MailChimp - Now With More Context!

Mar
13
'09

A bit ago, MailChimp came out with another revision to their site. Their revisions are always great and they're always taking steps forward. Past revisions offered better interfaces for creating emails; things like a fancy WYSIWYG editor, etc. Mostly pre-campaign features.

This revision seemed to focus more on the analytics end of things; the post-campaign features. They now feature a much enhanced analytics package with tons of my favorite thing; context!

MailChimp Stats

Check out the screen shot above that calls out a few of the areas they present very well. Not only does MailChimp compare your current campaigns performance to your account average, it also compares it to your industry average based on other like accounts they manage. I think this is wonderful, as stand-alone numbers are fun, but without knowing how these numbers compare to some other relevant numbers, no measurement can be made, and no action can be taken. They even go as far as to put it in MailChip terms in the green box at the bottom of the screen shot.

Other features they provide which provide context are the ability to see a domain performance report compare opens by location with an interactive flash map.

MailChimp Flash Map

Good job, MailChimp. Keep up the good work!

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Hey Christian! I was checking out your website. Very nice. Anyway I ran across this post. I have been debating on what to use for newsletters for my freelance and I have been messing with mail chimp. I like it a lot. I think it will be the preferred choice!

Cool. I absolutely love MailChimp. It's easy to use, is well supported and very cost effective. If you have any questions, let me know.

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HTML email design shouldnt be difficult!

Aug
28
'08

Up until six months ago or so, I was responsible for MCM's email marketing effort. We sent HTML and text emails to our opted-in users about once a week.

Before I took this task on, I thought designing web pages for all the different browsers out there was difficult. It turned out that designing HTML emails was worse. There are a lot more email clients than browsers, and all of them seem to have their own rules and quirks. Of course, there are guidelines out there to work around all of these. (I'd recommend giving MailChimp a visit for lots of good info)

After I had moved on from creating our email promotions, I came across the "Email Standards Project". This website movement aims to "work with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email". Sweet.

In addition to bringing fed-up designers together, the site uses it's version of an acid test to rate the state of all major email clients, from excellent to poor and gives full reports to boot. I'd recommend stopping by this site, saying hey, bloging or linking to it and spreading the word.

Here's to better web standards support in email clients!

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