Broadcast Email from a sarcastic chimpanzee?

MailChimp has turned into a nice second-source for broadcast email services to VickeryHill clients. While we used to recommend Constant Contact almost exclusively, mailchimp frameworkwe have come to love the extra mile MailChimp has put into their product.

The client UI is clean and comfortably heavy with graphics and they have fun with their interface. The user experience is fairly straightforward and the emails get delivered and reported on without flaws as near as we can tell.

Their primary dashboard jumps out at you with information about your lists' growth and a really nice pie chart of your last campaign summary including emails opened, bounced and unopened. Our clients who use it like the ability to quickly see where you are at without having to delve deep into sub menus.

MailChimp iPhone AppThe video help files and online training is very helpful and the Resource Area is filled with just about anything you would need to go beyond just sending a simple broadcast email to your customers/leads.

Another place they excel at is their MailChim Plugins. They have dozens of plugins for everything from Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress CMS systems, to TypePad blogs and shopping cart modules.

While it would be great to broadcast emails from your desktop with Outlook, the risk of your domain being blocked is not worth it...that's where MailChimp comes in.

They even have a really well put together iPhone app for Mailchimp that shows you Reports on your campaigns, ChimpChatter, your Lists and MonkeyRewards.

Let us know if you would like to talk about taking your customer broadcast email communication to the next level >

Spam Can Act of 2003

Why use an Email service provider?

Back in late 2003, George W. Bush signed into law the CAN-SPAM Act, which basically established a set of standards for sending commercial email.

In short, the bill permits businesses who market via email to do so as long as they stick to 3 forms of compliance:

  • Unsubscribe
  • Content
  • Sending Behavior

While some argue the loop-holes allow an actual definition of how-TO-spam, it has helped businesses better protect themselves (and their domain names) from being blocked by the their legitimate customers trying to receive emails.

In a nutshell, we use services like MailChimp to help facilitate compliance to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and protect their domains from being blocked by RBL / DNSBL lists that most of our email servers now subscribe to in order to block the emails we don't want.

It's a viscious circle, but we think without the law and providers like MailChimp, we'd all be wasting a lot more time than we already do deleting those darn "viagra" emails.