The Official Mad Mimi Blog

This is where we post about new features on Mad Mimi and whatever's on our minds. 

Mad Mimi's First Support Chat

This was Mad Mimi's very first chat *ever*.

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Mad Mimi iPhone app is live at the App Store

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10 Principles of Good Support

Dave, Mad Mimi head geek, pointed out an article to me about Zappos and their core values that drive what is know to be an impeccable support approach that has fueled the company's success in a major way and continues to today, while the company is under the banner of Amazon. Before I knew about Zappos, Mad Mimi's approach to interacting with people had evolved naturally in a similar-yet-different-but-also-great way. Here's a little on the way I see things:

1. Great execution (of software).
2. Great service (see below)

I'll leave off dogma about software design for another time... but here are ten principles of managing a support team:

1. You never know who you're talking to, so take a little extra time to be lovely and give good vibes.
2. Find every opportunity to go beyond limits of a conventional "support" experience.
3. Respond fast, intelligently, with proper grammar and lucid descriptions accompanied by images and videos.
4. Be yourself, don't be afraid to say no but more importantly, don't be afraid to say yes.
5. Always give the benefit of the doubt and treat everyone with an open mind.
6. If you don't know something, research it before you respond - even if it relates to something outside of the product you're supporting.
7. Be determined to make the life and business of person you're communicating with better - and let that be the sole driving force of the support experience you're providing.
8. Read the question twice.
9. Give unwarranted, thoughtful and subjective advice if you feel you would do something differently.
10. Customers are more important than sleep.

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And, we're back, and fast. Yay.

Hey all. Thanks to our awesome customers for sticking it out with us today. Thanks to our engineers Dave, Piotr, Jesse, Dean, Anthony and Terry for controlling a super tricky, vulnerable, stressful situation today. We managed to roll out very scary and hard database optimizations.

Right now, Mad Mimi's database is flying, and we've been able to implement a new configuration that will prevent this for happening in the future, and make sure that we move in the direction of "0" downtime with a master master database configuration.

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Site Outage

Gary here. Our engineers are working very hard on controlling a very difficult
situation here at Mad Mimi. We're doing our utmost to keep the app up as much
as we can with a failing database that occurred due to forces beyond our control.

All data is safe and we will be stable shortly.

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Percona and Mad Mimi's MySQL Optimizations

Recently, Mad Mimi's email and interface speed has decreased across the board somewhat, and some people have been asking about it.

So, here's the skinny on the speed.

Mad Mimi in in April, was sending around 1 million emails a day. September, the beginning, we were sending 3 million a day. One month later - as in, today - we're sending over 6 million. This means our database is ballooning quite fast, and although we've substantially scaled all our hardware, we've reached a point at which hardware is limited.

We've had Percona (the very best database consultancy in the world) in all week, specifically Piotr Biel and Maciej Dobrzanski, and we are retaining them to scale and optimize our database architecture primarily by implementing replication and sharding which will make our database scalable and fast.

We're hoping Percona will complete the optimizations the end of next week, and every day we've been rolling out smaller optimizations, and today we're updating our stored procedures. As of yesterday, we've seen significant enhancements in speed.

We expect dramatic improvements by the end of next week, at which time we'll all be sailing. :)

Please be assured, we're sparing no expense and no effort in handling this with as much elegance as is possible. We appreciate the support and patience of all our beautiful customers who we love. :-)

Gary

Mad Mimi's CEO and Founder

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You should feel pain when unclear

By Derek Sivers, http://sivers.org/

Email blasts are the best training for being clear.  

At my last company I had about 2 million customers.  

When writing an email to everyone, if I wasn't perfectly clear, I'd get 20,000 confused replies, which would take my staff all week to reply back to each, costing me at least $5000 plus lost morale.  

Even if I was very clear, but took more than a few sentences to explain something, I'd get thousands of replies from people who never read past the first few.  

Writing that email to all customers would take me all day, carefully eliminating every unnecessary word, and reshaping every sentence to make sure it could not be misunderstood.  

One unclear sentence? Immediate $5000 penalty. Ouch.  

Unfortunately, people writing websites don't get this kind of feedback.  

Instead, if they're not clear, they just get silence.  Lots of hits but no action.  

I see new websites trying to look impressive, filling their site with hundreds of puffy unnecessary sentences.   I feel bad that they haven't felt the pain of trying to email that text to thousands of people, to directly see how misunderstood or ignored it is.

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Testing the Email Waters | Why Business Blogger Heather Rast Picks Mad Mimi

Small biz at its best (an exept from Heather Rast's Insights and Enginuity, as featured on Marketing Profs)

For small businesses, it can be a challenge to look uber-polished and sophisticated with every communication and customer relationship tactic. If you’re also repositioning and rebranding the company as we are at Ovation, in many way’s it’s on par with a brand new start-up.  There’s the Web site, collateral, product sheets, trade show materials to develop. On another level is logowear, corporate gifts of various values, advertising for awareness and image building. There’s also the requisite trade associations, Chambers of Commerce, and more for networking.

The reality is that small business budgets are, well, smaller than that of their mid or large sized counterparts. With an eye on growth - that one “tipping point” win - small business marketers know they can’t afford to be overlooked.

Beautifully Simple

One area I’ve given a lot of thought to is email.  Done right, email can be a professional, relatively unobtrusive way to reach a variety of prospects, influentials, and existing customers. Many elements can be placed in a library and re-purposed for multiple “drops,” and of course there’s the power of the visual to draw a reader in (along with well-written content) and lead them to key landing pages.

But which provider was right for us? I had a few essential requirements when I started my search.

My Basic Criteria

  1. Low monthly cost (or free!)
  2. Flexible design and layout formats
  3. Low-level coding requirements
  4. Tracking and reports for insights
  5. Flexible list management (we use Highrise for CRM)

The Little Red-Haired Girl

Mad Mimi: email wiht moxie

Mad Mimi: email with moxie

After a lot of evaluation (I confess, I didn’t understand the significance of some of the items listed on various feature sets) I narrowed my choices down to two. Running neck and neck (sharing many of my requirements, and each offering a few “something extra’s”), I chose MadMimi.

In just minutes late the other night, I pulled together a simple email sample and sent it to a few people. Using a few branded graphics I had easy access to, my new email had a masthead, intro paragraph, two stories (each with their own visual), and a footer. There’s no charge for a good long while (we’re still developing a list). It was easy to tell which of my recipients opened theirs (and which didn’t!), and also who forwarded it.  I can create separate campaigns for different purposes (say, a drip marketing program for customer development, routine emails for ongoing relationship management, etc.), maintain separate lists, and generate insightful reports that tie into site conversion funnels.

All of this may be all in a day’s work for many - email consultants, direct marketers specializing in digital, developers, and the like. But this was my very first hand’s on creation experience (it’s one thing to receive a slew of them, another to plan and create them for specific use cases!), and I have to say I’m jazzed at the potential. I’m only limited by the time and energy I have to focus on learning all the ins and outs. Not to mention watching the trends…

 

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Email marketing services that rock

September 3, 2009 - by Rob Maguire - Nonprofit Communications

Facebook may have made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, but email is still king. Despite the rapid growth of online social networking, email has three times the reach, according to a new Forrester survey.

Even a space monkey could build beautiful newsletters using a service like Mad Mimi.

An email newsletter should hold a prominent role in every nonprofit’s communications strategy. The tools you use to create and send your message have a huge impact on whether it ever ends up in your recipients’ inboxes and how likely they are to read and act on it.

If you’re sending newsletters from your regular email account, the odds of being blacklisted are uncomfortably high. And if you’re building your own HTML newsletters from scratch, you’re probably wasting your time.

Hosted email marketing services are your best bet for quickly producing newsletters that are both pretty and powerful. There are a whack of great features common to many of these services that will help you:

Save time: most hosted services are so easy to use that a space monkey could put together an attractive, easy-to-read newsletter in minutes. Schedule your messages to send in the future, or even set up a drip campaign.

 

Track your emails: you’ll benefit from stats on open, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and can easily compare your campaigns to gauge effectiveness. Most services often useful charts, easy data exports, and integration with Google Analytics.

Manage your lists: easily add and remove individual subscribers or quickly import entire contact lists. They’ll handle your bounces and unsubscribe requests for you, and offer cut-and-paste forms for your website. Running split tests is a dream.

Be responsible: ensure your messages comply with spam legislation with features like confirmed opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, and removal of duplicate entries.

Have fun: many of these services have a playful interface and are a pleasure to use. You’ll look forward to crafting your messages and tracking the results once they’re sent.

Who’s who in email marketing

mimi-iconNow that you see a hosted service is the way to go, you’ve got a handful of good options. My personal pick is Mad Mimi. Along with a surprisingly intuitive interface and pricing that can’t be beat, they have the greatest customer service of any company I’ve ever done business with. (Thanks Dean and Gary!)

If Mimi ever croaked, I’d hook up with Emma. Her services are bit steeper, but she plants five trees for every new customer she receives, makes microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, and gives away twenty five accounts to deserving charities each year.

There’s also MailChimp, who offers a free library of email marketing guides to anyone who’s interested. When it comes to solid marketing advice, these guys don’t monkey around. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Now if you’re looking for oodles of features and full-service support — or your company frowns upon suppliers with funky, unique names — you might want to take a look at the pricier plans offered by Constant Contact and Bronto.

Many of these services offer free basic accounts to get you started, so sign up and start playing around. Once you see how fun and easy email marketing can be you’ll never send a hand coded email from Outlook again!

Disclaimer: I take part in the Mad Mimi affiliate program — but my love for her is true, I swear!

Thanks for the props Rob Maguire!

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Mad Mimi 2009 - TopTenREVIEWS

Mad Mimi was reviewed and rated this week by TopTenReviews.

We really like Mad Mimi, mostly because it is hassle free and refreshing. We like how easy and fast the service is; the newest of newbies can create an email campaign. As experienced reviewers for email marketing services, when we can look at this service we have a sense of wow, and commend Mad Mimi for their innovation and unique approach to email marketing.

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