To begin, you’ll want to head over to Google Docs and login using your Google account information. Then, under the New Document menu, select Form. Go ahead and give your form a name and then include some information as to what the signup form is for or about.

From there, you’ll begin adding fields. By default, the blank form starts out with two “Sample Questions” for you to modify. For this example, we just added a separate field for First Name, Last Name and Email Address, and went ahead and made them all required fields. It’s also important to ensure that you select “Text” for the Question Type.

Once you have your fields created and organized the way you want them, you can work on changing the visual design of the signup form. Google Forms is pretty limited in this aspect, but they currently provide 69 different stock themes for you to choose from.

Since we’re creating a signup form for our burgeoning Picnic Club, we went with the “Picnic” theme. To see how this will look once it’s published, just click on the link at the very bottom of the Form Edit page. This will open a preview of your published form in either a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your browser set up.

The second part of this tutorial is setting up MailChimp to import your signup form into a new list. First, login to your MailChimp account and click the Account link at the top left. This will take you to your account settings, and you want to click on Integrations.

Click on the first option: Google Analytics, Contacts, Docs and select Authorize Connection. This will take you away from your MailChimp account and over to Google (very briefly), and you will need to click Grant Access.

Once you click Grant Access, you’ll be taken back to your MailChimp Integrations page. You’ll see a green dot for your Connection Status, but may see a yellow dot representing Data Status. This is fine for now.

The next step is to head over to your Lists, and you want to click the huge orange button to Create a New List.

On the first page, you’ll need to go ahead and set up all the basic information, such as Sender Name and Permission Reminder. Next, select the Import My List option, and then select the source that you want to import from. In this case, Google Docs.

A dialog box will appear, telling you that MailChimp can connect to your Google Docs account. Just select the appropriate Form from the pull-down menu, and proceed with list import.

There are so many now, that managing your different integrations can be tough. So we created this new “Integrations Dashboard” under your Account page.

It’s a great birds-eye-view of all the apps you’ve linked to MailChimp, and what their status is. If you’re experiencing any issues sync’ing data with one of them, this is where you can go to diagnose.

The * | MC:TOC | *  dynamic merge tag works by pulling anything from your email that is formatted as Title text, and displaying it as an ordered list complete with bullet points. Each item in your table of contents is then anchor linked to the corresponding blurb in your email.

To add a table of contents to your email, simply insert * | MC:TOC | * where you’d like the contents listing to appear. In the example screen shots you can see that I added some Title text (“In this edition of The MonkeyWrench”), and then added the merge tag below it.

You can also insert a Table of Contents in either the right or left column of a two-column template and the merge tag will work exactly the same way.

(I’ve used extra spaces between the elements of the merge tag so that it will render correctly for those who subscribe to the RSS-to-Email version of the blog.)

The good news is that it’s super easy to add the address field to your signup form. Just click on the Lists tab at the top of the Dashboard screen. From there, select the list that you want to segment and click on the “forms” link.

Next you’ll 1. select Signup Forms from the pulldown menu on the left, and then 2. click on “address” in the Add a Field column on the right.

If you plan to segment by ZIP code often, you will probably want to go ahead and set “address” as a required field on your signup form.

In a nutshell, it uses the power of Google Analytics to tell bloggers what kind of an effect they’re having on overall website traffic. We’ve made it super easy to tell if your blog posts (and email campaigns) are driving traffic to your website — it’s all embedded right in your WordPress Dashboard!

You don’t have to be a MailChimp customer to use or benefit from this plugin. But if you do happen to have a MailChimp account, we’ll mash in your MailChimp campaign stats too, giving you a bird’s eye view of the cause and effect of all your hard work.

It’s so cool that words don’t do it any justice. You need to watch this video, then download the free plugin now:

UPDATE (07/21/09): Check out this little tip on segmenting your GA blog traffic reports from our own Stephen Martin

Done! Booyah!

Import from Highrise by tags

And may we also suggest using one of MailChimp’s built-in templates with golf-themed header and color palette?

Booyah! Closers get coffee! (sorry, I got glengary’d away there)

Import List Options in MailChimp

What’s nice about the Google Docs integration is that if you use Google’s Form/Survey tool (which save data into a Google Docs spreadsheet), all that data you collect can be imported into MailChimp really easily.

Opens and clicks over time

It’s a chart that shows your campaign’s opens and clicks hour-by-hour after you sent it. For example, we sent this campaign yesterday at 5pm ET. You can see there was a spike in opens and clicks almost immediately (reminds me of this study we did waaaay back in 2006), then it tapers off and plateaus in about 3 hours. We see some blips around 4am (our subscribers across the pond, perhaps?) and then again at 8am (the people who already left work before we hit “send” yesterday).

Hmm, while we’re on the topic of open stats, we added a new stat to the campaign summary: “Clicks per unique open.”

The older “click rate” stat that you’re already familiar with basically says that 7.7% of my entire recipients list clicked.

The new clicks/unique open stat tells me that of those who actually opened, 20% clicked.

This is handy if you send lots of test campaigns and different campaign types (especially daily RSS-to-email campaigns from your blog), and your grid view is getting a little unwieldy…

On your Campaigns Dashboard, click on this link (near the top right of the list):

Your campaigns grid will switch to this timeline view:

As you can see, you can click on any of the dots to get a pop-up balloon with more campaign info. Click again to drill down to the campaign. At the bottom of the screen, you can scroll the timeline horizontally to move around.

By the way, if your campaigns list is getting crowded, don’t forget about the smart folders in the left column of the screen. Smart folders automatically organize your drafts, RSS, and scheduled campaigns.They’re the little purple folders in the left column:

MailChimp's Smart Folders

You can also create your own folders and organize campaigns that way. Just click the “New Folder” button right underneath the smart folders:

Creating a new campaigns folder in MailChimp

Speaking of organizing this screen, if you send daily RSS campaigns it used to be really hard to find your “source” campaign in the list of all your daily updates. So now, if you click on the “RSS-to-email” smart folder in the left column, then on the RSS-feed, you’ll notice the source campaign is always at the top of the list:

Download Recipients From AIM Reports

We’ve added a couple new enhancements for our AIM Reports users.

First, if you search for a subscriber across your lists, you can now see their opens, clicks, and e-commerce/purchase “activity history.”

Second, we now generate a list of “who the campaign was sent to” which you can export. This is especially useful if you send to segments of your list, and you’d like to see who ended up in the final recipients list.

This is also great if you’ve created a segment to send to your “dormant” list subscribers, who never open or click. Check out this discussion in the MailChimp Jungle for details.