We’ve been frustrated and bewildered by random Postini blocks ourselves (see here and here). We gave up on trying to contact Postini a while ago.

But just recently, we had a customer sending tests to their VERY large client, and consistently getting blocked by their Postini filters.

We eventually got (real, live) people from Postini on the phone.
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Anyway, the guy from Cloudmark said he knew he’d be on a call with a bunch of email service providers (ESPs), so he looked us all up in their database to see if he had any records on us (this is the part of the call where you could hear a pin drop).
Then he said something along the lines of, “95% of problems that ESPs have seem to be coming from relationship newsletters, not sales promotions.”

Huh?

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Those are called “Drip” campaigns. The marketer sets up a series of email campaigns and sets them apart at timed intervals. After a “trigger” of some sort (like when you sign up for something), the emails start dripping into your inbox.

When expectations are set, and when the content is actually useful, drip campaigns are really powerful and cool.  But if you don’t set expectations, it can be like water drip torture.

Here’s an example of properly setting expectations for a drip campaign (click to zoom in):

Here’s an example:

and a tribute to lolcats:

What’s really creepy is I got a haircut yesterday, then logged in and got this:

How’d we do that? Perhaps the engineers are playing pranks on me.

Anyway, if you’ve got an idea for a random MailChimp welcome message, post a comment below. We’ll plug it into the interface. We’ve got customers from all over the world, so personally, I’d love it if we could get some local attitude in there.

I am so glad I did.

It’s starting to become one of my favorite new features. Here’s what it looks like in the Dashboard:

As you can see, MailChimp is giving me updates about my email marketing. Neat. But the really cool part is that it’s an RSS feed, so I can click the little RSS “feed” icon:

then embed Chimp Chatter into my Google home page:

So now I can get updates from MailChimp even when I’m not logged in. It’s pretty cool to open up my browser, then see that my A/B split test just got sent, or a campaign I recently sent got a record high open rate.

Of course, you’ll also be able to change your Chimp Chatter preferences, so that it only tells you about certain stuff:

“Besides having a very busy audience, you are dealing with boundaries of nondisclosure and usually not being able to accept anything of monetary value as an incentive for participating in a survey.”

So what do you offer if you want to send a survey to C-level execs? The article’s got a lot of great advice, like instead of that iPod shuffle, offer to give a donation to their favorite charity, or an executive summary of the research findings.

They’ve got a few tips for copywriting and subject lines, too (I’d just add that you should include your company name in the subject line, to boost recognition).

Executive Survey Invitations: How to Get C-Levels to Respond 

And if you’re interested in putting together an online survey, check out: SurveyMonkey

For example, we review every single new account at MailChimp. Occasionally, we’ll come across a techie who created an email address like, “mailchimp-techie@example.com” I guess it’s a way to filter all email from us, and it’s also a nifty way to detect if we ever sell their email address or something (this should go without saying, but no—we don’t do evil stuff like that).

Anyway, there’s a quick and easy way you can do all that with Gmail:

2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address

If you’re using MailChimp’s managed lists, we automagically clean hard bounces from your list immediately, to prevent this sort of thing. If you manage your list by hand in some excel file, and you manually remove bounces and unsubscribes “whenever you can get to them,” you’re going to have problems (and not just with AOL).  If you’re sending your very first email campaign to an old list you’ve been collecting for years, you should remove any contacts older than 1 year, and then send your campaign in small chunks.

On a related note, here are “average email bounce rates by industry.”

Also, the new MailChimp reports will show you what your bounce rate is by ISP:

Sometimes it’s just a polite way of asking, “Are you just sending emails from some hamster-powered box in your broom closet?” We point those people to our email marketing infrastructure page.

Other times, it’s because some rookie actually wants to “blast a billion emails a minute” to their “opt-in list.” So when people ask me this question, I put one finger on the trap door button under my desk, and ask them, “Um, why do you ask?”

The truth is, our infrastructure does deliver “bazillions of emails an hour,” but that’s across all our accounts, servers, and IPs. You’ve got to do it in a very controlled way, or ISPs will think you’re obnoxious, and start throttling or blocking you.

The folks at Strongmail have a nice writeup for this. If you’re thinking about getting yourself a dedicated IP address, then sending tons of emails from it, it’s not quite that easy. Services like ReturnPath’s SenderScore Certified are supposed to help with that, but you’re going to need a good, powerful MTA as your delivery engine first.