Jesse’s our new API engineer. He’s been quietly beefing up the MailChimp API’s functionality, and making it work with just about any application or database that you can think of hooking us into, or building a plugin for.

He just recently sent an email announcement to our API users about some upcoming changes. Of course Jesse’s used MailChimp to send countless tests to himself. But this was his first time sending out a “real campaign, to a real list with real people” using MailChimp. It was also our first-ever attempt at contacting  just our API users, so this was a learning experience for all of us.

I casually walked past his desk a few hours after he sent the campaign, and asked him how his stats looked. I thought he’d say, “Hmm, I dunno, let me check” and then he’d open his browser, log in, etc. But nope, he made this quick flick of his wrist, and up popped his email campaign report.

Turns out he’d been watching his stats change by the minute (like all our new customers who send their first campaigns).It was cool to see him so happy about his stats.

It’s exciting to see your email stats go up, up, up for the first time. Eventually, you get past that first high, and will prefer to receive your stats later, via RSS.

Anyway, before his campaign stats page fully loaded, and before our pie charts boing-boinged into place, he told me, “I’m running circles around the software industry.”

He was referring to our email marketing benchmark data, which we embed right into  your MailChimp email marketing stats (screenshot of how that works).

Jesse got a 50% open rate and 11% click rate, which when compared to the average for the software industry, is pretty darn good. How do you compare to your industry peers?