MailChimp’s posterous

Newsletters for artists are a bit of a rarity. How many times have you had someone tell you that they love your work but can’t buy it right now. What do you usually do? Tear off a piece of paper and give them your email address & phone number? Give them a flyer & a business card?

I would imagine that a lot of artists have the same experience, many times each week.

If you want to remind all of those people who loved you at one time to buy your work when they have some extra cash, you need to a do a few things. A newsletter can be your secret weapon for creating long-term residual sales and building a fan base around your work that sells your art for you.

Read the full post here.

via @chriscoyier

Every business day our Twitter handle @freesourcing publishes a “Freesource of the day”. Today’s Freesource is MailChimp – MailChimp is the most impressive email marketing tool I’ve seen – “period”. Aside from MailChimp being a great submission, what I found especially exciting, was the man who submitted it: Skip Blankley, the Owner and Founder of Groovemuse Atlanta.

Groovemuse is an Atlanta-based organization led by Musicians and Artists, for Musicians and Artists. Skip and his crew focus on creating and growing opportunities for talented artists in the Atlanta area through fundraisers, recording, web design, management, promotions, and legal assistance. And as you may have guessed, Skip is now using MailChimp to boost his efforts.

A big part of Groovemuse’s success has been achieved through their community of artists, vendors, and fans. Skip mentioned that “keeping in touch with so many is a challenge, and email blasting is never enough”. Skip’s excited about the switch to MailChimp and because of useful features like analytics, custom design, add-ons, and ROI measurement, but the main item that sparked his interest was a recent integration with Eventbrite – a free event listing and management tool. Skip said “the combination is exactly what Groovemuse needs”.

Freesourcing.org would like to extend a special thanks to Skip for submitting MailChimp and especially for taking the time to speak with us this morning. On a side note, Skip declined to say which email marketing provider he was using before, but based on his endorsement, I don’t think Groovemuse will be going back.

via freesourcing.org

Posterous and MailChimp have radically transformed the entire online publishing proposition for me. I can now publish more often in more places at a fraction of the time or cost.

-- Mike Elgan

If you're in NYC, you should be truly excited. MILKMADE (homemade, hand-delivered ice cream) will be launching their ice cream of the month membership very soon. The initial membership area will be the East Village and West Village areas (zipcodes 10003, 10009, and 10012).

"We're opening membership up to the first 50 people who sign up next Wednesday, October 28 starting at noon. Watch your inbox on Monday, October 26, for an email with the link to sign up."

You can subscribe to the list if you're interested.

At SoundOps, we are always looking for stuff that will help our clients make the most of their music.  If you’re serious about your career as an artist, you’ve probably noticed, you actually spend more time marketing your band than you do writing, recording, and playing…

For us, running a mastering studio is very similar.  We spend a ton of time marketing our services, because if we didn’t, our engineers would all be twiddling their thumbs.

We recently discovered MailChimp, a great company based here in Atlanta.  They offer the email services we all need for less than the other guys.  In fact, for most artists starting out, it’s FREE!  You don’t pay unless your email list is pretty big.  And on top of that, their website is so smart, you don’t even need to know what the heck you’re doing

If you are having a hard time keeping up with your mailing list, and maintaining a regular newsletter, MailChimp is the ticket.  It won’t just make your life easier, it will actually add hours to your day.  Which means you can chase your dream as an indie musician and still sleep in!

The best kind of laziness is the kind that makes you more successful - I think that’s a quote…

If your band has tried services like aweber, this will be a breath of fresh air, and not just because it’s cheaper.  Trust me - check it out, and sign up for free!  That’s a special link, so you’ll also get 30 bucks and a cool bonus too if you ever upgrade your account

Good luck, and happy emailing!

- Will

PS:  One more thing - while we’re on the topic of being lazy… MailChimp.com is full of tutorial videos, so you don’t even need to read the instructions.  That’s been my favorite part so far.

From the SoundOps Studio Blog

Mail Chimp offers encouraging words and little comments that link to youtube videos...usually something to do with a chimp.

1. Visual Capabilities
Our previous large scale e-mail distributor was having some glitches and we wanted to go with more custom visual capabilities. When I spoke with our previous provider, they actually recommended Mail Chimp. Somehow I don’t think they’re focusing on their e-mail distribution side of the business! Not only does Mail Chimp provide basic templates, they also provide great tools for embedding your own graphics in the site or developing your own templates

2. Reports

A Mail Chimp Report

I never thought I was one for statistics, but I really like the graphics that Mail Chimp provides that help me evaluate how my campaigns are doing. This is great for showing my superiors how the campaign is going and letting them see that this means of communicating with people is  effective. Of course it’s always cool to see the map of where people are opening the e-mails, but I especially like being able to compare my campaign stats with the industry averages.

The e-mail click maps that overlay on the actual e-mail so you can see where peopl are clicking and what’s effective gives immediate feedback that can be used to improve the next campaign.

3. Comparison and recommendations

When I looked at other services like Constant Contact and iContact, I found that many of the alternative companies provide similar services and features, but I just was really pleased with they ease of use for Mail Chimp. I know, it’s not profound, but it just made sense.

4. Plays well with others.

When I send a campaign out, I can easily Tweet a short url out to my Twitter pals. With Analytics 360 I could pull info from my site data and see how the campaign is actually turning into values added or ROI. Currently, I haven’t used this feature (but I could!) and Chimp is promising more features in this area in the future. (I have been joyfully reading stats from Google’s Analytics for several years now to see how my sites are doing.

5. Ease of use

I’m not a computer whiz and even though this was recommended to me by our IT department’s Web guru, I found Mail Chimp to be pretty intuitional and easy to get going very quickly.

6. Support

Mail Chimp provides lots of snazzy, simple videos for training and they have Live Chat for getting questions answered and they’re pretty quick about it! They also have “live” tours you can take to learn how to do more with the system.

7. A-B testing

A sweet feature for sending out two variations on an e-mail to whatever percentage of your list you want, then sending the one that did best to the rest. For example I could try two variations of a subject line to 10 percent of my list, let the system calculate which one got the best open rate, then send that one out to the rest of the list…all without a hassle!  That’s nice.

8. List managment

Really the only issue I’ve had with Mail Chimp was when I made the switch and imported two overlapping CSV lists. When I imported the second list it overrode the group information that I was including. Once I realized that, it was a simple fix. Mail Chimp does a beautiful job of keeping my lists clean. Unless I force someone back into the system, even if I re-import a list, it doesn’t add them back in if they unsubscribed, complained, etc. The ability to let people self-manage their subscriptions was a major factor for using this system. The current gues management system that we use, has too many hoops to jump through to make it easy for this sort of mailing.

9. It’s Fun

They do a good job of keeping the whole process fun. When it’s processing they even let you know that they’re doing things, like making you a grilled cheese sandwich. Sadly, I’ve never gotten the sandwich itself because apparently the Chimp ate it “because he got hungry.”

Have you found a mail service that you love? Or hate? What’s working for you?

Great overview and a nice review of MailChimp.

Check out our interview with Angela Snyder, Co-Founder & Artist at Nerdbots.net

So, one of my new clients, Eva Rawposa of UnCooking101.com, introduced me to MailChimp, and it has quickly become one of my favorite tools. As a site designed to help you create, manage and send e-mail campaigns, it’s completely brilliant. It’s 100% Mac + Firefox friendly, which makes me love it even more.

Membership
They have a free membership that covers up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 sent e-mails per month, which is perfect for small business monthly newsletters. (I’m starting one soon! You can sign up to receive it ->->-> over there!) If you have a need for more subscribers or sends, or don’t like the required MailChimp badges on your e-mails (but they’re so cute!), then it’s well worth the price of the membership upgrade. I’ve already been able to suggest this as a tool for another client, Megan Duret of the new and fabulous Academic Connections, who was looking for a good newsletter software.

Custom Template Design + Tutorials
With MailChimp’s intuitive User Interface (UI) and just a tiny bit of HTML + CSS knowledge, you can be up and running with a custom newsletter in no time. For those who don’t have that web knowledge, MailChimp has (currently) 222 lovely templates that you can choose from. From special occasions to holidays to music and bands, they’ve got you covered. They also have some tutorial videos and a free webinar so that you can learn how to use the site quickly.

Marketing
With the ability to track opens and HTML clicks, integrate with Google Analytics, and automatically post campaigns to Twitter, (among other things) it’s also a marketer’s dream. They make it beyond easy to create beautiful forms for sign-up and e-mails that users receive when updating or canceling their subscription. They also provide test sends so that you can see what it will look like in your inbox, though each time you test send, one of your free 3,000 sends is gone forever. (Until next month anyway!)

Bonus!
Quite possibly my favorite feature is the site’s personality and constant pop culture references. When the Chimp told me I could be a part-time model, I knew it was meant to be.

A nice review from one of our freemium users.

Bonobos used MailChimp to launch this sweet video earlier today. Big Chimpin' featuring Rod Bananapants.