MailChimp Blog

Delta SkyMiles: Subscribe---or else!

Interesting tactic from Delta. You WILL subscribe to our email marketing, or else...

Your rewards go from 5 miles per dollar to 1 mile per dollar, unless you subscribe to their emails to earn "Engaged Member" status.

Thanks, Neil!

Kroger's Secret Marketing Weapon

Found this very cool article about how Kroger is using database mining to market to its customers.

It also explains why I'm getting so many coupons for twinkies in the mail.

This isn't directly related to email marketing, but it might inspire you to think about ways you can segment your customer email lists, then run experiments on them...

"At its core, the dunnhumby approach assigns a score to products on Kroger's shelves based on attributes like price, quality, freshness, and the size of the package. (Organic Swiss chard would have a much different score than, say, Twinkies.) Dunnhumby's computers then search for customers whose shopping carts have similar scores, and groups those shoppers together into segments. Kroger right now has seven segments, such as budget shoppers, those "watching the waistline," and so-called "family-focused." Each segment gets customized mailings, and can be further broken down if need be."

Read the full article at CNN Money: Kroger's Secret Weapon

If this kinda marketing stuff gets you excited, and if you're a MailChimp user, you can do this kinda stuff with your email offers too. Here are the tools you'll need:

• MailChimp's API - Sync your customer dB and purchase info with your email marketing efforts
• MailChimp AIM Reports - Track individual user-specific email open-click behavior
• MailChimp List Segmentation - Send campaigns to targeted subgroups based on their purchase behavior
• MailChimp A/B Testing - Test different offers, subject lines, and send times to optimize your results
• MailChimp's Inbox Inspector - Preview your campaign in different email apps and check them in spam filters before you send
• MailChimp Experts -   Need help getting all this done? Hire a MailChimp expert. Many of them specialize in databases.

Before You Hit Send, Consult Your Email Checklist

Karen Gedney's got some good advice here about using an email checklist before you hit the "send" button. You know, to prevent those embarrassing mistakes (like sending 5,000 "Happy Thanksgiving" emails on Christmas---not that I've ever done that before).

Some things Karen recommends for your checklist:

• Test your subject line for readability in multiple email programs
• Do the first 15 characters contain the main hook?
• Did you remember a call-to-action in the content?
• Does the link point to the correct landing page?
• Check how your email appears in different email programs (ahem, very easy to do with MailChimp's Inbox Inspector)

And many more really good points. Be sure to check out the full article here:

http://www.clickz.com/3627581

MailChimp's Pre-Delivery Checklist

If you're like me, you probably get a little nervous when it's time to click that send button. It's kinda scary sending something to thousands of people.

That's why in MailChimp, we've got the Pre-Delivery Checklist. It's a screen where we stop the flow, and give you a chance to review what you've done before hitting that send button:

Here are some of the things I've screwed up with my campaigns I recommend you check before you send:

• Are you sending it to the correct list? Particularly important if you're an agency sending on behalf of multiple clients. Or, if you just want to send to your test list, make sure that it's selected here (and not your "real" list).
• Is tracking on? By default, MailChimp has it on, but for some reason, people like to turn it off while they're sending themselves tests (I have no idea why). Make sure you turn tracking back on if you want it.
• Are you using the correct email template for the campaign?
• Did you remember a plain-text version of the email?

If we had our way, the little chimp's arm would poke out the Pre-delivery Checklist screen and give you a gentle slap on the face. Just to get your attention.

One last tip (from our customer service guru, Dan): Don't click the "Send Now" button. If you're a nervous nellie like me, always use the "Schedule for later" button. Even if you're ready to send the campaign now, schedule it for 30 minutes in the future. That's because as soon as you hit "Send" you WILL suddenly remember all those things you forgot to do (on Karen's checklist). Now you've got 30 minutes to "go back in time" and fix things.

Return Path Launches First Email Rendering Solution For Mobile Devices

They say people are addicted to their crackberries, and are checking their email while on the toilet and while driving. I am happy to say I am not one of these crazy people. I just use my laptop to post to our blog while I'm on the toilet.

Any-hooooo...

We just learned that ReturnPath (they provide the rendering engine that powers our Inbox Inspector campaign previews and spamchecker) is adding mobile devices to their offering. Which is pretty friggin' awesome, BTW.

This means that soon, MailChimp customers can preview their campaigns on Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices (in addition to the 30-something other campaign previews).

How soon will this be available? Depends on demand from our customers. If demand is high, we'll add it to our Inbox Inspector. If demand isn't there, meh---we'll add it anyway, but later down the road. Nobody likes developing stuff that won't get used. Life's too short.

So if you're a MailChimp customer, please take our mobile device survey and tell us how badly you want this nifty new stuff. Log in and click the "survey" link in the News section of the MailChimp Dashboard. Thanks!

Psst...Speaking of email campaigns on mobile devices, here's how HTML email renders on Apple's iPhone

Online Retailers Plan More Perks

Here's an interesting article in the WSJ by Mylene Mangalindan:

Online Retailers Plan More Perks For the Holidays

According to Ms. Mangalindan, online retailers are anticipating a soft sales season this year, what with all the mortgage craziness and rising gas prices going on here in the states. So they're going to work extra special hard to get you to buy. Some tactics (maybe you can use for your online business too) include:

• Start early
• Refer-a-friend discounts
• Free shipping
• Recommendation engines
• More email marketing

More details, plus a breakdown of what each specific retailer is planning, at the WSJ blog.

Do From-Names Matter More Than Subject Lines Now?

I've seen a few articles recently about how subject lines aren't as influential on open rates as we all thought they were.

Like this one from Silverpop. Bill Nussey is saying that it's the "From-Name" that matters. Basically, people need to recognize who the email is coming from before they'll consider opening it. In fact, Silverpop was actually doing a study on subject lines and open rates, but they canceled the whole thing, because the results pointed to "from-name" as the most important factor.

I think there's more to it.

When I'm at work, I get hundreds of emails a day from customers, prospects, and the media. Their from-names mean nothing to me. I've never heard of any of them. So it's all about the subject line for me.

But I'll admit, when I'm at home checking my personal email, I do tend to look only at from-names. That's because only a handful of friends and family have my personal email address (and about 5 billion spammers, but they don't count).

So I look at from-names for friends and family, plus I look for brand names from stores I'm subscribed to. Like GAP, Old Navy, Kodak Gallery, etc. And those types of customers seem to be the types that Silverpop caters to, so it makes sense (and it helps that those mega-stores can afford email certification).

So my theory is that if you're a mega-brand, yeah. From-name is probably all you need to worry about to get opens. People will recognize your brand, and trust the email. But if you're a small business owner, you may have to focus more time on your subject line (here are some tips for writing effective subject lines).

But this is all theory. The only way to know for sure if to do some testing. And it just so happens we recently made A/B split testing your email campaigns extremely easy with the MailChimp Email Optimizer. With just the click of a button, you can test 2 different subject lines, or two different from-names. No rocket scientists or mega-marketing budgets required.

Dell's token of appreciation:"have some spam."

Seth Godin's got a nice riff on spam here. The Dell spam is funny, but the BBB story hits close to home. I've received similar voicemails from the BBB. Their messages are a little scary, as if there's been a complaint registered about our company. When you return their call, you get a sales pitch (which is sad, because we're already BBB members). Not nice. Legal maybe, but not nice.

When PR agencies spam

Found this link over at Al Iverson's SpamResource.com. An editor at Wired is posting email addresses of all the public relations agencies that send him unsolicited press releases via email.

If you run a PR agency, and you send unsolicited emails in bulk, yes---that's spam.

Send them one at a time, then technically it's not spam. But you'll still piss people off:

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/10/sorry-pr-people.html

Email Coupons Make People Spend More

If you ever wanted scientific evidence that sending email coupons can be a good thing, here's an interesting report from Harvard. Basically, they found that people create mini "mental accounting models" in their own heads, in order to stick to short term budgeting goals.

A surprise gift certificate or coupon (the professors call them, "unanticipated small windfalls") will give people that little push to go buy stuff they wouldn't normally buy otherwise. And they usually end up spending slightly more than normal.

So this holiday season send your customers some "unanticipated small windfalls" via email. MailChimp can help. You can setup a Postcard Template for Thanksgiving and Christmas, for instance. Use the "splashy graphic" slot for your coupon.

And with our new segmentation feature, you can actually send campaigns to targeted groups within your list of "people who are interested in e-coupons, AND who clicked on the coupon in my previous campaign" (here's an example).

Nagging For Dollars

Here's a fun little story over at Fortune Small Business about how Marla Cilley, aka FlyLady, nags  her 400,000 email list subscribers every day and makes $4 million a year for it.

Reviving an Old Email List

Found this blog post from Urban Beauty Online. Danni is relaunching that website, and chronicling all her efforts on the blog to help other entrepreneurs.

What caught my eye was how she took a 2-year-old email list, re-invited them to subscribe to that list (to make sure they still wanted to hear from her), and then she posted the results online for all to see:

1. Reviving an Old Email List Part 1
2. Reviving an Old Email List Part 2

Granted, the list is small, but the results are pretty consistent with what we've seen at MailChimp. From our experience, you can expect your list size to drop from 50-80%.

• Should You Re-confirm Your List?
• Local Pub Gets Better Response With Double Opt-In

And this reminds me of one of our all-time favorite re-invite campaigns:

How to Reclaim Old Customer Emails

Booted By Your ESP?

All of a sudden, we're getting lots of calls from people who were recently booted by their email marketing service (a very, very large competitor to MailChimp).

In this business, you really don't want someone else's trash. But a lot of these people seem to be innocent email marketers who made a simple mistake somewhere. Their complaint rates (and list sizes) aren't even that high. What's sad is that 9 times out of 10, these marketers could just tweak a few things in their campaigns to get back on the right track. But the ESP isn't hearing any of that---they're apparently just shutting them down 'with extreme prejudice.'

Perhaps they took on too many customers, too fast. Our customer review process is pretty lengthy over here at MailChimp, and it's always made me wonder how those guys got so many customers so fast, and whether or not it would bite them back. Guess things are getting dire over there, so it's slash and burn time. What's sad is their employees keep initiating live chats with us, pretending to be small business owners, when we can see their originating IP address plain as day. Sigh. I'm fine with competitive research. But for Pete's sake, don't do it from work, guys (same goes for posting comments to blogs).

Whatever the case, the worst part is that the ESP is just booting marketers, and not even telling them how they can improve their ways.

So here are some articles from the MailChimp Email Marketing Resource Center to help:

• Email Marketing Etiquette
• Is my list okay to use in MailChimp?
• Free email marketing guide
• Reclaiming old customer email addresses

Do you REALLY need a privacy policy?

Found this article from Rob Hassett over at the Gwinnet Business Journal, and thought our readers might find it interesting:

Question:
"I am setting up a website to sell products directly to consumers over the internet. Am I required to post a privacy policy on my website? If so, may I just copy one from another website?"

Click here for the rest of the article

Back To School Email Marketing

All the parents I know are so smiley and positive today. There's a noticeable bounce in their step that I haven't seen in months. Oh yeah, school's back in session!

What do today's kids want? Here's some interesting research from ShopLocal.com:

"ShopLocal surveyed 500 preteens and found that 73% want handheld gaming systems, 70% are asking for new computers and 69% want a new cellphone."

Handheld gaming systems are a back to school item now?

The Shoplocal.com survey seems to jibe with these survey results from The National Retail Federation.

Just in case you plan to send some back to school email campaigns, here are a few links to help:

• Royalty-free "Back to School" images from iStockphoto.com, and LuckyOliver.com (you might search for "school", "teacher", and "homework")
• See what the major retailers are doing by searching for "Back to School" email campaigns at NewsletterArchive.org
• The back to school season is a reminder that the holiday season is approaching, and it's time for e-commerce store owners to start ramping up their website efforts. Here are some tips from Practical Ecommerce

Freelancer's Hourly Rate Calculator

A lot of our MailChimp customers are freelance designers and web developers.

So we thought you'd be interested in this hourly-rate calculator over at Freelance Switch:

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

At one point, when our company was developing websites for a living (as "The Rocket Science Group"), we had an hourly rate. Even if you charge "per project" you still need to know a baseline hourly rate as a reference point. We revised our hourly rate every year, using some crazy Excel spreadsheet that we hacked together by trial and error.

I just tried the Freelance Switch calculator using numbers that I remember from our web-dev days, and it was spot-on. Wish this thing was around back then.

One thing to take note of---it'll ask you how many days you can work, and how many hours you can work each day. That's common sense. But the real question to ask is, "how many hours do you realistically expect to BILL for?" Very few people ask that question. Kudos to Freelance Switch for including that. IMHO, it should be in a big red box, because it's the most important question to ask a freelancer.

Most freelancers think, "Well, I work 12 hours every day, so I'll bill for 12 hours." But if you actually track your invoices (note that I didn't say track your "time," such as with a stopwatch) you'd be surprised how few hours in the day you can realistically bill for. In our company of high-strung, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends workers, we found that 3-4 hours a day was a good average (depending on the role). Shocking. It's why we included that metric in our PunchyTime product. It's not really for freelancers (who also need billing and invoicing). But if you're a small agency with multiple designers (and you already have invoicing/accounting software), PunchyTime will tell you what the average billable time per employee really is. It's crucial for agencies to know that.

Anyway, very few hourly rate calculators actually take that question into consideration, but the Freelance Switch one does. Very nice.

Unsolicited Snail-Mail Preferred over Unsolicited Email

Pitney Bowes just published a study that shows (are you sitting down for this?) people don't like spam.

Sarcasm aside, there is something to learn from this report. If you want to send unsolicited messages about your business to a whole bunch of people at once ("get the word out!"), don't do it with email. That would be spam. See Spamhaus' Definition of Spam. Basically, you can send one person an unsolicited email about your business. That's called "doing business." We all do that, all the time. But send an unsolicited email to a whole list of people at once---that's spam. For example, let's say you walk over to the local Chamber of Commerce, and get a list of local business owner emails from them (apparently, a lot of people do that). It's spam if you take that entire list of emails and send them an unsolicited HTML email newsletter (no matter how relevant or cool the email looks). It's not spam if you send individual emails to each person about your business. I wish all the Chambers of Commerce would give that disclaimer. 

So use snail-mail to get the word out. According to Pitney Bowes, people are more likely to read it, and less likely to trash it. Best of all, include a URL in all your snail mail, asking people to visit your website and subscribe to your email list (and make it worth their while).

Email Marketers: You Deserve A Raise

"According to the study, which surveyed 630 marketing executives, salaries have increased from an average of $50,526 in 2005 to $63,547."

http://btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070614/FREE/70614008/1116/FREE

Email Marketing Ideas for Restaurants, Small Businesses

I stumbled upon this article over at Tallahassee.com about how small businesses can get started in email marketing. Great advice about "think quality, not quantity" and "talk to your customers, not at them." The writer also lists a few examples from local businesses that he likes:

• A local restaurant sends a "secret question" to ask the cashier to get a free drink (neat idea to keep people opening your emails)
• A local clothing store sends a special discount every year on his birthday

The article has some good overall concepts to consider before you get started. When you're ready for some specifics, we've got a "Getting Started" checklist in the MailChimp Resource Center:

http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/growing_your_list.phtml

Shoebox Greetings Blog (A tiny little division of Hallmark)

When we were kids, my sister and I used to make greeting cards. Not the crappy glue and glitter kind, mind you. Ours were pop-up cards. They had moving parts. She'd draw all the pictures, cut out the parts, color the cards, and assemble the pieces. I'd sit on the floor and watch her work. We made a good team.

I later went on to  co-create Lollipopcards.com, an online greeting cards website (the technology eventually became the engine behind earlier versions of MailChimp).

My sister, on the other hand, went on to become an editor at some little company called "Hallmark cards." Poor girl. She just didn't have the drive to follow her dreams, I guess.

Anyways, she just pointed me to their new Shoebox Greetings blog.

If you want a nice example of a "corporate" marketing blog with personality, here you go. If they can keep it up, it's going to be a great blog.

When she was just an intern at this "Hall-Mark" startup, I remember my sister used to bring home a secret, underground newsletter that the Hallmark creatives distributed around the office. It had all kinds of crazy, almost-demented stuff (I said "almost" so as not to offend any people there---but just between you and me, those people can be pretty friggin' demented) that the artists would draw. You could tell they were venting their frustrations after designing happy-fluffy-cutesy cards all day. It was really an awesome newsletter. Now that she's been there a while, she of course denies its existence.

But they do post some of their rejected cards under the "Funny, But No" section of the blog. They're hilarious. There's a book full of those rejected cards too.

Don't Assume We Know You

A bunch of marketers (who are also bloggers) got the same piece of spam yesterday. I got it too. It was about how not to spam bloggers.

It started out with:

Countless accounts of “PR Flaks” who have spammed bloggers, mis-targeted pitches or just plain gotten blogger relations wrong fill the Internet. Don’t risk finding your next pitch blasted on your favorite blog!

Their offer:

Download the FREE Vocus white paper Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations to get insights on how today’s PR professionals can successfully incorporate blogger relations into their PR strategy and build effective relationships straight from four of the top blogging experts in the industry!

Who the heck is Vocus, and how'd they get my email address?!?!?

Then I found another blogger complaining about this spam. He posted the spam to his blog (which is exactly what Vocus wants to teach us how to avoid) and when people started investigating, we discovered that the one thing we all had in common was that we've all used a service called PRWeb to distribute a press release at some time in the past.

Then we learned that Vocus had recently acquired PRWeb.

Ooooooh, so they were sending out an email to their customers. Okay, I guess that's not spam. Problem is, most of us had no idea we were Vocus customers.

It really would have helped if they used PRWeb somewhere (like in the From: or Subject: fields) so we could trust it. Maybe even a permission reminder, telling us that "You are receiving this email because you are a PRWeb Customer, and PRWeb is a service of Vocus..."

We see this countless times at MailChimp. Companies are in a rush to "blast their customers" with some offer, or some exciting (to whom?) company news, and they don't consider that the majority of their recipients will simply get the email and ask, "Who the @#$% Are You, And How'd You Get My Email?"

What happens next? They get too many spam complaints and they get their company domain name blacklisted. Even worse, they get their email posted on some blog for all the world to see.

Vocus looks like they mean well. They just made a simple mistake (that a lot of marketers make). And the whitepaper they're offering? It actually looks useful.

If you haven't contacted your list in a while, PLEASE send a re-introduction campaign. Don't just assume people remember who you are, and definitely don't assume they want to hear your news.

Here's an excellent example from ModernPostcard on how to re-introduce yourself to your customers.

Real Estate Signage and Email Marketing

In Atlanta, condos are popping up left and right. Close your eyes and throw a rock in any direction, and you'll hit some real estate signage of some sort.

I pass these 3 signs almost every day. They're about 50 feet apart from each other, which is why I found it interesting to see their different approaches to marketing...

This one's pretty typical of all the signs I see around the city. You get the pencil illustration, a phone number, and that's it. They actually do have a website, but you've got to Google for it.

This one at least has a website. That's nice. I can go back home and find out more before talking to a sales person.

This is the first sign I've ever seen with a website and a call to action. It actually made me want to check out the website to find out what this exclusive "priority buyers list" looked like. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. A+ on concept, D- for execution.

Blurb Books for Your Business

Here's a cool service I stumbled upon over at John Jantsch's Ducttapemerketing blog.

It's called a Blurb Book. You upload photos and text, and they make a hardcover book for you.

Yeah, we've seen these things before, where you can build your own photo album online.

But Blurb looks interesting because it's software you run on your computer. That should make it much faster and easier to build a book than uploading pictures to a website and typing text into little tiny form fields.

And John suggests interesting ways you can use these Blurb Books for your business:

• Real estate agents can use them to make scrapbooks for clients
• Home remodelers can chronicle their work on a project and make a portfolio to show prospective clients

Tons of possibilities for marketers:

• Photographers - make a portfolio book
• Graphic designers - make a book of all the logos you've done
• Restaurant owners - make a cookbook
• Non-profits - build an album from your latest fund raising event

More ideas at the Blurb Books website

Event Marketing via Email

Interesting article from Karen Gedney on how she used email marketing to do some last-minute event promotion:

Recently, I was called to rescue an event that was only two months away -- with only a handful of registrants to date. Here's what I did.

Nice use of surveys in the article. Great tips for any event planners out there.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625860

Ideas for Restaurant Email Marketing

Here's a nice case study for all you restaurant owners from Bennigans.

Interesting bits:

"they took a risk on their profit margins and pitched two entrees for the price of one in a four-day-only offer. They also mentioned appetizers and desserts in the copy"

"Although Bennigan’s higher-ups were skittish about the margins in giving away a meal for every paid one, their fears were definitely quelled by the sheer volume of customers and cross-menu activity. Overall sales were up 12%. More particularly, beverage sales increased 12.7%, appetizers 7% and desserts 10.8%. In fact, some restaurants ran out of certain menu items."

And I don't remember how I ever stumbled upon these guys, but Quantified Marketing Group has a nice email newsletter with lots of tips for restaurants. I've never wanted to own a restaurant, but I'm subscribed to their newsletter, and find it fascinating. They cover stuff like how to price your pasta dishes, cost segregation analysis, designing your restaurant, and how to find good restaurant accounting software. Here's a link to some of their past issues.

Yahoo!Mail To Start Blocking Images

According to Ken Magill, Yahoo might start blocking images in HTML email by default, requiring your recipients to click a "show images" button if they want to see all your pretty graphics.

But if you're Goodmail certified, they'll keep your images on by default.

It's unconfirmed, but I'm inclined to believe it. I think Yahoo is basically testing the waters and seeing what kind of push back they get from all this. You may recall that  AOL got quite a lot of complaints about this when they first announced their partnership w/Goodmail. I doubt anybody will complain this time around.

For those of you who don't know, blocking images is a common safety measure that more and more email programs are implementing in order to protect their users' privacy. If your email designers aren't factoring this in, your recipients probably don't see what you want them to see:

Email marketers can get around this safety measure if they are Goodmail Certified. If you pay for certification, your images will always be on (for some ISPs). For more information about email certification, check out this article in the MailChimp Resource Center.

Thanks to Mark Brownlow for the link (he's also got a nice resource on email certification at his blog).

Spam Filters Need Spam Filters Now

By now, most email marketers know you should avoid using "spammy" phrases like "FREE! CLICK NOW!" or the spam filters will trash your message.

But did you know that before your email even gets to a spam filter, it has to get through a gatekeeper? Yep, spam is so bad, that spam filters now need spam filters to help them.

These gatekeepers kinda look like this:

Looks vicious, doesn't it? They're all over the place. ISPs use them. Large corporations use them. Small businesses are starting to use them.

What's really scary is they all talk to each other. It's how they learn what "spam" is, and who should be blocked (Gulp - are they talking about you right now?).

That's a picture of IronPort's Email Security Appliance. If it thinks your email is spam, it'll gobble it up and fart its remains into cyberspace before your recipient's puny little spam filter even gets a chance to look for the word "V1AGRA". It won't even waste the energy to tell anybody about it (like in a bounce report).

Ever send to your email list and wonder where 5-10% of the emails seem to disappear off to? Ever wonder why the numbers don't seem to add up in your deliverability reports? It was probably one of these big, mean appliances (ReturnPath says its closer to 20% in this PDF Report).

If IronPort thinks your email is "not spam" then it lets your email through (but it'll still get analyzed by a content-based spam filter). And that's when your "avoid spammy content" tactics finally come into play.

To learn more about how IronPort works, they've got an eyebrow-raising demo you should watch. Click the tab at the bottom of the movie, to skip to the "anti-spam" section. Watch the demo

How the heck does this server know what spam is? Your own recipients teach it. When you send an email to your list, and someone on your list thinks it's spam, or doesn't remember opting-in to your list, or if you purchased a list from someone, that person can report you to SpamCop (which was purchased by IronPort in 2003, and is now called "SenderBase"). Get enough SpamCop complaints, and they'll propogate your data to all the IronPort servers around the world, letting everyone know you're a spammer:

Incidentally, your email service provider should be registered at SenderBase, so they can properly investigate every single complaint generated in response to their users' campaigns. At MailChimp, everyone on our staff personally receives copies of any complaints that come in, so we can go suspend the sender's account and investigate immediately.

IronPort is only one of many, many email firewalls, gateways, and security appliances you, as an email marketer, should learn about. Also see:

• Barracuda Networks
• Postini
• MessageLabs
• Brightmail ("9 of the top 12 U.S. ISPs use Brightmail")

All of those big, mean, ruthless "gatekeepers" rely on "reputation" scores to block emails before they even get to the content-based spam filters.

So you really want to make sure your reputation is good. How can you do this?

• Never send spam.
• Don't buy lists. Don't use lists that other people gave you.
• Only send to lists of people who know you, and requested emails from you. Otherwise, if you want to get the word out about your company, pick up the phone and call your prospects, or pick up a pen and write them. Or, email them one at a time (see "Definition of spam" and specifically the word "bulk"), from your own email program.
  

Assuming you're not sending spam, your email design is a huge factor in getting you blocked by one of these gatekeepers:

• When you send emails, always include a "How we got your email" reminder. MailChimp's built-in templates include that information for you, with our *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* tag. This tag is automatically replaced with the survey information that you provide each time you setup a list in MailChimp.
• Your email designs have to be reputable looking. Get sloppy, and people won't trust your opt-out link, and report you instead. See how one designer got blacklisted from his design.
• Always include a one-click unsubscribe link in every campaign you send (MailChimp adds this for you when you use our built-in templates. If you use your own designs, we'll give you a code snippet).
• Haven't contacted your list in a while? Or is this your first campaign? Send an introduction email. Remind them of who you are, or you'll get a big surge in complaints, and wind up on all those ugly blacklists out there.
• Sometimes, you're not the one who got you blacklisted. It was someone else on the server that you used. If you used a shared email marketing service like MailChimp, where thousands of people are sending emails from the same IP, you're at risk. That's why MailChimp has lots of IPs that we send from, but more importantly, we have a human staff of reviewers who pre-screen all new users before they're allowed to use our system. If a user still manages to generate spam complaints, our abuse desk can shut the user down immediately, and re-route email to our other IPs, while we deal with the blacklist service. This is how we manage to send millions of emails every day from our system. If that still sounds too risky, or if you hate sharing, get your own dedicated IP address from MailChimp.
• But if you think you can send junk, get reported, then switch to a new email server, you are sadly mistaken. Once you get reported, your company's name and domain name are on the lists. They'll know to block ALL emails with your name in it from now on, no matter who sends it, or where it came from. This is why affiliate marketing programs can be so risky. Imagine thousands of sloppy email senders (your affiliates) buying lists and sending emails with your company's domain name in them.
  
• Still want to make absolutely sure your campaigns won't get blocked? Consider our new Inbox Inspector feature. It checks the most common spam filters, plus MessageLabs, Postini, and IronPort.
• Want to continually monitor your reputation? There are services for that (ReturnPath has their SenderScore Reputation Monitor).

Want to find out what your (or your client's) reputation is? Here's one way:

Plug your domain name into this lookup service

They'll tell you if it's on any of the blacklists that they search. If it is, then follow instructions on how to get off their lists (tip: you are guilty until proven innocent, every email you send them will probably be posted on a public forum, and you will be asked for proof of opt-in for each complaining recipient).

Thanks to these big email appliances, it doesn't matter what email service provider or email server you send from, or whether or not your content has spammy words in it. If your name is on these lists, your email won't even get delivered.

Nowadays, it's your email reputation that precedes you.

A Flash Intro That Doesn't Suck!

I was live chatting with a MailChimp customer today. I clicked over to check out his company's website, and was immediately drawn in by their flash intro. I don't think I've ever stopped to watch any flash animation from start to end in my entire life. The "punchline" at the end does a great job setting us up to understand what they do:

The “Upstream” in our name refers to the importance of addressing a problem at its source, rather than merely trying to manage its effects.

Email Newsletters vs. RSS, Podcasts, Print

If you market to small or mid-sized businesses, you may be interested in this little study from Bredin Business Information:

In the study, SMB executives were asked to judge the relevant importance of different media for business management information. 83% of respondents indicated that email newsletters were either very important or important sources, putting it in a near statistical tie with print media (84%) and ahead of corporate/media websites (71%). At the bottom of the list were many of the "new" media distribution methods, including webcasts/podcasts (40%), RSS feeds (39%) and blogs/wikis (34%).

They also included the kind of content that small businesses say they're most interested in (ideas for your own email newsletters):

By far, practical "how to" information (40%) was the preferred form of content, followed by company product information (26%), management overviews on topics such as strategy or leadership (21%), company news (19%) and case studies (17%).

Other interesting stats are in their report, such as how often SMBs prefer to receive your newsletters, what day and time they prefer to receive them, and more.

http://www.bbionline.com/press_0307.htm

Collecting Backup Email Addresses

I stumbled upon the TrueDelta website last night. TrueDelta is some kind of alternative to Consumer Reports' car reliability reports. Anyways, take a look at their enrollment form. In their line of business, it's crucial to send you periodic emails so that you can take your car repair survey. So they ask you for your email address, plus a backup email address.

Very nice idea if you send mission critical email alerts, what with all the spam filters and email firewalls that are constantly changing their algorithms to block spam. More and more people are getting their emails accidentally blocked, so having a backup email address on file is smart.

One could probably combine this idea with some kind of open or click tracker to automatically send a followup to the alternative address:

Authentication Causing False Spoof Warnings

Email is easily "spoofed." That means you can make a message appear as if it's coming from someone else (and perhaps trick them into submitting a password, or something slimy like that). So receiving servers now look for some type of "authentication" with every message you send. Authentication is basically "proof" that "this message really did come from my server."

Wouldn't you know it, we're starting to see a few cases of authentication causing false spoof/phishing warnings from email servers.

Here's what's happening:

• You send an email campaign from Server A, to a recipient at Server B.
• Server A has authentication setup, so your email has all the proper "proof" that it truly came from Server A. You're doing everything properly.
• Server B accepts the message.
• But your recipient, at Server B, is always on the go. He setup his email account to automatically forward all his email to his mobile device, which uses an email address hosted by his mobile service carrier (Server C).
• Server C receives the (forwarded) email from Server B. But the message header  says, "This was delivered by Server A," so it looks spoofed.
• Server C rejects the message.

If you send a lot of emails, you may find evidence of this in one or two of your bounce backs.

It's not a widespread issue (yet). We occasionally hear from a customer about how "My customer's email server is saying my emails are spoofed!" Don't worry. You're not doing anything wrong. The recipient is probably just forwarding to his mobile device. Ask him to just subscribe with his mobile device's email address instead of his forwarding address.

They could theoretically solve this problem, if they could tell Server C to "trust the judgments that Server B makes." Not gonna happen.

This problem will be solved once enough mission-critical emails (like travel itineraries) are lost in cyberspace. Just keep an eye on your bounce records, and see if you spot someone you know who should be receiving your emails, but they hard bounced.

If you send last-minute travel itineraries (and people are likely to be forwarding your emails to their mobile devices), or if you're a bank, and your security and reputation are critical, you may want to consider warning your recipients about this when they sign up for your emails (or at least creating a help article on your website about it).

Valentine's Shopping Survey from Google Checkout

Yeah, I know Valentine's Day is over, but we thought you might be interested in this survey from Google Checkout & Harris Interactive on how people shop for Valentine's. Save the stats for next year:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/checkout_vday2007.html

New Orleans Receiving Donations via Text Messaging

Thought this article at WIRED might be interesting for our non-profit customers.

New Orleans is working with PayPal Mobile to receive donations via mobile text messaging.

People who want to donate using cell phone text messages would text "NOLA5" or "NOLA10" to the number 78787 if they wanted to donate $5 or $10, said Jamie Patricio, a PayPal spokeswoman. If people want to donate another sum, they would text "NOLA" to the number and be prompted for an amount, she said.

I haven't got enough caffeine in my veins this morning to suggest other ways savvy guerrilla marketers could use this, but I'm sure the ideas are out there.

Valentine's Email Case Study from MarketingSherpa

Here's a Valentine's related email marketing case study from Marketing Sherpa about how IdeaArt sent a campaign to a huge list of subscribers, and got so-so results. Then they decided to send a follow-up campaign to "people who opened but did not click." The new campaign went to a list that was 8 times smaller, but got more than double the sales.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/emaw2006/37.html

The idea of "remailing" is discussed in the article. Some people send "remails" to "people who opened." Or, to "people who did not open." If you want to be able to do that with your MailChimp account, look into our A.I.M. Reports.

Trendwatching.com's "Trysumers"

Trendwatching always gets my brain's gears moving in the morning.

Read this looooong page of insight, foresight, and moresight and see if it inspires some marketing ideas for your company (or your clients). Seems like Valentine's Day is an excellent day for the "I'll try anything new consumer" they describe...

http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/trysumers.htm

Wish the Nike trial van would swing by my neighborhood. Wonder how many people just take off with the shoes (and wonder if Nike would even mind):

Inside MySpace.com

This one's for all our customers who also run web-based services or build web applications. We've all experienced server problems before, right? Outages, growing pains, scalability, etc.

This article puts things in perspective:

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp

Restaurants & Email Marketing

Practical eCommerce has an interview with a restaurant owner, and how she uses email marketing. I really like how she keeps it simple and doesn't go overboard. A monthly email coupon is about all she needs, and she can see traffic at the restaurant pick up. No million-dollar database marketing tactics, no dedicated marketing team, no computer chips embedded under her customers' skin, etc. Just a simple, occasional email to customers.

Guerrilla Marketing Book About Podcasting

Jay Conrad Levinson's apparently working on a new Guerrilla Marketing book about podcasting, and he's looking for people with some experience.

"If you are interested in podcasting, are using podcasting, or are planning to use podcasting as a Guerrilla Marketing strategy, I'd like to hear from you."

I know a bunch of our MailChimp customers must have done some podcasting before, so here's where you can sign up:

http://www.gmarketing.com/podcast_survey.phtml

MarketingSherpa's 2007 Email Awards

Have you done any email campaigns (or newsletters) recently that got great results? Consider entering MarketingSherpa's annual Email Awards. Ten categories (including B-to-B) to choose from:

http://emailawards.marketingsherpa.com/

We've been mentioned in a couple MarketingSherpa articles, and the traffic they send is great. You'll be in front of over 237,000 Sherpa readers. What's nice is Sherpa is always about results. You don't need an email that's a work of art to win. Just tell them about the awesome results you got (opens, clicks, conversions, sales, whatever) and you could win!

Fine-Tuning Local Search

Cool new ad technology featured on BusinessWeek.com

They talk about how a local car wash could target online ads to people (via their mobile devices) within a few blocks of their business.

Duct Tape Marketing

One of the blogs I visit every single morning is Duct Tape Marketing. I just love the name. Duct tape is simple, easy, and it just works (hey, that's our mantra at The Rocket Science Group!).

Anyways, the reason I like their blog so much is it's always full of quick and simple small business marketing ideas you can use right now. It won MarketingSherpa's "Best Blog on Small Business Marketing" award for 2006. If you haven't already, bookmark it.

I'm going to look really stupid for saying this, but I never realized the author of that blog was promoting an upcoming book (duh!). I just went to the blog every morning, read his useful tips, and left. Frankly, I thought the book was already out there, and I somehow missed it. So one day I got an email to the effect of, "Okay, my book's finally ready, hope you like it." What a nice surprise! See, ignorance really is bliss.

I've already pre-ordered my copy. I know if it's half as useful as the blog, it'll be worth its weight in gold. And I just read that the author, John Jantsch, used to work with Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth (my all time favorite business book ever, and probably the only reason our business is still going strong after almost 7 years). On top of all this, I just noticed that MailChimp has been featured on the Duct Tape Marketing blog! Too cool.

If you run a small business, you should look into this book. Pre-order now, and you'll get some really cool add-ons, like audio interviews and e-books:

• Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth Revisited discusses "Awakening the Entrepreneur Within" ($29)

• Guy Kawasaki, author of Art of the Start discusses "The Art of Creating Community" ($29)

• "Millionaire Mind, The Secret Psychology of Wealth" a 90 minute audio featuring T. Harv Eker author of NY Times #1 bestseller "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" ($79)

• Bob Serling's "10-Minute Marketing Success Interviews" ebook - Bob asked 21 leading experts the question, "What is your favorite marketing technique that's working really well for you and your clients right now?" ($39)

• 6 Deadly Marketing Mistakes � David Frey � Marketing Best Practices ($39)

• Free 1 hr conference call for up to 100 participants from Conference Calls Unlimited ($100)

Fun Holiday Activities (for Web Nerds)

A lot of our customers are entrepreneurs and web nerds who maintain their own websites (like us!).

This is the time of year when the office is closed, and we're all relaxing at home in our pajamas with family (and going stir crazy for some work!).

So we thought we'd put together this list of ideas that webmasters and geeks can try over the holidays (or add a few of them to your New Year's Resolutions)...

1. If you haven't already, try pay-per-click advertising. Sign up for a Google Adwords or Overture account, and dabble with them. You only have to put a few bucks down to experiment. Set a monthly budget of 20 bucks and just do it.
   
2. Already doing PPC advertising? Consider outsourcing it. If you're like us, you started small, but then it got to be a burden to manage dozens (hundreds?) of keywords and campaigns. There are firms out there who will manage it all for you. They usually require that you spend a few grand every month on PPC, and they take a small commission off that amount.
   
3. Place conversion-tracking code on your website. Are you measuring how many people who click on your banner ads, PPC ads, or links in email newsletters actually convert into paying customers? Do you know which keywords or ads bring you the most money? If not, you could be throwing money out the door. Use something like ConversionRuler.com or Google's built-in conversion tracker. It's surprising to see which keywords or ads are really turning into money, while others might get tons of clicks, but lead to nothing but wasted bandwidth.
   
4. Optimize your landing pages. If you're running banner ads or PPC ads, you're probably pointing them to special landing pages. When was the last time you analyzed the click-path of your prospects, and optimized those landing pages? Maybe some "Click here" buttons need to be bigger, or more beveled. Maybe some of your links need to be underlined, or moved up on the page. Maybe you need to re-write some headlines to include keywords that visitors used to find your page. Call To Action is a great book that's full of tips for squeezing more conversions out of  your website.
5. Try installing Live Chat on your website. We use Timpani at MailChimp, and we think they're pretty good. We were scared at first, because we thought people would be chatting with us all day. But it's not as bad as you'd think. And people love instant help---it's great customer service. Google the term "Live Chat" and you'll get lots of other vendors you can try.
   
6. Update your META tags. Yeah, I know. We learned about META tags a looooong time ago. Chances are, you didn't spend a ton of time on META tagging your pages when you first built your website. Now's a good time to go back and put in some better, more relevant keywords and descriptions. Here are some modern-day tips from Clickz, and here's a list of other search engine marketing related articles. When we first designed the MailChimp website, we placed a few META tags here and there. Over time, we replicated pages to make new ones, and forgot to update <TITLE> tags on a lot of them. A sharp MailChimp customer pointed that out to me, and mentioned how important TITLEs are, now that IE7 has tabbed browsing. I'll definitely be spending a little time over the holidays on this.
7. Check out Google's Webmaster tools. Have you verified your site and submitted your sitemap yet?
8. Figure out how to integrate digg and reddit and delicious links into your blog or website (this is one I've put off forever, and found out it was surprisingly easy).
9. Write a whitepaper and post it in PDF format on your website. Our "HTML Email Design Guide" gets downloaded about 50,000 times a year, and sends a lot of customers our way (yes, people still like to print things on paper!).
10. Send an online survey. Go build an online survey at SurveyMonkey.com (no relation to MailChimp). Then, send a link to the survey to your email list. Ask your members what features they want in your product next, or ask them how you can improve your company's service. It's a really quick, simple idea for staying in touch with your customers. 2nd tip: after you get your survey results, publish it in the next email newsletter!
11. Send HTML email e-greetings. Got a web designer on staff? They'd probably *love* to spend some time designing something fun or kooky for the holidays. Ahem, use something like MailChimp to deliver it, and we'll track your opens and clicks. You can send 'em for New Years day, instead of Christmahannukwanzaa
12. Setup a Cafepress.com store, and make your own company t-shirts. Send 'em to your favorite clients. Our parent company, The Rocket Science Group, gave these away one year.
13. Write a press release and use an online distribution service like PRweb.com
14. Make an online video demo of your website or online app. We use Adobe Captivate for our demo.
15. Put together an end-of-year satisfaction or feedback survey. Use an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey.com and email a link to all your customers (using MailChimp of course!) If you tinker with SurveyMonkey for a while, you can actually do some pretty sophisticated surveys, and customize them pretty close to your brand.