Mad Mimi - a great email newsletter tool!

Ever since I started designing jewelry, whenever I do a market I've been putting out a blank book & pen and encouraging people to sign up for my email updates. Then I would send out mass emails letting them know when I have upcoming events. In the past, I've always just sent out a regular looking email, sometimes getting fancy with bold or even coloured text, along with some links to some of my new work. Ooh, exciting.

I was always envious when I'd get a really nice looking, stylish newsletter email blast from other designers - wow - an actual layout! With embeded photos & links! I always wondered how they did that. (I come from a graphic design background, but my specialty was in printed media, not web stuff).

I noticed that most the the "pretty" newsletters I received used layouts from a company called "Constant Contact". I checked out their website and saw that they had a free 60 day trial so I signed up to try and design my own pretty newsletter. After the free trial, you can decide if you want to pay a low monthly fee to send newsletters to a set number of email addresses.

Well I never even got to try out the free trial! I found their templates and interface to be so confusing and frustrating that I gave up after a few tries. So much for my pretty newsletters.

Then, while I was perusing Handemadeology, I came across a post by a designer that mentioned "Mad Mimi" as her favorite newsletter option. So I checked it out.

Hallelujah! It was friendly and easy to use right from the get go! I had a (very) simple, pretty newsletter with clickable links ready in about 3 hours time. They too have a free trial for up to 100 email addresses, so I wasted no time adding 100 emails and sending out my message.

I had a couple of questions during the set up, emailed the company and heard back from them right away - on a Sunday night even! There were real people on the other end of the email with very helpful answers, and nice personal touches (she mentioned she liked my jewelry!) Excellent customer service! So I wasted no time in joining up; $8.00 a month for a 500 email contact list.

So that's all pretty great, right? But there's more! After your promotion goes out, they immediately send you an email with a link back so you can track where your message has gone, how many people have opened it, how many people click on the links, how many bounced back, etc. It's amazing! Here's an image of the two promotions I sent out (first 100 was the free trial).


And it's fascinating to see that in an email promotion that is sent out to a dedicated email list actually had only has 86 people out of 276 bothering to open up my email (2 days after sending it). I find this surprising, since it's not spam but rather people who signed up specifically *for* my newsletter.

Thought I probably should not be surprised considering the amount of email we are bombarded with on a daily basis, even still, it's a bit of a wake up call. It will probably make me consider juicing up my next newsletter with some type of promotion or sale and makes sure I specify that right in the title, so people will at least open it up to see what the promotion is.

Anyway, I couldn't be happier with my Mad Mimi experience, and obviously I would highly recommend them!

On a related side note, I had a question for them about how to get a copy of the newsletter onto my blog so you all could see it. As you see from the link above, this was the better solution. But in answering my inquiry, a second Mad Mimi employee also complimented my jewelry and mentioned that his mother has and etsy shop too. She works with copper wire and he thought she would love my stuff. He provided her link to her shop in case I wanted to check it out. Then he asked, I didn't mind, if he could pass on my shop's link to her. How lovely!

Of course you could be synical and think that they probably train their employees to compliment people - but you know what - even if they do I don't care!

Oh - and his mom's shop? See for yourself below - STUNNING! And bonus: made with recycled copper wire!

I'm still discovering all the cool things you can do with tracking these promotions, like about "drip campaigns", and "Google Analytics integration". I'll certainly enjoy digging deeper into the Mad Mimi world!

Till next time,
Christi York
www.buenostyle.com