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Archive for the ‘Deliverability’ Category

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How to Reactivate Inactive Subscribers

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Last week, Ben blogged about how MailChimp allows you to segment your mailing list by activity. He gave several good examples of how you can use the tool effectively, but I’d like to show you how to use it to reactivate inactive subscribers and remove subscribers who don’t want to be on your list.

If you’ve ever received a subscription to a magazine, you know that as you approach the end of your subscription, you start receiving letters in the mail about renewing your subscription. And it’s never just one: You get a series of letters, all designed to move you to action. It may seem like overkill, but there’s good research showing that a renewal series is more effective at retaining subscribers than a single renewal notice. Renewals can get lost, thrown away, or forgotten in a pile of mail. Sending a series of renewals increases the likelihood that a subscriber will renew if he desires, or that he’ll make an active decision not to renew.

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Posted in Deliverability, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices, Using MailChimp | 15 Comments »

Feedback loops being replaced by engagement?

Monday, August 24th, 2009

list-activity-ratingOn a recent ESPC call, a major ISP (who owns one of the top 3 email services) reported that they were moving away from using feedback loops as their primary method of determining the “spaminess” of a sender. Before the FBL pundits rejoice, wait till you hear what they’re measuring instead.

Now, they’re shifting their attention to measuring “engagement.” They defined engagement as opens, clicks, and having an email moved out of the spam folder. This is similar to Gmail’s approach to leaving images on if the recipient knows the sender.

How Does This Change Things?

Hmm. If ISPs are starting to look at how engaged your subscribers are, how could an email sender use this to their advantage (beyond simple list  segmentation)? Perhaps you could send email a little differently through your delivery servers, based on your subscribers’ engagement activity? For example, if you knew half the people on your list were active users, but the other half not so much, wouldn’t it be smart to deliver the campaign to the engaged people first, then the others last? It would really suck to only get a small portion of your list delivered before an ISP decided you have poor list management practices, and blocked the remainder of your message.

Yes, MailChimp does all that. Automatically, and behind the scenes. That’s the reason we launched the List Activity Score back in March. We rank every single user on your list by their engagement, then we prioritize email delivery through our network based on overall list activity score. One of the many ways our nerds in the lab keep striving to improve email marketing.

Learn more about our List Activity Score

Related:
How sending to old lists will kill your deliverability

Posted in Deliverability, Spam Topics | 10 Comments »

URL Shorteners and Blacklists

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

We just had to help a MailChimp customer whose email campaigns got this strange warning by gmail:

gmail-alert-phishing

To be honest, I’ve never seen that warning, and have no idea what exactly triggered it. As you can see, the email was also sent straight to gmail’s junk folder.

On the surface, nothing about the campaign looks bad. The general content of the campaign is fine. The sender is not in a risky business (it’s a church). Their email delivery infrastructure (ahem, mailchimp) is fine. So what gives?

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Posted in Deliverability, Spam Topics | 10 Comments »

Images ON in Gmail – If You’re Authenticating

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

images-turned-offUnless you’re totally new to email marketing, you know that most email programs turn images in your HTML emails OFF by default. It’s meant to protect your privacy, but is very annoying to legit email marketers for a variety of reasons. Well, Gmail to the rescue.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

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Posted in Deliverability, Email Design, Emarketing, Business, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | 9 Comments »

New Email Deliverability Benchmark Report from ReturnPath

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

email-non-deliveryReturnpath has released another depressing (but informative) deliverability benchmark report. Here’s an eye-opening snippet:

“Deliverability Failures Continue to Plague Marketers with more than 20% of Email Not Delivered to the Inboxes in the United States and Canada”

Hmm, if my math is correct, that means on average, only 80% of your list ever really gets delivered. Where does the other 20% go? Most just go missing. Yeah, seriously. It’s normal. Your mail man occasionally loses mail, so why can’t computers lose email too? It’s only fair. Some of the lost emails go into the spam folder (but not as much as you think).

Get your copy of the report here.

If you’re new to the topic of email deliverability, and you’re wondering what MailChimp does to help our customers get into the inbox, here’s a resource for you.

Posted in Deliverability | 1 Comment »

DKIM Sees Significant Growth

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Here’s an article from Cisco about DKIM uptake.

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Point of the article is to say that yes, more and more people are adopting DKIM, so that’s good for the cause (visit Online Trust Alliance).

Juicy deliverability morsel from the article: “Google and Yahoo! have announced that messages with valid DKIM signatures, where the domain has established a good reputation with them, are less likely to be classified as spam.” And a quick reminder to our own customers that yes, DKIM authentication is baked into MailChimp.

Posted in Deliverability, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | No Comments »

What’s your list activity score?

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

A few weeks ago, we blogged about MailChimp’s List Activity Score. Since then, it’s been quietly gathering data about all our customers’ list “freshness” and tweaking delivery behavior based on that info. A couple days ago, we made the scores live. Under your “Lists” tab, you’ll see a row of little stars next to each of your lists:

list-stars

In general, the more stars, the better your deliverability will be. So what’s your score?

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Posted in Deliverability, MailChimp News | 2 Comments »

Do spam filters read Alt-Text?

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

firefoxscreensnapz008Someone over in the MailChimp Jungle asked, “Do spam filters read Alt-text descriptions?” I honestly had no idea, so I took my most recent MonkeyWrench email newsletter, replicated it, and I typed in the most awful, disgusting alt-text descriptions that I could think of.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

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Posted in Ask MailChimp, Copywriting, Deliverability, Email Design, MailChimp News, Monkeys!, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices, Using MailChimp | 8 Comments »

Using Email Domain Performance stats to spot ISP issues

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Last week, I got a call from someone who wanted to switch from another ESP because he had a sneaky suspicion they were getting blocked by Yahoo too often (btw, DKIM can really help in this situation).

Blocks occasionally happen to everybody, so I told him we wouldn’t be immune. And believe it or not, ISPs have been known to have email problems themselves. What sucked about the guy’s situation was he couldn’t tell for sure if he was having a problem.

In MailChimp, if you want to know if your email campaign had troubles with any ISPs, you can always check your Email Domain Performance report:

email-domain-performance

In the stats above, 39% of all emails to comcast.net were bounced. It’s not a full 100% bounce rate, but it’s way above the average bounce rate for his industry. This particular user wrote me an email asking what they should do…

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Posted in Ask MailChimp, Deliverability, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices, Using MailChimp | No Comments »

Email: What’s Inside?

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

destination-crm-logoJessica Tsai has written up a comprehensive piece on email marketing over at DestinationCRM that covers deliverability, authentication, ROI, and getting people to open and click.

Some highlights from the article, plus links to related email marketing resources from MailChimp, are below.

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Posted in Deliverability, Emarketing, Business, Spam Topics, Tips, Tricks, Best Practices | No Comments »

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