Howdy <<First Name>>, you smell like bananas today. Here's your latest issue of the MonkeyWrench. Hope you like our new look!
A/B Tests Prove Experts Wrong
In case you haven't heard, we just launched a new, patent-pending A/B testing tool for email campaigns. With the click of a button, it can take the guesswork out of "what's the best day to send?" and "what's the best subject line?" Anyway, it's got people running sophisticated email marketing experiments with the click of a button. It's cool, except for the fact that we've learned all the email marketing experts out there are wrong. Including us. The only way you can know for sure what works and what doesn't is to run your own experiments. Constantly.
Three cases in point:
Learn more about A/B Testing with MailChimp...
Tracking Conversions From Email
Ever wondered how many people who receive your email campaigns actually click over to your website and buy stuff? Google Analytics makes it pretty easy. All you have to do is "tag" every link in your email campaign with some special code. Whenever someone clicks one of those email links, Google Analytics will place a cookie and track that user's activity through your site. It'll tell you:
- Total Revenue made from email campaign
- Number of e-commerce transactions
- Average value of transactions
- Per-visit value
- E-commerce conversion rate
If tagging every single link in your email campaign sounds like a mind-numbing process, you're right about that. But if you're a MailChimp customer, we've got a free add-on that you can use, so that all you have to do is click one button to automatically tag all your links with Google Analytics trackers.
Here's a case study of how NavySeals.com uses our Google Analytics Add-on...
ISPs and Authentication
You've probably heard by now that ISPs are recommending that legitimate email marketers authenticate their emails (Mark Brownlow's got an excellent primer on email authentication here). Recently, someone from Yahoo! went beyond simply recommending authentication, when he revealed that they plan to start throttling non-authenticated emails. Yikes. If you haven't begun testing email authentication yet, now's the time. But which email authentication method should you use? There is no single standard, and to make things more confusing, different ISPs check for different types of authentication. Aargh! If you're confused, you're not alone. So we've put together this handy email authentication guide, where you can learn more about authentication, and see exactly which ISPs are checking for which forms of authentication.
Mini-MailChimps
Web designers: Ever wish you had your own private-label version of MailChimp, so your clients could log in and get their campaign stats? You can do that with the MailChimp API.
We've got an excellent case study from MailChimp expert Murray Summers, demonstrating how he gave his client, Staffmonkey, their own little mini-MailChimp.
Read the case study...
Got an interesting implementation of our API? Reply to this email and let me know about it!
We'd love to showcase your work on our blog, and get you listed on the MailChimp Experts page.
Eep eep,
Ben from MailChimp.
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Email Marketing Stats:
Here are some stats that we got from the very awesome EmailStatCenter.com:
percentage of the world's heaviest online advertisers who budgeted significantly for landing-page A/B tests in 2007.
-MarketingSherpa (2007)
The average order-conversion rate of email
- Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2007 report (Sept. 2007)
Cool Prize: Labware Mug
Every issue of MonkeyWrench, we pick a random subscriber from our list, and send them a cool gift. It's usually something monkey related, or something cool from a MailChimp customer's store.
This issue, we're giving away a Labware Coffee Mug from The Museum of Useful Things (just like the one pictured below, except brand new).
The winner this time around is John from Untuck Design. John, reply to this email and we'll have it shipped over to your office.
Going to SXSW?
If you happen to be going to SXSW this week, stop by the Adobe Day Stage Cafe and say hi to Aarron Walter, our new User Experience Designer.
Aarron's the author of Building Findable Websites, so he'll be discussing the concept of findability, and doing a book signing. Aarron will also be at An Event Apart New Orleans in April. If you go up to him and say the secret MailChimp phrase "eep eep" he just might give you a monkey toy.
Monkey Related Quote:
“I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.”
- Loren Eiseley
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