Till this point of time, we’ve been using Feedburner’s email subscription feature to deliver our blog posts via email to those who still prefer the good ol’ email for reading awesome WordPress tips! It’s pretty funny though we decided to ditch Feedburner’s email subscription service in favour of Mail Chimp at the time when Google finally decided to focus on Feedburner.

Mail Chimp is an awesome email newsletter company and not only I love their presentation, I was flattered with their amazing list of features. I’ve been exploring and checking Mail Chimp’s features since yesterday and the more I look into its feature, the more I fall in love with it. I’ll be honest, I tried their service because at the moment they are offering 1000 subscribers for free and considering the fact that we have 400 email subscribers for Blog Design Studio, I thought it was a fair deal ;) However, once I signed up with their service – I can say that I’m going to stick with them!

MailChimp features that impressed me the most!

1. Presentation – We all know that its important to have good design on the internet, add some humour with lots of value and you’ll have a very popular website. Mail Chimp has done all three of them correctly.

2. Free offer – Their bait of having up to 1000 subscribers for free helped in starting up.  It’s ideal for a small bloggers and I’m sure by the time some one will have 1000 email subscribers, they’d be earning enough from the blog to cover Mail Chimp’s premium services.

3. Integration with services – The thing that impressed me the most that they have a pretty big list of services through which they’ve integrated Mail Chimp in some or the other way. Facebook, Twitter, Zoho CRM, Sales Force, Freshbooks, Survey Gizmo are some of them.

4. Reports & Analytics – Google Analytics is fantastic, reports generated by Google Feedburner are also helpful, however it was still cumbersome to use it. I hope they’ll change it soon after their new design and all. On the other hand, Mail Chimp is offering far more useful stats and once combined with their Social Pro feature and Google Analytics it looks completely irresistible. These are the kind of stats that can really help business people in making critical decision.

Other than that, they have all the other features that most of the popular email marketing services have. You can check their complete list of features over here [download feature list PDF].

Email newsletters are really important for online business, as we’ve learned from experience of others. We are yet to experience for ourselves and if you haven’t done that for your blog or business, then you should start one today! In next post, we’ll highlight that why email newsletters are important.

Update – The current email subscription form on Blog Design Studio isn’t active. We are in the process of designing a good looking form, that will be active pretty soon. If you want to get the blog updates with awesome WordPress tips, then you can subscribe temporarily from here.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

© rajat for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Because I’m on shared server, I asked WPWebhost to change the memory limit and it did solve the problem! Thanks a ton Rajesh and WPWebhost for helping me in fixing up the problem.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Matt Mullenweg, Matt Cutts, Tim Ferriss, Andy Peatling, Chris Pirillo, John Lilly and who not! You’ll fall in love with the list of attendees. Won’t you get jealous if you are even an inch closer to WordPress?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Although, I’m not sure that if you happen to buy those tools – do you get a thank you note for making the MMO blog owners thanks or not for helping them become rich :P

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Apart from that, I’m also working on various small little things that will make my life more organized as I see that its important for a freelancer/professional blogger to really tidy up their schedules so as the discipline is there. I hate myself for not being disciplined and not doing justice to this blog and for that same reason, I’m planning to go for a different office with startup culture in it. By Startup Culture, I mean that we’ll have an office space that’ll be shared by 3-4 startups and will have similar kind of startups too.

The reason, I was pretty happy to see the productivity while I was at Pune with my friends who are running a wonderful startup called http://hover.in. You’ll see that it’s running successfully on this blog and I’ll come up with its review and uses in one of the forth-coming posts.

I really need to come back with my proper schedule and timings and I’ve got a gut feeling that this is the right time. I know lot of time has already been wasted, still its never too late, is it? I assure you that you’ll see a different kind of approach and will enjoy reading this blog even more.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink