Which is particularly cool, because of the video engagement analytics that Wistia provides. Without further adieu, here’s a quick video from Wistia’s Brendan and Chris to tell you all about their awesome new MailChimp integration:

*|WISTIA:MZ1Pn4:450:http://mailchimp.wistia.com/m/MZ1Pn4|*

Initially, when Wistia generates the URL for your video and merge tag for your MailChimp campaign, some tracking info is appended. This allows Wistia to provide game changing analytics for each person on your MailChimp list, including who’s watching your video, where they’re geographically located, and even how much of the video they watched. That’s amazingly powerful, actionable data!

Accessing these stats is super easy. Once you send out your campaign, head over to Wistia and log in. Click on the “Stats” menu at the top of the screen, then “Public and Embed Stats”.

For a complete walkthrough of how to set up the integration and use it in your MailChimp campaign, check out this tutorial.

The Scenario

A couple months ago we blogged about the prototype for Chimpadeedoo, a MailChimp app for iPad. Even though it was just in the fledgling stages at the time, we wanted to let everyone know it would be coming soon. This introductory “sneak peak” video would have been a great opportunity to use Vzaar’s MailChimp integration. By using a verbal call to action or even including that call as part of the video, we could collect the email addresses of people interested in hearing when the app officially launched. Another idea is to incentivize signing up by allowing subscribers beta access and a special sneak peek. (Chimpadeedoo has since launched and is currently in v1.1.)

Cool and powerful– a winning combination.

The Nitty Gritty

You can get started with Vzaar by heading over to the site and signing up for a free trial. Once you get your account set up, you’ll be taken to your Dashboard and should click on settings. Scroll down to the ’3rd Party Tools Integration’ section.

In a new browser window or tab, go ahead and login to your MailChimp account. Click on the Lists tab in your Dashboard and drill down to ‘list settings and unique id’ for whichever list you’d like your video subscribers to go to. (Note: for this example, I’ve set up a new list and called it ‘Vzaar’.)

Scroll down to obtain your list’s ‘unique id’ and copy it.

Then head back over to the Vzaar window or tab you have open and paste your list ID into the ‘MailChimp List ID’ field.

You’ll also need to generate a MailChimp API key, which you’ll find under account > api keys & info (in MailChimp). Click the little ‘add key’ icon, copy the whole string, and then paste into the ‘MailChimp API Key’ field in Vzaar. Click ‘save’ and you’re all set.

This will add a standard, non-customizable form at the end of your video that includes First Name, Last Name and Email address fields. (You can see it in action by watching the video at the top of this post, or by clicking through here.)

If you’re interested in using this integration in an email campaign, we’ve also created a Vzaar video merge tag. The syntax is the same as our Blip.tv, YouTube and Vimeo merge tags– *|VZAAR:xxxx| * where xxxx is the video ID (highlighted in the image below).

But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.

It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…

If you want to include a video in your MailChimp campaign, and it’s hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo, just get the video ID, and stick it in our new video merge tag like this:

MailChimp will go to the video, grab its keyframe (a still image from your video), then overlay some video control elements to make it look playable:

Whenever users click, it’ll take them to the hosted version of your video.

No need to screenshot anything, upload to MailChimp, etc. Just use the merge tag, and you’re done.