MailChimp's social features

With the landscape of the internet changing constantly, it can often feel like the sand shifts just as you get your feet onto something solid. Any marketing professional worth their salt will already be using email as a cornerstone of their campaigns, but they may not be fully aware of just how powerful email can be when combined with social networking.

MailChimp offers an incredible set of tools for email marketing, and if you have never heard of them, you really should check them out. This post is specifically about some of the most useful social networking features of MailChimp, and how they can both inform and enrich your campaigns to make them more successful.

First things first, Facebook. At the time of writing, and my checking their statistics page, Facebook has more than 500 million active users. With the world's population estimated to hit around 7 billion in 2011, that works out at around 1 in every 14 people in the world actively using Facebook...

MailChimp has a social share feature that makes sharing your email campaigns on Facebook really easy, and they also have a Facebook app that allows you to add a sign up form for your mailing list to your Facebook page – a great complement to the Drupal MailChimp module and Magento MailChimp extension that we use for our Drupal and Magento sites.

Sharing your campaigns on Facebook means that you open the possibilities of your message being seen by an audience much greater than your mailing list, and once shared to Facebook, it can then be shared on any number of times by your friends or fans, and their friends and so on. You can also easily add 'like' and 'tweet' buttons to your email, which your mailing list can use to share themselves, growing the potential even further.

Using MailChimp's SocialPro tools, you can find out how many of your subscribers are on social networks, how engaged they are with the emails you are sending out and how often they share your campaigns with others. You can also see how many times your campaign has been tweeted or re-tweeted on twitter, giving you a good idea of how exciting people find it. However, the most powerful feature is how MailChimp collects data like age, location, gender and interests and allows you to segment your list to target your emails really effectively.

Another couple of great resources MailChimp offers are the Twitter and Facebook merge tags (what is a merge tag?), which pull in your profile information from the sites to make the whole campaign a bit more personal. There is also a video merge tag. While it is not quite as exciting as it sounds, because it doesn't actually embed video into your emails, it does go to your Youtube video (or other), grab the chosen keyframe and overlay player controls to make a video player screenshot. When your users click the video player, they are taken to the real thing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, hopefully, however, it gives a taste of what is possible. Here at Deeson, we create and manage ongoing email marketing campaigns for many of our clients using all these tools, and with all the potential they offer.