But which stats you use to measure success really depend on the type of emails you’re sending. If you send monthly newsletters, maybe you focus on opens (reader interest) and what URLs are clicked (their fav content). If you send transactional emails to a million people a day, all you probably care about is deliverability. If it’s one-to-one autoresponders, perhaps you check your overall conversion rate (using our ecommerce360 or google analytics api).

But what if you’re sending RSS-To-Email campaigns?

These emails go out automatically, and “behind the scenes.” Depending on your frequency settings, they could be sending daily. That means after a few months, you could have like 5 kajillion emails sent (double check my math).

Here’s what I mean…

I use our RSS-to-email functionality to send a daily email to subscribers whenever we post something new to our blog. I don’t do much to promote this list, but somehow 1,000+ people have found their way on to it. Since it sends emails every day, my campaigns page looks like:

They’re multiplying like bunnies!

There’s no way I’d click into every single campaign to check its open/click stats. Plus, I think the clicks would be all over the place, since the topic of our blog posts vary wildly from day to day.

Besides, when it comes to our blog content, all I really want to know is how many people are following us.

What Stats I Look At

So on the MailChimp Dashboard, I look at my list growth:

Nice, pretty growth curve (albeit slow)! If you’re wondering about the increase in November of 241 subscribers, yeah. That caused some problems that I detailed over on this blog post: Why did my open rates go down?

I occasionally look at the geomap to see where people are opening from:

That’s only because when I started this, I had 1 person in Russia and 2 people in Japan who opened my campaigns. I really want to be able to say “I’m big in Japan” so I keep checking. Woo-hoo! I just hit 3 opens in Japan! That’s like a 50% increase! Domu haragato!

It’s cool to be some guy in Atlanta with readers that far away.

MailChimp makes it fun to track all that.

I recently talked to the folks at ZIP Products, and learned that they send both promotional campaigns, and RSS-to-email campaigns.

For promotional campaigns, they look at one, and only one stat: Sales.

And our Analytics360 plugin shows them that number in one quick glance, right in their MailChimp report.

But check out this example of one of their RSS-to-email campaigns:

This is brilliant.

Because they know their blog is different from their monthly-ish newsletter (where they talk about themselves) or weekly promotions (where they sell stuff).

Their blog is for their die-hard, gear-head, monkey-wrench customers (who else would subscribe to frequent blog alerts?). This is where ZIP posts their “how-to” tips (and these tips happen to show you how to use the stuff they sell). ZIP doesn’t just sell Corvette parts. They’ve got a garage and mechanics who will install it for you. So this blog is an excellent way to put the expertise of all those mechanics to good marketing use. Now they need a crazy prize to boost subscribers. Like a giant robot made of Corvette parts. That would be so cool.

Oh right, back to this article.

I asked Paul from ZIP how he measured success from his rss-to-email campaigns, and he told me that in general, he looks for:

1. Overall open rate – This one’s a no-brainer and doesn’t require explanation.

2. Overall tweets & re-tweets – He watches for mentions of their company on twitter, just to see how often his readers are passing on their content. It’s a nice way to see what his readers find interesting or not. Amit from Photojojo does the same (see: Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness).

One thing you may want to look at is our Tweet Tracking Feature, where we measure how often your campaign was shared via twitter, and even re-tweeted (and by whom). It’s a great way to see how viral your campaigns are. I don’t have it turned on for my blog campaigns, because they send daily (and it would get spammy fast for people who are following MailChimp on twitter). But if you send weekly or monthly blog updates, you might consider it. Here’s what it looks like for my monthly(ish) MonkeyWrench newsletter:

On a side note, measuring how email campaigns, tweets, and blog posts influence traffic to your blog can be tedious, which is why we do that automagically under the reports tab in your MailChimp account:

Just look for the “Site Analytics360″ button. It requires that you’re using Google Analytics for your site.

3. Overall traffic to website – We should all be blogging to share useful information with our customers, who in turn (hopefully) share that information with their friends. Word of mouth marketing and all. “Traffic to website” is a good measure of this. I know, duh.

But if you’re a Wordpress blogger, and you constantly measure how your blog posts send traffic to your site, try our Wordpress Analytics plugin:

You can install it to your Wordpress Dashboard to get a birds-eye-view of your website traffic, and whether or not your little orange dots (blog posts) cause any traffic spikes.

The whole purpose of setting up an RSS-to-email campaign is to automate some of your outreach to your most loyal subscribers. Not everyone will want daily or weekly updates from you. Only the people who really, really enjoy your content. For that reason, RSS-to-email campaigns are a different beast altogether from your monthly newsletters and promotional emails. Measuring how these subscribers interact with your content has to be measured differently too.

So I went to Etsy, searched for “monkey robot” (or something like that) and found the work of Chet Phillips. He does these really cool ‘steam punk’ style monkeys. I bought a bunch of prints that matched my co-workers’ personalities, like this one for our lead engineer and this one for our video guy.

I guess some people around the office really liked them, because our marketing team and DesignLab reached out to Chet and commissioned him to do a 40 foot long banner that’s hanging on a wall at SXSW right now…

Here it is going up:

If you look closely at the mural (and other stuff we’re dropping around SXSW), you’ll find secret little links to itsautomagical.com, a landing page where we’ve animated Chet’s work:

Make sure you scroll side to side, so you can find “the scariest unicorn ever” as tweeted by one of our friends (who I’m not sure knew that was us!). I think it eventually takes you to a page at MailChimp where we talk about all the stuff that we make “automagic” but this was really just a project for fun.

If you happen to actually be at SXSW, and you use Gowalla, be sure to take the Automagical Jaunt to win the most awesome unicorn-related badge ever:

This year we’ve joined forces with Gowalla to create a trip that will lead you on a voyage of discovery and delight…

Gowalla is a mobile application that allows you to check-in, share your location with friends, and collect virtual goodies (in the form of items, pins, and stamps in your virtual passport) as well as tangible rewards. And since Gowalla was born and raised in Austin, we thought they’d be a perfect partner to team up with during SXSW.

Our Automagical Jaunt will take you to three specific spots where you can connect with us– the Automagical Mural at the corner of 3rd St. and Trinity (outside of the Austin Convention Center), the South By Small Business Web happy hour, and at Happy Cog’aoke 2. While the MailChimp team won’t be camping out by the Automagical Mural 24/7 , you’re sure to find us at both the SXSBW  happy hour (Saturday 3/13, 4-7PM) and Happy Cog’aoke (Saturday 3/13, 10PM-2AM).

We’re also sponsoring SCHED* again this year, which is considered the premiere interactive event calendar and social networking tool for conferences and festivals. Take a look at their indispensable Unofficial Guide to SXSW 2010 to keep up with everything going on at this year’s festival.

There’s a video over at the Official Google Apps Blog that explains how the Apps Marketplace works, and how to install new apps. Hmm, looks like a few of our friends from the Small Business Web are listed there too. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it pays to invest in your API, fellow app developers.

We’re so excited about this because 9 years ago, we built MailChimp for our clients who were paying bloated, enterprise-sized fees for bloated, enterprise email marketing solutions. Our goal for MailChimp was to make powerful email marketing available to any business, whether big or small. And Google has that same goal with Apps. Now, to see that MailChimp is freely available with just a few clicks to roughly 2 million businesses, and 25 million users of Google Apps? Wow.

And you can track just how insane we are by using the MonkeyRewards Dashboard…

Log in to your MailChimp account, then click on the “Account” tab:

then, click on MonkeyRewards:

You’ll be taken to your MonkeyRewards Dashboard, where we show you how many MonkeyRewards you’ve earned, and how many people you’ve referred:

Above is one of our top referrers. As you can see, he’s a free user, but he’s earned 6 Inbox Inspections for his account, and $60 in rewards this month alone. $720 in total. If you want to earn some free email credits, and you don’t mind spreading some monkey love in the process, give this a shot. Here’s how to implement our badges.

Yes, there is a catch.

In order to be eligible for rewards, you need to be a paid customer. But this user can basically just plunk down $9 for our lowest pay-as-you-go plan, or $30 for our lowest monthly plan, and then bam: moving forward, $720 in credits will be waiting to be applied to his MailChimp bill.

Other social-related articles you may enjoy:

• MailChimp launches Geo Targeting service
• Auto-tweet your emails, then track re-tweets with MailChimp, then mash it all up in your Analytics360 report
• Tutorial: Using MailChimp’s Twitter-to-email
• Case Study: Using Twitter for promos w/out being a d-bag
• How I use MailChimp with Flowtown

It’s called the Site Analytics360 report, which I used in this blog post to troubleshoot some strange open rate behavior in my email list (see: Why did my open rates change?)

Anyway, now we’re also showing your tweets on the report’s timeline, so you can see if (and how) twitter is affecting your overall site traffic. BTW, if you like stats and reports mashups, and you’re a blogger, you might also enjoy our Wordpress Analytics Plugin (more than 23,000 downloads and counting).

and he was tweeting at @chrisbrogan and other ESPs (@emmaemail) too, so it seemed like he was trying to be mysterious and get attention or something. Also, “bear in a bar” is obviously a joke-intro, and competitors have been known to make jokes about our mascot (I believe we’ve been called “Mail-Wookie” once), so I decided to take the bait.

I am so glad I did…

I’m not sure if this was a ConstantContact sanctioned “viral” campaign (in which case: mission accomplished), some internal morale-booster, or just a really, really inspired employee.

The trail really isn’t all that difficult to trace, which means they didn’t try hard to hide anything, so it’s hard to say. Either way, it’s great to see another ESP out there having some fun.

Oh, back to the bear.

Follow the path to the pot o’ gold at the end, my friends…

The sad thing about all this?

In that video at the end, Gail is obviously goofing around, but in this video, I’m actually trying.

This isn’t the first we’ve seen of PR email spam…

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at WIRED magazine, pissed off a lot of people in the PR world back in 2007 with: Sorry PR people, you’re blocked. Ironically, his own PR firms have been accused of sending PR spam to his benefit.

Clearly, PR people are in a catch-22. They want to get the word out to the press, and email seems like a fast, cheap distribution method. It’s just that when you send unsolicited email in bulk, that is the very definition of spam.

One more time: Sending a personal, one-to-one email to a journalist is fine, even if it’s unsolicited. That’s called “doing business.” But when you cross the line and send in bulk, a whole new set of netiquette (and law!) applies. You just can’t assume you have permission.

To send email in bulk, you have to 1) earn permission, then 2) send your PR emails responsibly (here’s how one company, in the anti-spam industry, sends PR email responsibly).

It’s that first part, “earning permission,” that’s hard. Some people call this “growing your subscriber list,” but the problem is a lot deeper than that. Tactics like “include a link to your signup form everywhere!” are fine and dandy, but they aren’t going to make a huge enough impact on your email list size.

Be an expert. Or, just be more interesting.

Fundamentally, it’s about making yourself and your content actually useful to others. If we think you have interesting insights, connections, or news, we’ll subscribe to receive your emails. Wait. Honestly, no we won’t. That’s admittedly a stretch. I would never sign up to receive email newsletters form a PR person.

But if you say interesting stuff on twitter, people will follow you there. I think Jim Caruso, from MediaFirst, does this well. He’s been at every single technology event I’ve ever attended in Atlanta for the last 10 years. He knows what’s going on. He’s a technology geek at heart (who needs to stop hacking at his website and just hire a web designer, for pete’s sake! 3/6/10 UPDATE: Looks like Jim recently did! Sorry, Jim!). And he’s on twitter, tweeting about local startups, global technology news, and of course, his own clients.

I follow him on twitter.

Full disclosure: MailChimp was once Jim’s client (and a happy client, too) but we ultimately stopped doing PR after deciding that the email industry is still very young, and all our press releases were just being read by other ESPs.

Anyway, twitter is perfect for PR professionals, because you can tweet about anything you want, and only interested people will actually follow you. Then the question becomes how to get found on twitter. Yeah, we’re back to the “be more interesting” part. It just takes time. But there are tools out there, like Journalistics, that can help you use twitter in a non-spammy way. Go do that. Not mass email.

How PR professionals should use email marketing

Okay, so besides Jim, I’d probably never, ever, ever subscribe to any PR firm’s list. Ever.

I’d more likely subscribe to receive emails from a company that a PR person represents. So the sequence of events goes like this: PR person represents Acme Global, and tweets something interesting about that company. It gets re-tweeted, and re-tweeted, until I see it in my own twitter stream, thanks to someone I respect and follow. I click the link, learn more about Acme Global, and if they seem interesting (i.e. offer some kind of useful content), I sign up for their emails.

So whenever a PR person asks me “Can I use MailChimp for my business?” I tell them, “If you mean sending unsolicited mass emails to journalists on your clients’ behalf, then no. For the love of all things holy, no no no. That’s a violation of our terms of use. If you mean sending newsletters to your own clients, then sure. And if you mean helping all your clients setup double opt-in email subscription forms on their websites, so that you can help them responsibly (and consistently) send out truly useful email press releases to journalists who actually cover your clients’ industries and who opted-in to hear about your clients, then absolutely MailChimp can help you.”

Furthermore, these features might actually be useful for you and your clients:

• Google Analytics integration with MailChimp helps you measure ROI from email to website purchases.
• Twitter re-tweet tracking for your emails, and more email-to-social integration
• Geomap and click overlay for MailChimp emails