This weekend we'll be upgrading MailChimp to v4.
- This is a major upgrade (see the list of new features below) and is free for all accounts.
- We will begin the upgrade on Jan 17th at 12am ET (see this in your timezone).
- We estimate the process will take the entire weekend, so please do not log in to MailChimp until Monday, January 19th (at 9am ET), when v4 is officially live.
New Features in MailChimp v4:
Note: some of the new features are discussed in this sneak-peek video.
Easier Signup Forms: Drop-downs & Hidden Fields!
We've made it super easy to build dropdown boxes, checkboxes, etc. (no custom coding necessary anymore). You can even set fields to "hidden." We've expanded the max number of fields from 15 to 30 (this is in addition to the 30 interest groups you can setup).
Geographical Open Reports
You'll get a geographical map and see where people are opening your emails from.
Click Overlay
We'll display an image of your actual email, and overlay click stats for each hyperlink, so you can see exactly where people are clicking.
Batch Modify & Batch Unsub
You'll be able to copy-paste a big list of members into a MailChimp list, and we'll batch unsub people (better than the way we handled before) and we'll also batch modify the other fields in their records.
RSS Scheduling Options
Users of our handy RSS-to-email tool will have new scheduling options: once a week, and once a month.
Import Campaign via URL
Give us the URL for an HTML email that you're hosting on your website, and we'll visit the URL, grab the code, resolve any relative links, inline your CSS (and other extremely cool stuff we'll talk about later) and then we'll send it out to your list.
Import Campaign via ZIP
Upload a ZIP file to MailChimp, and we'll unzip its contents (including subfolders, images, etc) and we'll send it for you. We'll also host your images for you.
Salesforce, Highrise & Paypal Integration
You'll be able to easily import lists from your Salesforce and Highrise CRMs (be sure to also check out BatchBook CRM's integration too). If you use PayPal, you'll be able to pass customers who buy stuff from you into your MailChimp list as well.
Wufoo Integration
Wufoo is an online tool that makes it easy to build great looking forms for your website (like "contact us" forms). It pretty much rocks. You can link them so that emails get passed over to a MailChimp list.
Social Sharing
After you send an email campaign, we'll give you an option to post a link to our hosted version (your campaign's archive) to your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and other "social" accounts.
New Template Headers
We've uploaded over 70 new beautiful images to our header designer's library, and we plan to add many, many more.
New languages
Two very, very gracious MailChimp users helped contribute Czech and Turkish to our list of signup form translation options.
"Remember Me" Checkbox on Login Page
We did this ages ago, but kept forgetting to make it live with each point release. Sigh. This time the code's been committed.
Plain-Text Generator Tweaks
Changed the way we display titles and subtitles and URLs in the automatic plain-text generator. This will never be perfect enough for everybody, but the idea is to save you some time when formatting your emails.
Smarter Databases
I saved this one for last, because it's the hardest to explain. Funny thing is, this one's the most important feature. The main purpose of MailChimp v4 is to overhaul the way we handle our databases. To put it simply, right now when you create a signup form & database, all your data looks the same to MailChimp. It's just a bunch of random data (if you had a field called "Age" someone could type in "21" or "twenty-one" and MailChimp wouldn't know the difference). But after v4, MailChimp will know, for example, that a "date" field should only contain dates. And that means soon, we'll be able to create awesome features like "Birthday Reminders" or "Drip Autoresponders" that are based on those dates (and you'll actually be able to segment on dates). It's sort of a hard concept to explain, but in upcoming releases, you'll understand just how revolutionary all this is.
Hope you find the upgrades useful.
If you have any questions or feedback before or after we launch v4, we've started a discussion about v4 over at the MailChimp Jungle...
Eep eep,
The MailChimp Team. |
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