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I realize now that I’m an old, old man. And that’s not just because nobody that I was talking to in the company kitchen recognized my references to Bon Jovi or Erasure the other day (don’t ask). But because all the young whipper-snapper web designers I talk to anymore have no idea how to code HTML emails the old-fashioned way. They scratch their heads and look at me like Grampa Simpson when I talk about embedded tables and shim.gifs. When I warn them of the perils of CSS Positioning, and how “basically, nothing works so keep it simple” they snicker and make little “coo-coo” hand gestures next to their head when I’m not looking (I have security footage to prove it).

Any-hoo, after they spend a few weeks breaking emails in Outlook 2007 and Lotus and screaming at Gmail for losing fonts, and at Yahoo China (but not Yahoo US) they come back and say, “Oh great master, tell me again about the ways of HTML coding.” Typically, I make them start by burning their arms on a scolding pot (has nothing to do with email coding, but it’s fun), then I teach them the “ancient” techniques old people like me learned in the late 90s. But I’m old, and I’ll be dead soon. Who will pass on these skills?

So I wrote that free guide over there on the right. It’s an 870k PDF download. You can use it to win our bloodsport Email Design Throwdown, if you like. But remember, with great power comes great responsibility, grasshopper.

But which stats you use to measure success really depend on the type of emails you’re sending. If you send monthly newsletters, maybe you focus on opens (reader interest) and what URLs are clicked (their fav content). If you send transactional emails to a million people a day, all you probably care about is deliverability. If it’s one-to-one autoresponders, perhaps you check your overall conversion rate (using our ecommerce360 or google analytics api).

But what if you’re sending RSS-To-Email campaigns?

These emails go out automatically, and “behind the scenes.” Depending on your frequency settings, they could be sending daily. That means after a few months, you could have like 5 kajillion emails sent (double check my math).

Here’s what I mean…

I use our RSS-to-email functionality to send a daily email to subscribers whenever we post something new to our blog. I don’t do much to promote this list, but somehow 1,000+ people have found their way on to it. Since it sends emails every day, my campaigns page looks like:

They’re multiplying like bunnies!

There’s no way I’d click into every single campaign to check its open/click stats. Plus, I think the clicks would be all over the place, since the topic of our blog posts vary wildly from day to day.

Besides, when it comes to our blog content, all I really want to know is how many people are following us.

What Stats I Look At

So on the MailChimp Dashboard, I look at my list growth:

Nice, pretty growth curve (albeit slow)! If you’re wondering about the increase in November of 241 subscribers, yeah. That caused some problems that I detailed over on this blog post: Why did my open rates go down?

I occasionally look at the geomap to see where people are opening from:

That’s only because when I started this, I had 1 person in Russia and 2 people in Japan who opened my campaigns. I really want to be able to say “I’m big in Japan” so I keep checking. Woo-hoo! I just hit 3 opens in Japan! That’s like a 50% increase! Domu haragato!

It’s cool to be some guy in Atlanta with readers that far away.

MailChimp makes it fun to track all that.

I recently talked to the folks at ZIP Products, and learned that they send both promotional campaigns, and RSS-to-email campaigns.

For promotional campaigns, they look at one, and only one stat: Sales.

And our Analytics360 plugin shows them that number in one quick glance, right in their MailChimp report.

But check out this example of one of their RSS-to-email campaigns:

This is brilliant.

Because they know their blog is different from their monthly-ish newsletter (where they talk about themselves) or weekly promotions (where they sell stuff).

Their blog is for their die-hard, gear-head, monkey-wrench customers (who else would subscribe to frequent blog alerts?). This is where ZIP posts their “how-to” tips (and these tips happen to show you how to use the stuff they sell). ZIP doesn’t just sell Corvette parts. They’ve got a garage and mechanics who will install it for you. So this blog is an excellent way to put the expertise of all those mechanics to good marketing use. Now they need a crazy prize to boost subscribers. Like a giant robot made of Corvette parts. That would be so cool.

Oh right, back to this article.

I asked Paul from ZIP how he measured success from his rss-to-email campaigns, and he told me that in general, he looks for:

1. Overall open rate – This one’s a no-brainer and doesn’t require explanation.

2. Overall tweets & re-tweets – He watches for mentions of their company on twitter, just to see how often his readers are passing on their content. It’s a nice way to see what his readers find interesting or not. Amit from Photojojo does the same (see: Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness).

One thing you may want to look at is our Tweet Tracking Feature, where we measure how often your campaign was shared via twitter, and even re-tweeted (and by whom). It’s a great way to see how viral your campaigns are. I don’t have it turned on for my blog campaigns, because they send daily (and it would get spammy fast for people who are following MailChimp on twitter). But if you send weekly or monthly blog updates, you might consider it. Here’s what it looks like for my monthly(ish) MonkeyWrench newsletter:

On a side note, measuring how email campaigns, tweets, and blog posts influence traffic to your blog can be tedious, which is why we do that automagically under the reports tab in your MailChimp account:

Just look for the “Site Analytics360″ button. It requires that you’re using Google Analytics for your site.

3. Overall traffic to website – We should all be blogging to share useful information with our customers, who in turn (hopefully) share that information with their friends. Word of mouth marketing and all. “Traffic to website” is a good measure of this. I know, duh.

But if you’re a Wordpress blogger, and you constantly measure how your blog posts send traffic to your site, try our Wordpress Analytics plugin:

You can install it to your Wordpress Dashboard to get a birds-eye-view of your website traffic, and whether or not your little orange dots (blog posts) cause any traffic spikes.

The whole purpose of setting up an RSS-to-email campaign is to automate some of your outreach to your most loyal subscribers. Not everyone will want daily or weekly updates from you. Only the people who really, really enjoy your content. For that reason, RSS-to-email campaigns are a different beast altogether from your monthly newsletters and promotional emails. Measuring how these subscribers interact with your content has to be measured differently too.

So I went to Etsy, searched for “monkey robot” (or something like that) and found the work of Chet Phillips. He does these really cool ‘steam punk’ style monkeys. I bought a bunch of prints that matched my co-workers’ personalities, like this one for our lead engineer and this one for our video guy.

I guess some people around the office really liked them, because our marketing team and DesignLab reached out to Chet and commissioned him to do a 40 foot long banner that’s hanging on a wall at SXSW right now…

Here it is going up:

If you look closely at the mural (and other stuff we’re dropping around SXSW), you’ll find secret little links to itsautomagical.com, a landing page where we’ve animated Chet’s work:

Make sure you scroll side to side, so you can find “the scariest unicorn ever” as tweeted by one of our friends (who I’m not sure knew that was us!). I think it eventually takes you to a page at MailChimp where we talk about all the stuff that we make “automagic” but this was really just a project for fun.

If you happen to actually be at SXSW, and you use Gowalla, be sure to take the Automagical Jaunt to win the most awesome unicorn-related badge ever:

Update: Here’s Chet’s version of the whole thing on his blog

There’s a video over at the Official Google Apps Blog that explains how the Apps Marketplace works, and how to install new apps. Hmm, looks like a few of our friends from the Small Business Web are listed there too. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it pays to invest in your API, fellow app developers.

We’re so excited about this because 9 years ago, we built MailChimp for our clients who were paying bloated, enterprise-sized fees for bloated, enterprise email marketing solutions. Our goal for MailChimp was to make powerful email marketing available to any business, whether big or small. And Google has that same goal with Apps. Now, to see that MailChimp is freely available with just a few clicks to roughly 2 million businesses, and 25 million users of Google Apps? Wow.

And you can track just how insane we are by using the MonkeyRewards Dashboard…

Log in to your MailChimp account, then click on the “Account” tab:

then, click on MonkeyRewards:

You’ll be taken to your MonkeyRewards Dashboard, where we show you how many MonkeyRewards you’ve earned, and how many people you’ve referred:

Above is one of our top referrers. As you can see, he’s a free user, but he’s earned 6 Inbox Inspections for his account, and $60 in rewards this month alone. $720 in total. If you want to earn some free email credits, and you don’t mind spreading some monkey love in the process, give this a shot. Here’s how to implement our badges.

Yes, there is a catch.

In order to be eligible for rewards, you need to be a paid customer. But this user can basically just plunk down $9 for our lowest pay-as-you-go plan, or $30 for our lowest monthly plan, and then bam: moving forward, $720 in credits will be waiting to be applied to his MailChimp bill.

Other social-related articles you may enjoy:

• MailChimp launches Geo Targeting service
• Auto-tweet your emails, then track re-tweets with MailChimp, then mash it all up in your Analytics360 report
• Tutorial: Using MailChimp’s Twitter-to-email
• Case Study: Using Twitter for promos w/out being a d-bag
• How I use MailChimp with Flowtown

It’s called the Site Analytics360 report, which I used in this blog post to troubleshoot some strange open rate behavior in my email list (see: Why did my open rates change?)

Anyway, now we’re also showing your tweets on the report’s timeline, so you can see if (and how) twitter is affecting your overall site traffic. BTW, if you like stats and reports mashups, and you’re a blogger, you might also enjoy our Wordpress Analytics Plugin (more than 23,000 downloads and counting).

and he was tweeting at @chrisbrogan and other ESPs (@emmaemail) too, so it seemed like he was trying to be mysterious and get attention or something. Also, “bear in a bar” is obviously a joke-intro, and competitors have been known to make jokes about our mascot (I believe we’ve been called “Mail-Wookie” once), so I decided to take the bait.

I am so glad I did…

I’m not sure if this was a ConstantContact sanctioned “viral” campaign (in which case: mission accomplished), some internal morale-booster, or just a really, really inspired employee.

The trail really isn’t all that difficult to trace, which means they didn’t try hard to hide anything, so it’s hard to say. Either way, it’s great to see another ESP out there having some fun.

Oh, back to the bear.

Follow the path to the pot o’ gold at the end, my friends…

The sad thing about all this?

In that video at the end, Gail is obviously goofing around, but in this video, I’m actually trying.