Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Mad Mimi: WYSIWYG Email Marketing
When I hear “email marketing” I can’t help but think spam, but it is a legit tool too, and the latest tool in the pack is Mad Mimi.
Mad Mimi launched this week and consists of “state-of-the-art UI design makes for layouts that are easier to
create -– and easier to read – than emails generated by Constant Contact, Emma and others, who rely on rigid templates and cluttered,
dated layouts.”
Mad Mimi’s “modules-based” interface allows users to add picture and text fields, drag them around and add captions, links and dividers. Embedded constraints gently guide the layout, keeping the “designer” from getting into trouble, but providing more plasticity than templates.
The result: a fluid, flexible user interface, and clean, fashionable “Mimi-generated” promotions that represent a fresh approach to email marketing – at a subscription price that trumps the competition.
When I saw that Tobie Langel was on the team, I had to check it out. When you give it a spin you will be able to add images, and then use them to build out your email. There are some really nice subtle features such as the undo support.
ha ha one more email marketing service.
doesn’t look different. not sure why AJAXIN selected it as something unique.
It’s on Ajaxian because of its unique UI features, not because there’s nowhere else you can go to send marketing emails.
As a side note/rant, I would love for all email clients to only render plaintext. Image-based email (including web beacons etc.), is more annoying/evil than useful/good in my opinion, spam just highlights this issue.
Mad Mimi is very different to other email marketing services. You probably haven’t logged in, or used email marketing before. The UI features are really the point here, like sentientholon said.
Offtopic:
Am I the only one who thinks that “Lucida Grande” looks crappy? (http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/417/madmimisimplelovelyemaifi6.png)
Why not just use “Helvetica”?
I just did a deeper dive. Although it is a web 2.0 graphic design (curved corners, bright pastel colors) I didn’t get the feeling that it was pushing the envelope in terms of UI. It reminded me a little of Google Page Creator but not nearly as easy. http://pages.google.com/
The thing I really didn’t like is the Wiki style formatting. WYSIWYG is much more pleasant for a marketer.
Just my two cents.
dear gjl32
Sure I logged in and there are tons of js errors on compose message page. I use IE 6 may be there are no in 7th version or FF but anyway I think that ConstantContact has the simmilar editor with better functionality.
Firstly Google Pages is utterly awful. It’s ugly and half the time you can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s good if you want to make websites that give you a headache. It could have been dome 10 times better with Flash.
In terms of Constant Contact’s editor being better, although it does more, that’s not the point of Mad Mimi. Mad Mimi is about simplicity and is built for the web. Not as a desktop product. Constant Contact (and most editors) are overkill. That’s not what we’re about.
Also, we’re redeploying the fix for the IE6 errors in a short while.
Hmmm. Well the UI may be nice but they’ve got a lot to learn about email marketing.
No authentication (DomainKeys/DKIM). They also fail FCrDNS because they use you name and address as the form: header. I suspect that it will not take long before spammers ruin their IPs reputation as well.
Domain Keys seem to only be adopted by Yahoo and very recently, by Gmail. It does not effect an IP that has a clear score.
Our anti-spam techniques include human intervention in spammy campaigns. AOL, MSN and Yahoo feedback loops are used to detect spammers as well.
We’re also looking into cleaning up the headers. Thanks for your feedback.
It appears the proof is in the pudding mad mimi client base is growing which appears to be satisfing their specific clients needs.
There is another new player in the email marketing arena “InteCom” from New Zealand with the application developed on Ruby on Rails -be interested in your thoughts. http://www.intecom.co.nz