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:

• A/B testing (also see: MailChimp’s A/B testing tool)
• Subject line writing tips (also see MailChimp’s Subject Line Suggester)
• Creating a special “holiday email series” (also see MailChimp’s Autoresponder)

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.

Twitter and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention from email marketers now (see: Sharing with Twitter v. Facebook), but don’t forget flickr, because it can be a great way to get your subscribers to contribute to your conversation with photos!

Major email domain market share

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.

So is this something email marketers should worry about? Not just yet. We analyzed all outgoing campaigns from MailChimp to see how many emails were being sent to the myspace.com domain, and found a spike around June, then only gradual growth since their official beta launch:

They’re not quite as huge (in terms of opt-in email subscribers) as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Gmail yet. But we’ll keep watching the stats, because some day they might be a big email player. That’s definitely their goal, according to the article from Giga Om:

“Given its large user base, MySpace claimed in a press release that its new mail service can eventually become the fourth-largest mail provider in the world and the second largest in the U.S. Yahoo is currently the largest email provider in the U.S.”

Here’s a summary of what we found:

Some things we found interesting:

Gmail subscribers seem to be a bit more engaged than the other subscribers. Could be some demographic kinda thing.

Also interesting to see that the number of emails sent to gmail has surpassed AOL. Interesting to me, since AOL has had a head start over gmail, yet Google has caught up in just a few years. Keep in mind this is just emails sent. I have no idea what the “number of subscribers” are at those domains (nor does TechCrunch, but this article is still somewhat interesting).

Oh, and the reason there are no abuse complaint numbers for gmail is not because those wonderful recipients never complain. It’s because we currently have no way of measuring complaints, as gmail has no feedback loop.

In terms of emails sent, yahoo and hotmail are both still significantly higher than gmail and aol.

For all you stats-freaks w/calculators, I’m leaving out a row of data from comcast.net (which represented 8,673,998 emails sent). Frankly, it was so out of line with the others, we’re going to look into that one in more detail. The data set we analyzed was “all emails ever sent from our servers” but excluding campaigns sent to lists smaller than 2,500 recipients.

And if you’re interested in these sorta stats, be sure to check out Chimp Charts, where we post free email marketing data like this quite a lot.

Does this make you wonder what the composition of your own subscriber lists look like? MailChimp users get a free domain performance report for all campaigns.

Want to see if certain subscribers on your list respond better than others? Try some simple list segmentation.

You’d think that seeing “Google, Mountain View” on your caller ID would make us pretty excited. But the truth is, it’s more of a frightening experience (along the lines of, “Oh God did we break the internet?).

Turns out it wasn’t so bad…

They had opened up access to their awesome Analytics product through an API. This basically means you can program applications that go in and grab stats from a Google Analytics account.

They wanted to grant us (along with some other lucky beta testers) special access to the API, allowing us to greatly improve our old Google Analytics integration (which involved scraping email reports sent to you by Google — not very reliable if you got duplicate emails, or emails got junked, or if they changed the format of emails).

Long story short, that API experience eventually allowed us to create this new feature.

Google Analytics Stats Within MailChimp

In addition to all the other cool reports you get with MailChimp, you can now see how your email campaigns are affecting your overall site traffic:

Google Analytics stats embedded in MailChimp

The graph in the screenshot represents your website traffic. The little blue dots are email campaigns you’ve sent. If you hover over any of those little blue dots, they make a tiny little monkey-screaming noise (just kidding) and we provide a link to your email campaign archive  so you can see which campaign caused traffic to spike.

You’ll love this new feature if you’re an e-retailer (because I know you people are stats freaks).

You can click the tabs above the graph to filter results by “organic traffic, cpc traffic, email-generated traffic,” and more:

There are a bunch of other stats that we pull from your Analytics account below that chart:

How to turn it on

To get the stats, you’ll need to integrate your MailChimp account with your Analytics account. You do that under the “Account” page in MailChimp, then go to the new integrations panel:

MailChimp integrations panel

Activate Google Analytics syncing there, then you’ll see your stats under the “Reports” tab:

Click on the new “Site Analytics” button:

The idea isn’t to totally replace Google Analytics. If you’re a stats freak (like me), you’re still going to go log in to Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, Mint, YouCalc, Wordpress stats, etc. It’s just a way to show you more relevant stats while you’re logged in to MailChimp and checking campaign performance.

In addition to, “how many opens, clicks, and purchases did my email get?” we can also directly answer the question, “how much traffic did my email campaign actually drive to my website?”

Opens and clicks over time

It’s a chart that shows your campaign’s opens and clicks hour-by-hour after you sent it. For example, we sent this campaign yesterday at 5pm ET. You can see there was a spike in opens and clicks almost immediately (reminds me of this study we did waaaay back in 2006), then it tapers off and plateaus in about 3 hours. We see some blips around 4am (our subscribers across the pond, perhaps?) and then again at 8am (the people who already left work before we hit “send” yesterday).

Hmm, while we’re on the topic of open stats, we added a new stat to the campaign summary: “Clicks per unique open.”

The older “click rate” stat that you’re already familiar with basically says that 7.7% of my entire recipients list clicked.

The new clicks/unique open stat tells me that of those who actually opened, 20% clicked.

Amit says to measure the success of his email campaigns, he compares sales to re-tweets…

From Amit:

“We care about tweets and sales. We’re measuring opens and clicks, but don’t pay a lot of attention to those numbers, because in the end what we really care about is how much we’re selling and how much we’re spreading.

Opens really only tells you how good your subject line is, and our open rates are pretty consistent… people are opening our emails because they trust the brand to be interesting.

50,000 clicks that lead to 20 sales are worthless.

5,000 clicks that lead to 200 sales are meaningful.

100 retweets means that people are digging the product and think it’s interesting enough to tell their friends out. 10 means it’s not cool enough and we shouldn’t have plugged it. The retweets are a more meaningful metric of product interestingness for us because it’s not a reader clicking through to learn more (low risk) but actually putting their reputation on the line to tell their readers that they think it’s cool (higher risk).

With those two stats you start to see some interesting things…

1) product with lots of retweets and low sales = price too high or product not filling a need.
2) product with few retweets but lots of sales = product is useful and well-priced but not exciting. It’s not gonna spread.
3) product with lots of retweets, and lots of sales = success! Well-priced, exciting to our customers, and it’ll spread.

For us, #3 is a success, and #1 can be turned around, and #2 means we’ve got a dud.”

Hmm, measuring email campaign success via twitter re-tweets. If one were good at creating graphs (which I am not), that graph might look like this:

Using twitter to measure email campaigns

Even though Photojojo does not use MailChimp (gasp!), I highly recommend their newsletter to everyone I know because of the great copywriting day after day after day. If you’ve never sent an email newsletter before, just remember that “step 1″ is to figure out your personality. It makes writing soooo much easier. Photojojo has tons of personality, and it’s why I actually look forward to receiving their emails.

Anyway, if you’re a MailChimp user, be sure to always tweet your email campaigns:

then follow yourself using something like addictomatic or tweetdeck.

They all make money from their email marketing, and they all suffered from declining open rates. None of them did A/B testing at their old email providers, because it was too complicated.

Which is a shame, because we’ve found that those who A/B test their emails get roughly 10% better open rates than those who don’t (see: A/B Split testing – does it help?).

Let’s see. If your list has 100,000 members, and your avg. open rate is 20%, that’s 20,000 opens per campaign.

A/B testers would get roughly 2,000 more opens.

If you could get 10% more opens, and you know your conversion rate, how much more money would that make for your business?

MailChimp’s patent-pending automated A/B testing tool makes it easy. You plug in 2 subjects lines, and that’s it. The system automagically does the rest for you. Best of all, it’s free.

One of the things that concerned our engineers during the build out was, “How would customers judge the effectiveness of autoresponder campaigns?” How would reporting be different from regular campaigns, if at all?

So they’re introducing a new report just for autoresponder campaigns (they’ll probably do it for all campaigns someday too):

Here’s the idea.

Let’s say you setup a series of scheduled campaigns.

Like, “Top 10 banana recipes” for new customers. After someone signs up to your list, you want a recipe to go to them each month for 10 months.

You let it run for a little while, then you decide to tweak autoresponder #6’s design. After you tweak the design, you need to know if opens and clicks went up or down for that autoresponder.

So you look at the “Opens and clicks over time” report for autoresponder #6, and check out your open rates and click rates before and after your changes.