I am a Raving Fan of MailChimp
Posted December 9th, 2009 by Robert
I didn’t think I had a need for a newsletter or a mailing list. But I love MailChimp so much that I found a need. As a recording studio, I couldn’t see a real reason to email people on a regular basis. They’ll find us if they want to record, right? That’s true. But in staying the course with our efforts to be a “new media” savvy company, I decided to find out why we shouldn’t have a newsletter, and not why we should.
I’d heard great things about MailChimp from friends in the know. At WeTheCitizens, we were already using MailChimp for our heavy-emailing clients. I’d also had the pleasure of meeting Amanda, MailChimp’s Chief Twitter Officer (yep, CTO…how cool is that!?) through mutual friends. I decided to sign us up for an account.
I must admit, it sat dormant for several months because we were busy…you know, trying to make money. But I recently found some time, and the material, to put into a newsletter. I set up a link so people could sign up for the newsletter, and also sent messages to bands and artists we’d recorded asking if they’d like to join our mailing list (we offered them 500% off their next recording project). It turns out we got a bunch of subscribers by simply asking people directly if they wanted to opt in as opposed to asking them to sign up.
After a couple of days and about fifty newsletter subscribers later, I decided to watch some MailChimp tutorial videos. A lot of the material covered doesn’t typically pertain to our type of company (at least not yet). We’re not selling physical products, and we don’t really need the advanced programming and corporate software integration features. But the videos and tutorials are so well-made that I became excited about the future possibilities of using it for more advanced applications. I was so impressed that I got in touch with the folks over at MailChimp and found out about Screenflow, one of the products they use for screencasting. We ended up using it the very next day to create a WeTheCitizens screencast, which incidentally, I narrated.
I spent about an hour designing a newsletter for us, mostly playing around with default templates and color themes, but it could have been done in less than ten minutes using the automatic theme generator. Since this was our first mailing, I did a bit of tweaking because I didn’t want to put too much content in and scare people away. The email design tools are very simple and slick, but still powerful. If you need extra power, they can hook into Picnick for image-editing and an email campaign program called High Impact for Windows.
After sending out the first newsletter, I found that the comprehensive reporting features were also amazing. You can see basic statistics like how many “opens” there were and how many people unsubscribed, but you can also see how many clicks there were in the email and what they clicked on! This is a goldmine of data that will help with writing better newsletters in the future. I also indicated to MailChimp that we’re in the music industry, so for every stat about our newsletter campaign, I get a comparison to the industry standards. So far we’re doing well!
The best part about all this is the account we are using is free. That includes up to 500 subscribers, and up to 3,000 emails per month. That’s huge! By the time we get to that point, we’ll probably be making enough moola to give to the Chimps for a larger plan. They’ve done it right – building tons of raving fans
