You can now segment your MailChimp lists based on purchase activity (product purchase, amount spent, or product category):
There are several different ways you can use this new segmentation feature…
Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
You can now segment your MailChimp lists based on purchase activity (product purchase, amount spent, or product category):
There are several different ways you can use this new segmentation feature…
Smith-Harmon is one of the most famous email design agencies around. I’ve talked about some of their design tips in seminars and here in the blog (like this article about 250px boxes). They design emails for companies like Intuit, Costco, Williams-Sonoma, and Pottery Barn. They know a thing or two about email design trends.
So if you’re thinking about revamping your email marketing for the holidays, you might want to check out their free PDF Guide: “Get Ready for the Holidays”
Their guide covers a wide range of topics, including:
If you like their tips, you should also bookmark their Retail Email Blog, where they cover all the trendy topics in the world of email design.
We recently analyzed all outgoing email traffic from the MailChimp servers to see who the major email providers are, and to identify trends (analyzing gobs of email data is what we do in our pastime here). So we though we’d share our findings:
Yahoo and Hotmail are tops, but Gmail is on an upward trend (related study: Gmail Users More Engaged?). AOL has some work to do, and Comcast is pretty flat.
BTW, if you like email marketing stats, or need data to print and show to your clueless boss, bookmark MailChimpCharts and EmailStatCenter.
We recently analyzed the stats for over 184 million emails sent from MailChimp and put together a report analyzing the engagement of recipients by email provider (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol, and comcast). We wanted to know if certain subscribers (such as hotmail users) could be expected to respond any differently than, saaaay, gmail users.
Here’s a summary of what we found:
| Domain | Open Rate | Click Rate | Soft Bounce Rate | Hard Bounce Rate | Abuse Complaint Rate | Unsub Rate | Sent |
| Yahoo.com | 24.54% | 4.17% | 0.08% | 1.09% | 0.19% | 0.35% | 54,791,998 |
| aol.com | 20.09% | 4.25% | 1.48% | 2.92% | 0.32% | 0.51% | 28,750,743 |
| gmail.com | 30.94% | 7.41% | 0.13% | 0.28% | N/A | 0.50% | 28,997,678 |
| hotmail.com | 23.79% | 4.49% | 0.31% | 0.80% | 0.24% | 0.43% | 63,465,012 |
Unless 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.
Techcrunch reported that Google has finally removed the “beta” label from Gmail. Hard to believe it’s already been 5 years since Gmail was launched.
Time for a little trip down memory lane with this Gmail press release from April 1, 2004:
Search is Number Two Online Activity – Email is Number One; “Heck, Yeah,” Say Google Founders
BTW – A real, “non-PR” story of how Gmail got started is in the book Founders At Work. Great read if you run or work at a startup.
According to the TC article, Gmail gets about half the traffic as Yahoo Mail (36 million uniques vs. Yahoo’s 98 million).
Ever wonder how many people on your subscriber list use Gmail? Just use the Domain Performance stats in your campaign reports:

The great folks over at Practical eCommerce have recently published a short PDF guide called Getting Started in eCommerce. The purpose of it is to provide a basic, unbiased overview to people who are new to ecommerce or are struggling to understand it. The best part? It’s absolutely FREE! So what are you waiting for? (click to download the PDF)
I recently asked a bunch of email marketers how they judge success for their email campaigns. One of the answers that really stood out was from Amit Gupta, who sends the Photojojo newsletter (you must signup for his awesome newsletter immediately).
Amit says to measure the success of his email campaigns, he compares sales to re-tweets…
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