We do the occasional email campaign to our current customers at my day job, and in interest of doing things right, I went with the absolutely awesome MailChimp service after looking at it and a number of alternatives. I’ve been very happy with their web app and their customer service, and highly recommend them if you’re looking to do any sort of email marketing for your business. It’s easy to get labeled as a spammer if you do things incorrectly when sending out large amounts of email, but using MailChimp practically reduces those changes to zero.
Anyway, I got an email from MailChimp yesterday letting me know about some upcoming scheduled upgrades and service enhancements, and I was reminded at how well these guys get copywriting and how it’s an integral part of consistent branding. Take this paragraph, for example:
This is an alert to let you know (well ahead of time) that we’ve got a huge upgrade planned for the weekend of May 3rd and 4th. We call it “huge” because unlike other upgrades, which we’ve likened to “changing tires on a moving car,” we’ll actually have to stop the engine and pull over to the side of the road this time. What this means to you is that while we’re doing our upgrades, scheduled campaigns will not be going out. Before you get too worried, we’re actually planning for this reboot to be extremely fast (like a pit stop) but we wanted to give you a heads-up so you can plan around it. Just in case. Details below.
The text they chose here is not an accident. It matches the tone they set on the rest of their site: Non-technical, easy to understand, and even a little funny. Email marketing isn’t exactly the most interesting part of doing business, but the team behind MailChimp has taken the intimidation and complexity out of the topic by using clear and friendly language and creating a product that is actually fun to use.
MailChimp also has some great video demos (screencasts, if you’re in the tech business) of this upcoming release that give you a good overview of what’s being improved and changed in what they’ve code-named Tarzan. Even here, they’ve done the extra work to make these demos friendly and interesting. I’m pretty sure they’re using the ScreenFlow product to make these, as they’ve even included a picture-in-picture window of the narrator – a nice touch. Here’s their guided overview of the new version as an example (direct link for feed subscribers).