Smartphones just outsold desktop computers. We’re all walking around with computers in our pockets. But you already knew that. What’s new here is that people aren’t going mobile–it’s computers that are going mobile. So in MailChimp v7.2, we built some features to help you with the second part of that: designing mobile friendly emails.
Here’s what we launched:
- 15 pre-built, mobile friendly email templates
- Pop-up mobile preview
- Push draft to mobile device, for instant testing
- Mobile styles editor, so anyone can tweak responsiveness
- Free mobile inbox inspections
Mobile Friendly Email Templates
You’ve probably seen other email services post tips, advice (and even rants on Twitter) about coding mobile friendly emails. Yep, talk is nice. We, however, prefer to make mobile friendly email templates available to our 1.8 million users at the click of a button. That’s being constructive.
You’ll find all these beautifully-designed, responsive email templates under “Designer Templates:”
marked as [mobile]. More templates, under each of our other template categories, are on the way. Lots more.
Pop-up Mobile Preview
After you’ve selected a mobile friendly template (or uploaded your own) we’ve made it super easy for you to preview how responsive they behave on mobile devices. Just click “pop-up preview” like you always do, then switch your display to mobile:
In our mobile research, we observed that most people “zoomed” their smartphone displays in and out by rotating them. So we added the ability to rotate this pop-up preview from portrait to landscape mode:
As you rotate your screen, you can see how responsive your design is. Do the images and text scale the way you’d like?
Push to Mobile
Sending test emails can be a pain. You click the “send” button, then wait a few minutes for your test to make its way through the intertubes, past spam filters, and then into your inbox. Then you tweak your code, and send another test. Then you wait. Then repeat. No more.
We’ve made mobile email testing instant. Just use our new “Push to MailChimp Mobile” option:
and we’ll bypass your inbox and push your test email straight to the MailChimp Mobile app (available for iPhone and Android). You’ll get an instant alert:
Click “view” and there’s your email:
Rotate it on your device to check that the fonts and images scale as expected, and you’re ready to send.
Well, almost ready. You should probably test it on more mobile devices. Which brings us to…
Mobile Inbox Inspections
A little while back, we made our Inbox Inspector feature free. You probably didn’t know that, because every single time we’ve sent an announcement about it, I failed to realize there was some holiday going on (d’oh). Well, now you know. They’re free.
And it just so happens the reports are loaded with mobile devices you can test your emails on: iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, and Androids.
We figured you’d want to test on those mobile devices more often (you know, since they’re free and all), so we moved the link to Inbox Inspections under a new “preview & test” button. Now you can run them while you tweak your campaigns, instead of waiting until the final campaign preview screen.
In total, the Inbox Inspector generates 18 screenshots for mobile testing.
Hope you enjoy the new features.
Mobile Email Research Study
MailChimp’s UX team conducted some behavioral research: Email on Mobile Devices. It’s packed with observations and design ideas, and it’s free.
Nice feature, but how must I know the email-addresses of my readers I have are suitable for the PC or mobile.
Our mobile-friendly email templates adapt automatically to be more readable on mobile devices, but still work great on desktop.
Absolutely Brilliant! eeep eep!
woot! looks awesome. the chimps are working hard i see.
Hi,
there are mobile friendly email template with RSS feed feature?
I like RSS feed newslettering mode.
Thank
If you go to our pre-designed templates, and look under RSS-to-email templates, you’ll see some mobile-friendly versions, yes.
Hey Ben,
I looked under the rss-to-email templates and I didn’t see any with the little mobile icon on them?
Also while I have you.. Is there any way to have an image automatically scale down for mobile users? My site is a photography site and the images I post are 600px in width. I looked at them on my itouch and they are much too wide.
thanks!
Have you tried the new drag and drop editor instead? It’s got RSS templates, and the images scale.
That said, you actually don’t *have* to pick an RSS template in order to send RSS-to-email. The RSS templates are just pre-loaded with a few merge tags so that you don’t have to do as much coding. You can choose any mobile-friendly template, then add RSS merge tags in manually (I end up customizing things so much, I might as well have started this way).
First.. your response time is AMAZING! Thanks.
And I’ll give the drag and drop editor a try. But I may be back with more questions :-) I’m tying to move away from feedburner to mailchimp and have a lot to learn :-)
Merry Christmas!
Hi Dave, As it turns out, we have a really experimental app we’re working on called ChimpFeedr. It’ll be going through a pretty big UX overhaul soon, but you’re welcome to setup an account and take it for a spin.
Well.. I can’t get it to work. No biggie.
I guess I’ll just have to do some more research on this.
Thanks anyway
Hey John!
Thanks.. I’ll give it a shot
great – I love you guys, for us people over the 50 mark who really only do social media cos we got to – you are angels
Good wholesome content like this is delicious. I’m glad that your blog and emails aren’t crap.
Yours are the only “unsolicited” emails I read right through to the bottom – so definitely not crap :) Quick question. Do you have to have facial hair to author a MailChimp blog or does that just help?
I don’t have facial hair, and I think I’m the chief blogger. Even if I tried, I could only get a Fu Man Choo, at best. :-) Seriously, I think the day of our photo shoot, the guys were participating in some “grow your moustache for some worthy cause” thing(?).
@MailChimp pushing responsive innovation with new mobile-friendly templates – #nicejob!
Thanks for the effort on the mobile-friendly templates. Doesn’t get far enough to be useful yet. Really need a true responsive design for the template — desktops see a two column layout, while mobiles see a one-column version — accomplished within a single template.
Create a setting for blocks so we can set the order in which they will flow in the single-column version. And create a setting for blocks that will allow them to be completely invisible to the mobile user. It can be done! Thanks.
Are you sure? For mobile? That falls back for old clients? Now that I would like to see!!
Woaah! perfect UI to see how it works on mobile devices :) Awesome!
I have already used it for my campaign and it is so cool.
Just simply love this feature.
Thank you for that!
We want to share this but the video is not on YouTube (yet!). Thank you for thinking one step ahead.
Though it certainly impacts sharability, we actually like the idea of *not* posting some of our videos to YouTube.
Ben,
Thanks for the update. Am glad MailChimp is staying ahead of the curve with these new features; when are you going to creature a feature that recognizes and deletes duplicate email addresses from several subscriber lists? That would make me extremely happy!
Daisy
Hi Daisy, duplicate emails are not allowed in any one single list. Our users are allowed to maintain multiple lists, and so it’s feasible you could have one member subscribed to different lists. We never consider them “duplicates” for that reason. One way to get around this is to use one master list, but then create smaller, targeted segments in that list. But that doesn’t suit all users, we hear. What’s your specific scenario where you run into this problem? There may be some way we can innovate around this.
I have this issue as well. My issue is one list is free and another is paid. I would like to be able to see if people who are on the free list are also on the paid membership list. Since I for the most part send the same material out to each I would like to avoid the duplicates.
Do we have any reports that show us what clients our subscribers are using to read their emails?
Yes, and you can segment on this data too: http://blog.mailchimp.com/see-what-email-programs-your-subscribers-use-with-user-agent-stats/
Just check reports for your campaigns, you can see who is using what, to read your emails.
As an additional step, use MiraPost to check engagement.
Tim
I can’t help it… my favorite part is the monkey sound that comes thru the app… I LOVE it! :-)
I am loving these new features. Over 50% of my list reads on mobile/tablet. 35% on iPhone.
Using MiraPost, I can see engagement is high across 60% of readers who are using mobile.
Created a new mobile specific template using yours as a basis.
About the only thing missing is auto width settings and max width, to take advantage of full screen size.
But, overall, these are amazing (especially for free!)
Tim
Awesome updates, thanks for all your hard work!
How rarely I see a new tool that really, really has me thinking ”that is so smart and even better, so usefull”. I first watched the video and initially thought the screen to mobile testing was puffery (look it up in your legal dictionary). Scanned the blog text and there it is – “Push draft to mobile device, for instant testing”.
What a marvellous time-saver. Congratulations. I’m sure I won’t see anything as productive the rest of 2012.
I love you MailChimp, I make work easier … trousers should do monkeys and sell them, I would be the first to buy a dozen!
So… following on from Gideon’s comment – if the mobile-friendly email templates work great on the desktop, are we in fact moving towards the idea of only using the mobile-friendly, so that everyone receives an attractive newsletter?
I believe we are, yes.
Very informative thank you.
When I go into templates, all the Categories are automatically ticked and it takes a very l o n g time to download them all or to deselect the categories I don’t want. Is there a way to have the templates deselected when I enter the page please? Thanks.
As someone who blogs about Android tips, mobile friendliness will be an awesome improvement to my newsletters!
Hi!
Nice updates, love the mobile features/previews.
I was wondering if it’s possible or will be possible to have the option to send our own mobile version?
We send our own html capaigns and it would be nice to specific html for desktop, and also html for mobiles at the same time – or would this be through segmentation?
Thanks!
J
I think the trend is pointing more towards “responsive” templates that adapt accordingly (because so many users will check email on their mobile *and* their desktops). That said, it’s totally possible to upload your own responsive template. And like you said, it’s also possible to send a targeted campaign to mobile users that uses a strictly-mobile template if you want.
Mobile templates do not appear to work correctly on Android Phones using the Gmail app or accessing Gmail online. I am guessing that a responsive template would handle this better. Where do I find these on MailChimp? Do you have any documentation on creating our own?
It’s a bit of a bummer for sure, but Gmail mobile apps don’t currently
support media queries which is what drives responsive template design.
All of our responsive design mobile friendly templates can be found
under designer templates and have a small cell phone icon on them.
Check here for a screenshot of what it looks like: http://eepurl.com/naN0L If
you would like to dig into creating templates that use media queries,
our own Fabio wrote this excellent post on the subject.
http://eepurl.com/iVXZj
John, that’s a pretty big deal as Android has the largest market share of smartphones, and most Android users are leveraging the standard Gmail app that comes with the phone. There are ways other than media queries to do responsive design. See here: http://www.zurb.com/article/1119/create-emails-for-any-device-introducing-
Any plans to add this functionality?
Hi Aaron, While our devs are always looking to make improvements so emails are friendly on all devices, they have a lot of things to take into consideration. One of the biggest issues is stability, and with 3 million users to look out for they have to make sure the solution isn’t worse than the problem. The bad news in this case is that Outlook compatibility goes out the window with this approach. While we don’t have plans to add support in this way, it’s a constant process to keep improving as technical needs continue to evolve.
Does the push to mobile work if I am creating a campaign (for my client) and my access level is as a Manager?
I’ve logged in to the client account using my own account details but when I go to “push to mobile” it keeps telling me i don’t have the app installed on my iphone.
If you don’t already have the app installed on your phone you’ll want to go here: http://mailchimp.com/features/mailchimp-mobile/ and click the link that’ll take you right to it on iTunes. Once you have it installed on your phone you’ll need to add any accounts to the iPhone app that you’ll want to push from. The adding of accounts can be done via an API key which you can generate as a Manager or Admin, or via login credentials. If you decide to go with login credentials you’ll need to actually be in that specific account when you push the campaign. If you decide to use API keys, you’ll receive it whether you’re logged into that specific account or not. Incidentally, if you’ve never generated an API key, here’s a short article to show you how to find/generate one: http://eepurl.com/im9k