Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
For those of you who don’t know, DKIM is a form of email authentication. Authentication is a way of proving your email is “authentic” and not a scam (like the kind of email scams that claim to be from your bank, or from PayPal).
High volume email senders (and ESPs) have speculated for the last few years about whether or not major ISPs will begin blocking emails that are not authenticated, and whether or not authentication will help you get your emails past spam filters and into the inbox.
In every one of your MailChimp campaign reports, there’s a section called Email Domain Performance:
It can answer important questions like, “Are any ISPs blocking me?” and “Which ISPs do my subscribers use most?”
It can also answer expensive questions, like, “Should I invest in email certification services like SenderScore (which gives you some benefits with Hotmail, Roadrunner, and Cox), or Goodmail (which gives you some benefits with AOL, Comcast, and Yahoo), or SuretyMail (which works with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink among others)?
Email certification can get email past spam filters and into inboxes with images on by default, and in some cases, video will work.
But are they too expensive? Why not test? Here’s how:
In MailChimp v4.1, launching later this month, we’ll be introducing something new to the List Dashboard.
Each list that you manage in MailChimp will have its own “List Activity Rating.” Below is a mockup of what it’ll look like:
Told you we’re suckers for stars.
Your list activity score is based on an algorithm that tells us how “active” and “engaged” the members of your list are. Generally speaking, the more active your list is, the better your deliverability (here’s what happens if you send to a list that’s not active). And since our job as an ESP is to maximize your deliverability, we need to know whose lists are active, and whose lists are not. Your list activitiy score will determine how we deliver your emails from our system.
Original email in English. Click a translation link on the right.
We’ve got a lot of international users on MailChimp. So we’ve considered translating our entire app into multiple languages. It’d be a huge undertaking. But the truth is, most of our users speak a little English. So for now, we’ve kept our translation efforts focused on the signup process.
Any-hoo, If you’re sorta thinking about “going international” too, there’s an easy way to do that with MailChimp.
It’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to get this done, but I’ve finally created an RSS-to-Email version of the MailChimp Blog (you can subscribe to the right, if you’re so inclined). I created a special template for the blog emails, and in that template, I’m using our new TRANSLATE:LANG merge tag to provide automatic translations of my email.
Here’s what the same email looks like in different languages…
Both BOL and Terra have been added to Inbox Inspector. If you or your clients send email campaigns to the Latin American market, you’re gonna like this.
BOL is one of the largest Brazilian ISPs and Terra is the leading ISP is most of the other Latin American countries.
You can see a couple screenshots from our test campaign after the jump.
We’re working on an experiment in the MailChimp Lab to help us automatically detect when someone’s about to send something too spammy from MailChimp (no, this is not what the supercomputer is for). We’re using Cloudmark, Barracuda, and Spam Assassin (and possibly Postini in the near future). We picked those, because they’re the most commonly used—and vexing—spam filters.
We’re not planning to expose any secret formulas, or help customers “get around spam filters.” It’s more of a behind-the-scenes, “big brother” tool to help us catch exceptionally bad campaigns before they get sent. That’s the idea, at least, and we’re not sure when this’ll go live.
For now, we’re doing research. We’re currently scanning a few hundred thousand campaigns sent through MailChimp over the years, to see how many “false positives” we might trigger.
In the process, we’re uncovering a lot of innocent mistakes made by senders, plus a few surprises.
Last week, email expert Stefan Pollard at ClickZ posted an informative article about getting into your subscribers’ address books or on their contact lists. This is one of the most simple and often overlooked tactics for improving email deliverability.
When your subscribers add you to their address book, they are essentially telling their ISP that they want to receive email from you, and in some cases it can even get your correspondence to show up with images turned ‘on’ by default and rendering correctly. As Stefan notes,
“ISPs want to deliver only the e-mail their customers say they want to receive, so they check those personal whitelists when deciding whether to deliver, block, or direct to the spam folder your e-mail.”
A couple weeks ago, Mark Brownlow wrote about segmenting your list by email address domain, and we wanted to show you how easy it is to do using MailChimp.
First, you want to create a new campaign. For this example, we’re going to choose “Regular Ol’ Campaign”.
Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.
This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.
According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.
We have a customer with a relatively large list of about 311,000 opt-in subscribers. They’ve been collecting opt-ins from their site for years now.
About 240,000 of them are “old” (inactive) subscribers. About 70,000 are relatively “new” (active) subscribers.
They recently segmented their list and sent the same newsletter to each group (separately) over the same IP address, about 6 hrs apart from each other. Around 2pm, they sent the newsletter to the large, inactive list. Around 8pm, they sent the same newsletter to the active list.
The results are eye-opening…
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