If you code this into your email content:

It’ll look like this when you actually send the campaign:

It’s a great way to give your most recent subscribers access to your past content. Note that it pulls the subject lines from your 5 previous campaigns. Also, you can change it to any number, like: *|LIST:RECENT3|*, *|LIST:RECENT10|*, *|LIST:RECENT20|*, etc., if you’d like to change it from the default 5.

Speaking of past campaigns, learn how to embed our free campaign archive module onto your own website

Our first “baby step” in that direction is our recent integration with Salesforce.com and Highrise (37signals’ CRM product). If you’re a MailChimp user, you can now give us your Salesforce or Highrise information, and we’ll import your customers into a list, so you can send an email campaign to them (and track opens, clicks, etc).

We call this a “baby step” because for now, it’s a one-way conversation. In future releases, we’ll introduce functionality to sync data “both ways.” Stay tuned.

Batchbook is an exception to all this. Their CRM is MailChimp-ready right out of the box, so the integration is easy and seamless (check out their demo video here). You can quickly build segments within Batchbook by searching your customer “tags” and “super tags.” Then, you pass the list over to MailChimp with the click of a button. MailChimp gives them two opposable thumbs up!

We just made that easy. Go to the Campaigns Tab, and look for this sharing icon:

Click that link, and we’ll take you to a page where you can directly post a link to Twitter (we’ll even shorten the URL for you with our own MailChimpy “eepurl.com”). It’s a nice time saver, so you don’t have to go find the Campaign-Archive link for your campaign, shorten it in TinyURL, login to Twitter, etc.

If you’re logged in to Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Magnolia or Delicious, you can also easily post a link to your campaign there.

Here’s an example from super-awesome MailChimp user The Secret Chocolatier:

It’s a great way to see where people click. Mostly near the top? Do they like pictures of products, or text links? Do different types of pictures get more clicks?

By the way, you should totally try The Secret Chocolatier’s Brownie Bites. Oh. Maggod.

Just look for the “add-a-field” buttons on the right side of the List Form Designer (here’s a demo video):

Update: And if our new visual form designer still doesn’t quite do it for you, go build a beautiful form in Wufoo, then link it to your MailChimp list.

But if you’re a developer, there are some pretty cool advanced tricks that you can use behind the scenes.

Advanced Trick #1: CSS Stylesheets for Email Campaigns:

Have you ever heard of stylesheets for printer-friendly versions of web pages? You can do that for your email campaigns, too. Just use media type = email.

When MailChimp grabs the URL to build your email, we’ll find the email-specific stylesheet, and use that instead.

Advanced Trick #2: Conditional Content for Email:

When you publish content to your website that you’d also like to use for your email marketing campaigns, you’ll probably want to embed hidden content that only appears in your email campaigns, but not on your website.

For example,most email campaigns have a different “footer” than you’d have in a web page (with the unsubscribe link, can-spam stuff, etc). Obviously, you’d only want that email footer to appear in your email campaigns.

Just use conditional statements like this:

Okay, so using “MailChimp” is a bit gratuitous. We just couldn’t resist.

But in the interest of turning this into an actually useful standard that other email services could do, you can also just use “email” in your code, like this (case insensitive):

Both “mailchimp” and the more generic “email” would be recognized by MailChimp.

Examples:

I asked Chad, our lead engineer, for examples of when you’d want to use these advanced tricks. Here’s what he gave me (the ones I could understand, at least):

• Use the media=email stylesheet to override your website’s top navigation and replace it with an email-friendly top navigation (without the fancy JavaScript hovers that fail in email programs).
• CSS positioning doesn’t work well in most email programs. So common 2-column webpage layouts based on “floats” won’t work in your email campaigns. In your email-version, eliminate the side column from your web page entirely (or use conditional statements to switch to table formats if you want to get really hairy with the code)
• Use conditional statements and email-specific stylesheets to totally hide “side column bars” that appear on your website that you don’t want in your emails.
• Use conditional statements to add “Dear *|FNAME|*,” to the top of your content. That’s admittedly a simple example, but any of our merge tags would work. Like the “translate content” and “share this with others” or the “see most recent campaigns” merge tags.

Select the “Import from URL” tab when you build a MailChimp campaign, then give us the URL to your web page. We’ll surf across the world wide cybertubes, grab the web page, turn it into an HTML email, and then stick a proper unsubscribe link in the footer (if you didn’t already put one there).

Be sure to read Part 2 of this feature for Advanced Tricks (email stylesheets and conditional content)

So we made it really easy to get your beautiful work loaded into MailChimp with our “Upload ZIP file” button.

Just take all your files, put them into a neat little folder (you can even organize your assets into as many sub-folders as you want), then compress everything into one .ZIP file.

Choose the “paste/Import HTML” tab when building a campaign, then click the “Import Zip file” button.  Upload it to MailChimp, and we’ll extract everything and turn it into an HTML email. We’ll even host your images on our server (free), and prep it for delivery.

All you have to do now is hit the “Send” button.

Instead, sometimes you just want to log in to MailChimp, copy-paste your most up-to-date version of your list, and then have MailChimp auto-detect whether or not there are any changes to a subscriber’s profile.

So whenever you import your list, check this box in order to do that auto-update:

Hint: this is an extremely powerful option if you’re sync’ing your database with MailChimp via our API. For each campaign you send, you can automatically update your customers’ data (like purchase history, product alerts, etc), then use our advanced merge tags in your campaign to insert dynamic content for each recipient. If you take a moment to think about that, you’ll actually poop your pants, so be careful.

Now, you can actually see where they’re opening from:

This is a free report you’ll find under your normal email campaign stats, and it’ll make your manager or client totally poop their pants. So be really careful with it.

Here it is in motion: