It appears Terra.es began closing accounts on a trial basis on April 16, and that all accounts will be closed by May 30. The move is final, but they’re giving customers a chance to migrate to Terra.com. Unfortunately, the change isn’t automatic.

What does this mean for your list?

You may have seen terra.es addresses bouncing already, but they all will after May 30. We recommend removing all terra.es addresses before then to avoid running the risk of getting your account shut down for a high bounce rate. It’s also possible that some terra.es accounts will become spam traps in the future, which is another reason to remove those addresses from your list.

In the meantime, you can send a targeted campaign to your terra.es subscribers to make sure they know about the change. They’ll need to re-subscribe to your list with another email address if they want to keep receiving your emails. Here are a few articles that will help:

Can I send to a segment of my list?
Segment Your List by Email Domain
List Management

If you ever tried to segment a list by engagement, you may have wondered about our member-activity rating. I’m talking about the little stars that look like restaurant reviews for your subscribers. I’m not sure how five-star restaurants get their rating, but I suspect it’s a little different than email.

To come up with a member rating, MailChimp tracks open and click data and measures that against your sending frequency. Actually, we get a lot of questions about these little stars and how exactly a two star subscriber becomes a five star subscriber. To find out how the sausage is made, we’ll need to look at the code behind member ratings.

Our five star system is based on a twenty point activity score, and we weight those activity scores unevenly. An even distribution might be good for my OCD, but loading activity points around four and five stars ensures that high engagement is easily remembered while low engagement is easily forgotten.

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Email expert Laura Atkins put the word out that Yahoo is retiring old accounts, shutting down a few little-used products, and generally cleaning house. Spring cleaning is probably good news for Yahoo, but it could mean higher bounces for you.

Just to ease your mind, we haven’t seen a huge uptick in bounces. We’re remaining steady with a 99.5% delivery rate, but the results will vary by user. Our sending volume to Yahoo is significant enough that a few users could easily get lost in that statistic.

Rather than sounding the alarm, I thought I’d explain why this move by Yahoo shouldn’t surprise you.

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While we’re finishing our Halloween candy and looking for the perfect turkey recipe, I thought it might be a good idea to prepare for the uptick in seasonal email volume. We wanted to understand what it was like for marketers during the holidays, so we compared nearly two years of MailChimp’s traffic to look for trends.

You’d think it would be simple to compare two years of data, but there was a problem. Our growth rate makes a pretty graph, but it also obscures any other patterns. We solved the issue by journeying to the north pole and… just kidding. We normalized the data to account for growth, and once we did, the results were pretty startling.

Click the image for a look at the details.

So, what are you looking at? Well, we overlayed 2011 and 2012 seasonal traffic, and certain swells in volume really lined up. We mapped the major U.S. holidays to make things clearer. You can find volume bumps for Easter, Mother’s Day, and July 4th. Labor Day gets a bump, and Memorial Day gets a bump, and, holy moly, Christmas! The swell in volume for Christmas starts on Cyber Monday and only goes up from there. It’s unlike any other time of year.

I’ve heard the holidays are a good time to take a step back and reflect. For an email marketer, it’s a good time to see things from your subscribers’ point of view. With this in mind, we’ve put together a few ideas to help you get through the holiday season from the comfort of the inbox.

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We sent 3 billion emails last month, and that’s way cool! There was a time (and I’m talking about last year) when the idea of sending a billion emails a month blew my mind. Now I take it for granted that MailChimp can handle whatever we throw at it.

I thought I’d share some of my enthusiasm, so if you look below you’ll see a chart with our monthly volume since 2011. I also included a list of our peak performance stats, like our best second, minute, day, etc.

Joe gave you an idea of what MailChimp’s growth looks like from a data perspective, but there’s a whole lot we do on the delivery side to complement that volume and make sure your emails deliver as quickly as possible. As more and more emails go out each month, we have to think beyond simply increasing our capacity. We have to get nerdy.

Nerd out with me for a minute.
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