While we’ve used Industry Mailout, and I can highly recommend them, I’ve been looking at some other companies that provide email newsletter services. Constant Contact was pretty decent, their newsletter template builder is great, and their pricing is pretty good. Still, I kept looking and when I came across MailChimp, there were a few features that really stood out:

• An API with lots of features – such as creating campaigns and sending them out programatically
• RSS to email – when a new item is added to your RSS feed (eg: a new blog post is added), MailChimp will check for this at a specified time, and send out an email newsletter with the new item(s) in it. It’s RSS for dummies!
• A/B testing – test out different subject lines and content before you send to the entire list.

While Industry Mailout can handle most of these features, they’re missing A/B testing, and a way to build your own templates. Okay, enough regrets — let’s check out MailChimp.

Signing up with MailChimp

Since MailChimp has a free account option (limited to 500 subscribers, and no more than 3,000 emails per month) I gladly signed up. After the usual procedure of providing your physical mailing address, and confirming your email address, I was up and running. On my first login, I was greeted with a funny green and black screen like an old BBS system, and then was taken to the dashboard. That’s one thing about MailChimp: they sure have a sense of humour.

HTML email templates

First thing I did was check out the templates. They have a good selection of free HTML email templates, and also some premium ones you can purchase. There’s also an option to edit these, and from what I could see, the templating language looked pretty decent. Here’s an example of the code for formatting content from an RSS feed:

*|RSSITEMS:|* <!-- start loop through RSS items -->
 <h2><a target="_blank" href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*"><span>*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*</span></a></h2>
 <p><span>Written by *|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|* on </span><span>*|RSSITEM:DATE|*</span></p>
 <span>*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*</span>
 <div>
 <h6>Share this story:</h6>
 *|RSSITEM:SHARE|*
 </div>
 <br>
 *|END:RSSITEMS|* <!-- stop loop through RSS items -->

Simple enough. I also had a look through the code in some of the other themes, and they were riddles with inline styles, tables, spacer gifs, and horrible caveman coding. Well, if you’re familiar with writing HTML templates for email, you’ll know that this is exactly what we want.

Configuring the sign-up form

They have a pretty easy-to-use sign-up form generator. If you want to see how the automatic RSS to email feature looks, sign up to my mailing list :) I’ve set it to send out at 4am. Anyway, there’s lots of additional fields you can add to the form… I’m a fan of keeping these as simple as possible, but there may be times when you need to collect additional information, especially for sales leads.

A/B testing feature

I’m looking forward to trying this feature, since many email marketing systems don’t have this built in. Sure, you can manually set up A/B group, but having it built in is so convenient. MailChimp’s primer on A/B split testing does a good job of explaining the feature, but it basically allows you to test out two variations of a newsletter, and see which one performs better. For example, you have two ideas for a subject line; instead of guessing, send both versions of the newsletter out to a small subset of the mailing list, measure which one has better open rates, and select that one to be sent to the full mailing list. Smart, huh?

Other neat features

• Option to send out a tweet once the newsletter has been sent. Alright, not that great, but kinda convenient.
• Option to add Google Analytics tracking codes to all URLs in the newsletter. In my opinion, you should consider this mandatory when setting up your email newsletter. If you’re not setting these tracking codes, then traffic from your newsletter is just getting marked as direct traffic. This is incorrect; the traffic does have a source (newsletter) and medium (email).
• Still exploring. More info to come!

MailChimp is one of the best mailing list services out there. Compared to other services, they provides some cutting edge features.

Post photo by bixentro@flickr