Want to know the best and worst days to send holiday email? It’s a known fact around the office that crazy things happen between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m not just talking about the sports, the gift giving, the sprinkle covered treat making, and the sprinkle covered treat eating. I’m talking about MailChimp’s annual holiday volume spikes. Of course!

The coolest part is comparing our 2011 holiday traffic to last year’s holiday traffic. We’ve done a lot of growing between then and now, and it really shows. Our holiday spikes for 2011 are 2.2 times greater than our holiday spikes in 2010. Check it out:

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There’s a long history of conflict between double opt-in and single opt-in list confirmation. Ultimately, email senders have to choose between list size and list quality. As an ESP, we tend to care a lot about the quality of your lists. After all, our IP reputation is at stake.

A handful of bad lists can ruin the party for our million good users. That’s why you’ll hear us talk so much about double opt-in list confirmation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Ben’s blog post from 2005. It’s kind of required reading if you want to understand the stats below.

When talking about double opt-in, we tend to hear customers say, “Why should I make it harder for people to subscribe to my list?” I get it. After all, double opt-in does require people who want to get emails from you to… open an email from you. It’s an extra step, but I think it’s one you can afford. Cutting corners in list collection tends to generate bounces, blacklisting, spam trap hits, and other nasty stuff that can tank your emails.

The question is, will using double opt-in really improve the stats that matter: opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes?

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It’s no secret that Facebook doesn’t believe in email, but despite my previous research, I don’t have a clear picture of how their vision is shaping the company/customer relationship. Perhaps I should say the company/fan relationship.

To help clear things up, we called Jeff from PageLever. His site provides really cool Facebook Analytics to all kinds of businesses, so he’s in a position to have a uniquely informed perspective.

Jeff was boarding a plane as we spoke (the life of a busy man, er, businessman), so our conversation isn’t something I can just cut and paste. However, he did provide a lot of solid insights that I want to pass along.

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In my last post, I talked about how quickly email moves through our IPs.  To get the data, I focused on our shared IP pool and basically ignored all of our Dedicated IP users.  Today is going to be different.  Today we’re looking under the hood to see the cool tweaks and updates the Developers have been working on.  These changes impact every single MailChimp user, but those of you with large lists will want to pay special attention.

Before a campaign can go out, before it even hits the queues, our system has to build it.  Build what?  Doesn’t the user build the campaign?  Well, I guess I’d say the user designs the campaign. It’s our job to write all the headers, define all the merge tags, and package all kinds of related info into a huge data payload so your awesome content can get to its final destination.

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Over the past year, I’ve seen MailChimp grow and grow. Along with all our new users, it seems like we see bigger and bigger lists every month.  In terms of email volume, our current daily average is now higher than our daily peak was one year ago.  To keep up with this explosion, we’re warming up new IPs which means more queues and more connections for our users.  Instead of asking everyone to deal with longer wait times, we’re actually trying to speed things up.

That leads to a very interesting question… How are we doing?  After sifting through 500 or so IPs and crunching the numbers on over a quarter of a billion emails, I might have an answer.  There are graphs with colored lines and all kinds of explanations below, but within my data set one thing is true.  75% of the emails we receive are delivered within 5 minutes or less.  That’s pretty cool.

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