New in MailChimp v5.3: 1000 Addresses Free!

[NooraK]

I signed into my MailChimp account today, and saw this. I'm really excited about being able to have 1000 addresses before I have to switch to a paid service!

What's new in v5.3:

1.Social Pro is free Get amazing insight into your subscribers, free, until March 2011.
2.AIM Reports are free - We silently rolled this out a couple weeks ago, but now it's official. Our AIM reports add-on is being absorbed into our default feature set, and is therefore now free (yay!). The data's found in your campaign reports under "subscriber activity." For those of you who don't know, AIM reports was an add-on that cost $49, and basically gave "who did what" stats. We made AIM free so that we can make the upcoming Golden Monkeys app (which requires AIM), free. Double yay!
3.Freemium Plan expanded - One year ago, we launched our freemium plan, allowing businesses with less than 500 subscribers to use MailChimp free of charge. We grew from 85,000 users to more than 440,000 users. So yeah, that worked. Now, we're expanding our freemium plan to allow customers with lists up to 1,000 members to use MailChimp free. Spread the monkey love!
4.MailChimp Faces - If you have the Social Pro add-on enabled for your list (ahem, which is free until March), you'll be greeted by your subscribers' avatars every time you sign in to the MailChimp Dashboard. Learn more about MailChimp Faces.
5.Add Facebook Comments to Emails - The discussion doesn't have to end when you click "send." Add the Facebook comments button, and your subscribers can keep the conversation going. See how it works.
6.Klout Scores added to member profiles - Klout analyzes your twitter and facebook accounts and rank your influence (here's a report on @MailChimp). It's sorta become the standard for measuring influence. So we've added Klout scores into all MailChimp member profiles.
7.Like Button enhancements - Back in July, we introduced the Like button to email marketing. Some of you told us you wanted more flexibility with it. So we added the ability for you to insert the URL that you want "liked." Your subscribers can like a product inside your campaigns, an item inside your RSS-to-email, or even your Facebook page. Basically, it'll work like this: * |FACEBOOK:LIKE:URL| *
8.Tweet Button - Campaign archives will include the "Tweet this" button, and you can insert a tweet this merge tag into your campaigns. RSS campaigns will get a tweet merge tag for each item, such as * |RSSITEM:TWITTER| * (we'll post more details, don't worry)
9.Buzz Button - We've added a merge tag for Google's Buzz button, as well as one for items in an RSS campaign.
10.Facelift & Botox Treatment - Over the years, we've been innovating like hell -- adding features on top of features on top of features. We decided it was time to sit down, take stock of our UI, and optimize like hell. Our interface elements are more consistent, fonts are refined, icons are more elegant, CSS files were reduced by nearly 80k and things are just -- well, more "aaaaaaaaaah."
11.Signup forms redesigned - We've redesigned the entire signup process. Signup forms, thank you pages, and welcome emails are more elegant and simple, and with a little sprinkling of CSS3. There's a new button in the signup form creator that will automatically design your signup form for you (it pulls in CSS and color settings from your website). Finally, signup forms are now optimized for mobile display (they'll auto-zoom on iPhone and Android). Existing signup forms are not changing. This is for signup forms moving forward (and you'll have the option to use "old" forms vs. "new" forms).

 

[bridedream]

I love MailChimp! And I got it all because of you, Noora. Thanks for the tip!

 

[Janutt2]

Does anyone have a webiste for Mail Chimp?

 

[NooraK]

Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailChimp

 

[Nanisu]

So how does Mailchimp differ from IContact? Not just price but how they handle bounces, etc.?

 

[NooraK]

For the most part I find their service to be very much the same. I was dealing with the lack of a WYSIWYG editor for the newsletters, but Joy pointed me to Online-HTML-Editor.org - The free online WYSIWYG Editor!. You get pretty much all the same reports, as well as some of the new social marketing stuff.

 

[bridedream]

Nancy, I signed up for the free trial of i-contact and mail chimp at the same time and sent to half of my list with iContact and the other half with MailChimp. The reports were virtually the same, so I couldn't see spending $10 a month for something I could get for free.I've been very happy with it. And I just won a free T-shirt! It's worth checking out.