how…

First, you’ll need to start fav’ing some tweets. If you’d prefer, you might even setup a totally separate twitter account just to stalk your main account, and fav all the nice tweets that mention your brand. Anyway, once you’ve got some favs saved, click on the “favorites” link in your twitter account:

Then you’ll be taken to your favorites list. BTW, I liked it better when they spelled it “favourites” didn’t you? Seemed more international.

Anyway, once you’re looking at your favorites list, scroll down the right column and look for this link:

That’s the RSS feed of all your favorites. Click it, and copy the URL in your address bar so you can paste it into MailChimp.

Take that, and build an RSS-to-email campaign in MailChimp.

I’m not going to go through all those steps, because I’ve already written up a HUGE tutorial for that over here. So go read that, then come back.

Okay, all done? That was a great article, wasn’t it?

If you actually read it, you’d know that our RSS-to-email campaigns will only pull your most recent updates into the email. So for example, if you schedule this to go out daily, we’ll only show the favorite tweets from the last day. And so on and so forth for weekly/monthly updates.

Now for the next step: make it pretty.

Using MailChimp’s Twitter Template

Now that you know how to setup an RSS-to-email campaign, let’s focus on the actual design of the email messages.

You could use any of our email templates in combination with our RSS merge tags to manually build a nice email, but one shortcut is to just use our new built-in twitter template.

It’ll basically pull in the design (colors, background images, your avatar, etc) from your twitter profile, and create a matching email newsletter.

Here’s a tutorial on how to use the new twitter template, and here’s what my resulting email looks like:

as you can see, it pulls in some cool data from our main @mailchimp twitter account, like most recent tweets, and # of followers.

Now that we’ve got the feed working and the design nice and tight, we just ask all our employees (who want these updates) to signup to the list.

Of course they could just follow mentions of “mailchimp” in a tweetdeck column or something (which I still do as well), but not everybody in the company is on twitter that often. Occasional, automatic emails in your inbox with nice comments about our product make the dev team happy. Nice tweets about our customer service make the customer support team happy.

Perhaps you wouldn’t want to do this with your favorite tweets, but it works with any twitter RSS feed. Maybe you want to create a regular email campaign of your week’s tweets. Maybe you want to email yourself someone else’s recent tweets. You could even mash up several different feeds (with Chimpfeedr) and then use that with our rss-to-email tool.

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

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!