The New Mail Chimp!

What is Mail Chimp?

Mail Chimp is an email marketing service provider (Wow that was a mouthful!). They offer services similar to Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, Mad Mimi, etc. If you have seen the signup forms on this website (surely you have!), they are all powered by Mail Chimp. When you sign up for my newsletter, you are added to my mailing list. Mail Chimp provides the means for gathering the list, maintaining the list, and sending emails.

I have been using Mail Chimp for the past year or so. The service was pretty good when I started using it, but they have steadily improved what they offer and their website. I covered some of what I like about Mail Chimp in a post a while back. Since then, there have been some great upgrades!

Forever Free!

One of the best “selling” points of Mail Chimp is the “Forever Free” plan. Basically, you get a fully functional account to get going with. The previous encarnation of Mail Chimp offered 500 subscribers and 3000 email per month.

Now Mail Chimp offers 1000 subscribers and 6000 emails per month. WOW! This is a great way to get an email list started for your business. You aren’t out any money until you have an email list that is quite large. I know for me, and a lot of small businesses I know, this is huge. One more bill can sometimes break the bank.

If you need to send more than your free quota of emails, you can upgrade to one of the paid accounts and send unlimited emails per month. There is a low entry point if you have less than 1000 subscribers ($15/month).

What Else is New?

Social Pro Add-On is free until March 2011.

This is usually a premium add-on to your account. The price is 20% of whatever you are paying per month. What is Social Pro?

Social Pro auto-magically searches your subscribers against most of the popular social media outlets. Something you could do yourself if you wanted to spend all your waking hours tracking down subscribers! Then it generates a profile card for each person it finds. The free trial is a great way to get introduced to this feature. Get a more in-depth description of Social Pro on the Mail Chimp Blog.

AIM Reports are FREE!

AIM Reports used to be an add-on feature that cost $49/month. The folks at Mail Chimp decided to make this part of their default feature set. It is now default in anticipation of their new mobile app called Golden Monkey. What is an AIM Report?

The AIM Report gives you a wealth of information about an email campaign. You can find out who opened the email, who clicked which links, and much much more.

Mail Chimp Faces

As an integrated part of the Social Pro Add-on, Mail Chimp Faces brings in avatars for your subscribers. This allows you to put a “name with a face”, and add a little humanity to the people who subscribe to your list. How does Mail Chimp get the pictures?

Mail Chimp aggregates avatars from the same network WordPress uses, Gravatar. Failing that, it pulls in images from one of the subscriber’s social media accounts.

Learn more about Mail Chimp Faces on their blog.

Add Facebook Comments to Emails

This new feature let’s the conversation with your subscribers extend past just sending the email. Basically, Mail Chimp inserts a link into your email that allows subscribers to make comments on Facebook about your newsletter from within the newsletter. As a topper, Mail Chimp keeps stats on what people are saying using this new feature.

Learn more about Facebook Comments on their blog.

Like, Tweet and Buzz

Mail Chimp has added the ability to incorporate social media more predominantly to their mail messages. You can now insert Facebook Like buttons, Re-Tweet buttons, and Google Buzz buttons to all your messages. This helps your fans to spread the word about you.

Klout

As part of their new push to integrate more social media into Mail Chimp, all your users will be analyzed and ranked via Klout. What is Klout? It is the defacto social media ranking system. It scores social media users based on several factors. Mostly, it analyzes your Twitter feed to see how influential you are on your followers.

Redesign!

The Mail Chimp staff have taken great pains to reduce the size of their CSS. By their own account around 80KB! In addition to reducing the size of the CSS, they have worked hard to improve their user interface and keep their colors and branding more consistent across the board. It was a nice looking system before, but has been improved since the last revision.

Read more about Mail Chimp’s Facelift on their blog.

New Sign Up Forms

Last but certainly not least, Mail Chimp has improved the look of their sign up forms. The upgrades do not affect any existing forms, but going forward you will have the choice to stay with your old forms or upgrade to the new and improved forms.

What does this really affect? Nothing as far as functionality. This only affects the look and feel represented to the user. There is even a button in the sign up form editor that will analyze the CSS file from your website, and generate a sign up form that has the same look and feel of your existing site. No more forms that stick out like a sore thumb!

Get Your Own Account Now!

That is pretty much it for the new Mail Chimp. I have been using Mail Chimp for about a year now, and I highly recommend their service for growing a mailing list and generating your newsletters. Take a look and see if what they have to offer is right for you!

Thanks for reading!

Bradley

P.S. Starting a list and need a great looking newsletter? Contact me today! Impress your subscribers with a professionally created newsletter.