Great content examples, email marketing tips,and a three-armed lady.
Content is Hard: Campaign Tips from Betabrand, Dave Pell, and The New York Times
"Content is really, really hard," Ben blogged recently. It's true, but if you're ever in a jam, good news: a lot of folks do content really well. We've rounded up a few of them here, along with some email marketing tips and tricks. We hope this issue of MonkeyWrench will bring you, wait for it, contentment.
"The objective has always been to make it just stupid enough that someone would want to forward it to a friend." That's how Betabrand founder Chris Lindland undersells his company's hilarious email campaigns. "People want to read interesting things" he says in the latest MailChimp at Work video. Sounds simple enough, but pulling it off is another story. Luckily, Betabrand happens to excel at stories, so we visited the company's San Francisco headquarters to learn more about their amusing and distracting newsletters.
MailChimp's data (mad) scientist is at it again, this time posing the question, "Are spammers simple, lazy, or brilliant?" In a blog post about what good email marketers can learn from spammy scumbags, he examines click rates and engagement, which "have something to do with subject line, and a lot to do with the content of your campaigns."
Back in November, we unveiled a Top Secret Super Confidential Covert Operation we'd codenamed Neapolitan. Because content is hard and you've got work to do, we wanted to make the campaign creation process easier and faster. So we created a new, drag-and-drop template editor. Then, we updated it, and tweaked it even further to help you shave 32 seconds off the time it takes you to make a campaign. Those seconds add up, especially if you're a frequent sender. Maybe you could use that extra time to play Legos.
As the self-described managing editor of the internet, Dave Pell spends the first four hours of every work day wrestling with 60 or so browser tabs to find the 10 most interesting news stories to send to his 25,000 loyal subscribers. We sat across the desk from which NextDraft is made each day to find out how Dave Pell curates the news.
Last time, we looked at how many emails we were sending via each of the major webmail providers. Recently, Litmus blogged further research that indicates Gmail's opens are up, while Hotmail and Yahoo!'s are down. Then they made a sweet infograph.
Big statement? Maybe, but Ben's standing by it. In a recent e-commerce tips blog post, he discusses learning about your customers, implementing social data, and automating based on what you've learned. Also? Rare Star Wars photos.
Rockhouse Partners is an entertainment agency that regularly answers tricky geo-specific questions in order to better serve its customers. Tech manager Dale Liska explained to MailChimp how his crew encourages out-of-state festival attendees with exclusive deals, balances the needs of a brick-and-mortar shop with an e-commerce storefront, and more. They once even invited customers to drive like Grand Prix racers!
By doing just a few simple things like subject-line experimentation, segmentation, and offering a coupon with signup, The New York Times Store experienced a remarkable uptick in sales. Store manager told MailChimp how they increased their ROI by 50%.
