There could be a number of reasons (and remedies) for your low open rate. First of all, check your open rates against other people in your industry (MailChimp Benchmarks: Average email open rates, click rates, bounce rates, etc). If you’ve been sending emails for a while, and your open rate has slowly trended downwards, and now it’s sort of plateau’d, that’s normal. If, right out the gates, your open rate is way below average, then something might be wrong.

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Question: "I’m trying to send myself a test campaign, but keep getting blocked. What’s wrong with MailChimp?"

Answer:

It’s not us. It’s because you are sending an email from yourself, to yourself. But behind the scenes, the email is actually originating from MailChimp’s server. Your company’s spam filter or email firewall thinks that the email must be an impostor.

You don’t believe me. Nobody ever believes it when we explain that to them.

Here’s some proof, and here’s what you can do…

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Got this question the other day:

"Dear MailChimp,
My site has a forward-to-friend link. If I save the friends’ email addresses and contact them later, would that be spam?"

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Q: "I have a list of 9,000 customer email addresses. I haven’t emailed them in a while, and now I’m ready to start sending them email newsletters. How can I do this without getting blacklisted, or angering my customers?"

A: Very carefully. If these recipients haven’t heard from you in a long time, chances are they already forgot opting in. Or, your emails just aren’t relevant to them anymore. And just because they bought something from you 5 years ago, it doesn’t mean they want to get email newsletters from you today. The chances are very high that they’ll click that nasty "this is spam" button in their email program. If only a handful of recipients click that button, some ISPs will start blocking all future emails from your company.

So you’ve got to be extremely careful. Here’s some advice we gave someone yesterday, who asked us this very question:

1. Send a "Re-introduction" campaign. The tone of the email is the most important factor here. Think more "Letter from the president" than "Boy, have we got an offer for you!!!!"
2. In that email, try to remind them how you got their contact information. If they’ve purchased something from your site, or if they’ve opted in, put that in your message. Got an order ID? Name of the product they bought? Mail-merge it in.
3. Give an incentive to stay opted-in. If I did business with you years ago, why would i want to do business with you again?
4. Send the re-introduction campaign to very small chunks of your list. Don’t just blast one message to 9,000 people. Break it into smaller lists of 1,000 or 2,000. And why not spread it out over several days? That way, you can watch for abuse complaints, and tweak content for maximum effectiveness.

So check this out.

This morning, I received an email (out of the blue) from Modern Postcard. I haven’t heard from them in years. How’d they do it?

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We get that question a lot.

Short answer: Hell no.

Long answer: http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30232