Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
A few weeks ago, we blogged about MailChimp’s List Activity Score. Since then, it’s been quietly gathering data about all our customers’ list “freshness” and tweaking delivery behavior based on that info. A couple days ago, we made the scores live. Under your “Lists” tab, you’ll see a row of little stars next to each of your lists:
In general, the more stars, the better your deliverability will be. So what’s your score?
Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.
This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.
According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.
We have a customer with a relatively large list of about 311,000 opt-in subscribers. They’ve been collecting opt-ins from their site for years now.
About 240,000 of them are “old” (inactive) subscribers. About 70,000 are relatively “new” (active) subscribers.
They recently segmented their list and sent the same newsletter to each group (separately) over the same IP address, about 6 hrs apart from each other. Around 2pm, they sent the newsletter to the large, inactive list. Around 8pm, they sent the same newsletter to the active list.
The results are eye-opening…
A few of our customers have been asking us about this bit of news from ReturnPath: AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards.
According to George Bilbrey, AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo have implemented DKIM email authentication.
For those of you who don’t know, authentication is a way to prevent email forgeries, and it can improve your deliverability. The AOTA says Authentication has hit its “tipping point.”
Since 2004, when email authentication started to really pick up steam, ISPs have been testing (and changing) their support for authentication. Some use one method for inbound, and another for outbound. Some support all methods of authentication. Some have abandoned it, or are in limbo. It can be confusing.
So we compiled a chart of which ISPs are using which authentication methods over here. 
Of course, we’ve also made authentication “MailChimp Easy:” Our customers can authenticate their email campaigns with one simple click, and we cover all the major authentication standards (DKIM, Domain Keys, SenderID, and SPF).
Got this message from the ESPC.
“The adoption of e-mail and domain authentication has reached its tipping point, exceeding 50% in several key metrics, according to the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance. The report found that 51% of the Fortune 500’s consumer-facing brands, 52% of the Fortune 500’s consumer-facing financial service brands and 54% of the top 300 brands in the Internet retailer segment are all using some form of e-mail authentication.”
You can read more about Authentication and how it affects consumer trust over at DMNews.
If you’re a MailChimp customer, you can authenticate all your email campaigns, just like the Fortune 500 brands do. It’ll make your emails look more trustworthy, and it’ll sometimes help you get through corporate email firewalls. And you can do this with one simple click. Here’s how to activate it (it’s free for all MailChimp customers).
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