Posted by Kevin on 16 November 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: MailChimp, Web Service Integration

In the last blog entry, I wrote about how to collect e-mail addresses on your site and use MailChimp.com to manage the e-mail lists and sending of newsletters. In this entry, I'll show you how easy it is to create a professional-looking e-mail MailChimp can send with no additional work on your part.

The goal is this: all of your newsletter content needs to be stored on your site. That way, people who have discovered your site for the first time can read past newsletters, and google can crawl that content and show those pages in search results, increasing your site's traffic.

After creating the newsletter page on your site, you can quickly turn it into a specially formatted e-mail template that MailChimp can use as your newsletter. Here's an example:  Charleston Financial Advisors recently created their November newsletter by creating the Newsletter page on their site. Once created, the person creating the e-mail campaign in MailChimp will simply point MailChimp to that page, adding a small extention to the URL to tell the site to show the page formatted as an e-mail:

The newsletter page on the Charleston Financial Advisors site:

Now, the same page, but formatted as an e-mail (and easily used by MailChimp):

No more time-consuming campaign building in MailChimp!