From Monkey Business to Business Monkey
In case you haven't noticed, we completely redesigned the MailChimp.com website this summer. It's a work in progress (don't worry, the chimp's not retired). We're still tweaking the look and feel and the copywriting to reflect our personality, but the general idea is to answer this common question (we get it about 100 times a day): "You guys look like you have a simple, fun product, but you're a real company, right? Can you do the same stuff that XYZ company does?" Sigh. So the new theme is "business monkey" not "monkey business."

Try The Hacker Safe Logo
While we're on the topic of our website redesign, I thought I'd share a little success story with you. For our redesign, we added the ScanAlert Hacker Safe logo to our free trial signup page. We're kinda jaded, so weren't totally convinced that it would help anything. So the guys at ScanAlert gave us a code snippet to try for a couple weeks. It basically did an A/B split test on all visitors to that page. Turns out that people who saw the logo were 15% more likely to sign up for a MailChimp trial than when that logo was turned off. So in our case, it pays for itself. If you run an e-commerce site, you might want to give them a try.

Bootstrapping Is Overrated.
7 years of bootstrapping and profitable, organic growth has taken us pretty far. 10,000 users managing over 35,000 lists. Not too shabby. But it's time to step outside the comfort zone and scale this baby up. We've got a new marketing person (Neil), a new programmer (Chad), and a new customer service person (Jennifer). Traffic to our site has more than doubled, conversions are up, and apparently MailChimp got a mention on MSNBC's morning business show (wish I knew about that beforehand, so I could TiVo it).

As we grow, the most important thing to us is that our new team members always understand exactly who we're here for. So we took them on a field trip to MailChimp customer #0001, GourmetStation.com. We watched how they ran their business, how they use MailChimp, and what kind of real-world email marketing needs they have. Plus, we bought some delicious GourmetStation dinners for all the new chimpsters! Can we make a field trip to your office too? We'd love to see how you use MailChimp (and we'll even help you with any questions you have about email marketing, MailChimp, whatever). Contact us if you're interested.

New Monthly Price Plans
We recently added monthly pricing plans to MailChimp. For those of you who send emails very regularly, and who have fairly large lists, paying by month can be a lot cheaper than by-the-email. There are still no contracts, and no setup fees. We basically just bill your credit card every month. The amount we charge depends on the size of your list (instead of how many emails you send). Take a look at the new plans here.

New MailChimp Partnerships
MailChimp is partnering with some pretty high profile businesses out there, in order to help spread the monkey love. Authorize.Net has added MailChimp to their merchant toolbox for their +150,000 users, and SurveyMonkey.com has partnered with us to give their customers a way to deliver their surveys in HTML email format. MailChimp actually uses both of these services (every day), and they're outstanding. Authorize does all our credit card billing, and SurveyMonkey is how we collect feedback in our satisfaction survey (that link in the footer of MailChimp). More partnerships are in the works! Interested in becoming a partner? And did you know you can refer a friend to get email credits? Click on your "Account" tab, then the "Become an Affiliate" link.

Upcoming New Features
We're putting the final touches on some new features, due to launch mid-October. The features will let you setup "interest groups" on your signup form, and do some pretty cool segmentation on your lists for each campaign. For instance, a website for car fanatics can let subscribers check off boxes for "sports cars" or "luxury cars" or "convertibles" (or all of the above). Then you can send customized email campaigns, specific to each interest group. On top of that, you'll be able to specify things like, "Only send this newsletter to people who like luxury cars, and who live in Detroit, and whose email addresses end with yahoo.com, and who signed up between these dates." Cool stuff like that. We've been working on this for a while now, but other things kept popping up. We're so happy we're finally able to launch this. Look for an announcement around mid-October!

Until next time,

- The Nerds at MailChimp