There has recently been a couple of important new features in the popular email delivery platform, MailChimp.
MailChimp now makes it easy to include video in your email. Not true video though in your email (that's pretty much impossible for email) - but the ability to automatically create a thumbnail and link just from the youtube url of the video at a size of your choice. Even better, this process is automated when including RSS feeds that include videos, which leads me to the next notable MailChimp feature. This is for many people old news, as it is a feature that was originally introduced to MailChimp in April last year. I believe it is as revolutionary as content managed websites are to plain html websites. It is still rarely utilised or known about by many MailChimp users. It is about combining the powers of two online mediums - email and RSS.
The vast majority of newsletters most businesses are likely to send with MailChimp are of the plain ol' campaign type, allowing the delivery of a completely customised html email newsletter, with a couple of dynamic fields (person's name, etc). A/B comparative campaigns and others are possible, but due to the additional time required in setting these up (not much but some), are historically not used that often by our clients.
In most campaign types, you are required to manually enter your text, upload and insert your images etc, which takes a considerable time of word processing, styling, formatting, and designing. If sending a digest of information from multiple sources, then the required preparation time is increased even more. Of course, there are shortcuts in MailChimp, (like developing the campaign in plain html offline, uploading the html and images in a single zip file as a template, and creating a campaign from that template for example), but in the end, the content will always have to be inserted by you. This is the main stumbling block for content heavy and detailed email newsletters to really shine and be produced on a consistent basis, as the amount of time required to pull all the information from multiple sources together into a newsletter digest can be very time consuming.
RSS are syndicated feeds of web pages, allowing your site content to be automatically available for other websites to publish. For example, it can take your blog page and only include the raw text and images in XML, a format easy for computers to easily read and display in different contexts, like news websites, news readers, and newsletters. Now people have been saying RSS and RSS readers have been on the way out for years. This is very much not the case.
MailChimp has for a long time had RSS sourced email newsletter campaigns (sent when a single RSS feed is updated or a period thereafter). When combined with MailChimp's ChimpFeedr, you can combine multiple RSS feeds into a single RSS feed, to allow for an automated newsletter with RSS content from different sources sent every x days/months/etc. However, the RSS powered campaigns in Mailchimp still only result in a single area of the newsletter having dynamically sourced content, and is only sent if the feed has been updated. This has been the case since 2008, and ever since, MailChimp has been working on a way to include multiple feeds into a single campaign. It may be old news, but they've done it.
All MailChimp emails and campaign types can include dynamic content sourced from multiple locations, anywhere in the newsletter. In other words, you can merge many different dynamic content sources with static content into different areas of one-time campaigns, sent on demand. This means that together with your usual newsletter or notification, you can add any recent blog posts, twitter updates, flickr photos & any other dynamic content sources that support RSS, and send it exactly when you want it to be sent. This allows for a great deal of freedom in designing and creating great looking newsletters, while containing a great variety and detail of content to ensure a great engagement with your audience. An excellent tutorial by Jesse Rand has been written on this very step.
Personally, I see the feature of having multiple RSS feeds in one campaign as being the same as the difference between plain html websites, and websites powered by content management systems. They may well look identical, but having a CMS makes for much easier changes of layout, content and menus without having to recode each entire page by hand. This essentially makes MailChimp not just a system for sending professional custom html emails, but a true content management & delivery system (CMDS), with the ability to select and insert many external content sources anywhere you want in the newsletter, and combine with your own text and images on a per-campaign basis.
What has been and what is possible to do with MailChimp for external content delivery:
- Display content from any single RSS feed into one area of your newsletter.
- Merge multiple feeds into single feed to automate content distribution of multiple news sources
- Place different dynamic content sources into different areas of the newsletter layout, sent only when RSS feeds are updated on daily/weekly/monthly etc basis.
- Combine many dynamic content sources with static content into different areas of one-time campaigns, sent on demand.
Email newsletters are a great way to reengage your customers, and a great way of advertising and providing incentives for return customers as well.
Don't forget that unlike websites that your audience and customers have to manually click or nagivate to, email campaigns appear directly in their inboxes. With the ever increasing tight schedules of today's technological society, convenience of delivery is becoming the norm, and it's never been a better time to try out email marketing.
If you'd like us to design and develop your own email newsletter digest, or any form of email campaign, give us a call on 08 73247170, or email / tweet / write to us.
Resources
What can I put in my newsletter? What mediums are you targeting in your marketing campaign? Images? Use Flickr.
Do you publish different content in different locations or have multiple blogs? Blogger / LiveJournal /
For something more advanced than ChimpFeedr, Yahoo Pipes is one of the most advanced systems, able to search for certain keywords within multiple news sources for example. Other notable examples of use are available here, and a video guide by MailChimp's Ben is available here..
August Boehm is the resident SEO and eCampaign Specialist at Alltraders.
