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.
In celebration of of our Forever Free Plan, we wanted to launch a promotional t-shirt giveaway. Free email marketing, free t-shirts.. makes sense right? In the marketing world they call it synergy, but it just seemed like a great way to help spread the word about MailChimp while celebrating our users at the same time.
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
One thing we do with our @mailchimp twitter account is we tag our favorite tweets from customers. For example, if someone tweets something like this:
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…
MailChimp is chock full of social features and integrations to make it easier to share with your network. And according to industry benchmark studies, social share links increase both the reach and the click rate of email campaigns. If you’re not using these features yet, you might want to consider checking them out.
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.
A couple days ago I mentioned the interesting use of flickr in Steve’s App Sketchbook email campaign. This morning I got this Halloween-ish email from ChoppingBlock that also used flickr in an interesting way: they invite you to post a high-res image from flickr to your blog, to see if you can name all the spooky characters in their latest tshirt:
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!
