In days gone by, Liking something on Facebook was a big commitment because it meant you were becoming a Fan of a particular person or product. Sharing was less of a pledge of allegiance because it enabled you to endorse content without becoming a Fan. In recent months though, that paradigm has flipped.

Facebook unveiled a number of significant alterations to their platform at the f8 conference in April 2010. Some of the most notable announcements were the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins. With these two changes, Facebook decreased the barriers to entry for integrating social functionality with your site or email campaigns, essentially making it a plug-and-play process.

So by making the Like button ubiquitous across the web, Liking something has shifted from being a huge commitment, to being more of a hat tip. It’s a casual way to show your interest in a site, article, brand or email campaign.

On the other hand, Sharing requires both a greater time commitment and a greater reputation commitment. Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy for Edison Reserach, describes Sharing as an act of curation.

Facebook’s “Share” feature allows active users to curate media – in fact, the sharing interface practically compels it by presenting sharers with that big empty box in which they not only post the “what” – the compelling link, the funny video – but the “why.” Facebook’s sharing feature allows curators to add value to what they share, and in fact create content of their own around shared items.

I suspect that there is a nascent dichotomy emerging here, between the type of Facebook user who chooses to Like content, versus the user who Shares it. By including both options (when we can remember to actually insert the tags) in our newsletter, we’re giving different types of users the opportunity to interact with our content in the way they find the most personally compelling. There are some people who will think that our content is worth sharing with their network of friends, so they share. There are others who wouldn’t necessarily share something with their friends (because their friends aren’t email designers, or email marketers), but they want to give props. So they press Like. It just so happens that when they Like something it shows up in their news feed on Facebook, and then curious friends can go see what it’s all about.

so if you have role addresses on your account that you know should receive your email marketing, we make you manually input those addresses.

That’s because role addresses are built for functions, not people…

In other words, they’re often forwarded to multiple employees in a company, and they often change owners.  So it’s pretty obvious how sending your newsletter to a role address can lead to spam complaints that jeopardize the deliverability of our system. We even have a handy “tell me more” link to our knowledge base explaining all this, just in case. And manually inputting role addresses is a lot easier than manually begging to get off blacklists. Yet people still complain about having to manually input role addresses.

I think I know why. Even though we explain the reason for doing what we do, we offer no handy tips on how they can solve their problem quickly and easily.

So here’s a way you can deal with this. It’s not going to be super quick and easy, but if you really want those role addresses on your list, and if you really care about deliverability, it’s worth it.

After you import your list into MailChimp, and we provide you with a list of the rejected role addresses, download that list to your computer.

Next, go to the Lists page in MailChimp, and click on the “forms” link for that list you just created:

at the top of the next page, you’ll get a link to your MailChimp-hosted signup form:

Copy that URL.

Now go to your email program and BCC that link to the small handful of subscribers that you know are real human beings and that truly want your email marketing, but who insisted on using a role address when they originally subscribed to your list. I’m assuming it’s a handful. If it’s thousands of role addresses, (where BCC’ing is not a possibility), we’ve got a deeper problem here. Omnivore is likely to shut down your account, because a high percentage of role addresses pretty much smells like a purchased email list.

Anyway, send that handful of addresses a personal note from your own desktop email program, with your own email address as the reply-to, and using your own ISP or company mail server to distribute the message. If the prospect of dealing with the spam complaints and delivery issues that arise from mass-BCC’ing is bothering you now, then yeah—now you know why we feel the way we do about role addresses and preventing abuse complaints.

But if it’s just a handful of people you know, and who are already used to receiving emails from you, everything will be just fine.

Use a personal note like this:

Hello friends, customers, and subscribers.

I’m moving my email marketing to a product called MailChimp. Yeah, the name’s funny and all, but it’s actually a super powerful tool that will make my life a lot easier, and get useful content to you more efficiently and reliably.

Anyway, you signed up to my list a while back using your company’s role address. Something like “sales@” or “webmaster@”

Problem is, MailChimp won’t let me use that role address, because your company might be forwarding incoming mail to multiple people. Furthermore, those people will often change departments. It’s this philosophical thing they have. I dunno.

So this means that if you want to continue receiving my awesome content, please subscribe to my list using your own, individual  email address.

Here’s the link to sign up:

[link to your MailChimp signup form]

Regards,

__________

You might even consider customizing your welcome emails to include some kind of free prize, or free useful resource (like a whitepaper, PDF guide, whatever). That way, in the letter above, you can actually give people an incentive to go through “all that work” of signup up to your list again. Hopefully, your content’s so darn good, they’ll gladly go sign up, regardless of prize (but people still like those prizes!).

Again, we understand that this creates work for you, the publisher, and also work for that handful of recipients who signed up with role addresses. But over the years we’ve seen a lot of people get into a lot of trouble sending emails to role addresses that forward to someone who never signed up for anything.

It’s an unbelievable hassle proving your innocence to all the parties involved. You have to explain your situation to your ESP, the recipient who’s complaining, any ISP abuse desks that are blocking you, and that anti-spam organization that’s now globally blocking all emails that contain your company’s domain name (no matter where or who the emails are sent from).

Trust us. We know it’s an inconvenience, but when it comes to email marketing, an ounce of abuse prevention is worth a pound of role addresses.

When you log into WordPress and look at the dashboard for your awesomely new WordPress Analytics Plugin, you’re probably wondering how you can limit the data to only your blog traffic.

Here’s how we did it at MailChimp…

First you’ll need to log in to Google Analytics and find your site in the “Website Profiles” list.

1. Adding a New Profile

Then, click +Add New Profile next to the web site that has your blog attached to it.

Add a New Profile to Google Analytics Account

You’ll arrive at the Create New Website Profile page. Make sure you select Add a Profile for an existing domain. Then check to make sure your main web site is selected in the “Select Domain” box.

Create a New Profile

Give your new profile a meaningful name. How about “Name of Your Site Blog”? Click “Continue” to save the profile and let’s see how the magic filtering happens.

2. Create a Filter for Your New Blog Profile

Now that your new blog profile is created it’s recording the same exact data as your web site. Don’t worry! We can filter the current data to only include your blog (aka “The Magic”).

Find and click the Edit link for the new profile you created.

This page contains all of the settings for your new profile, but we’re only interested in one area: Filters. Look for the Filters Applied to Profile section and click +Add Filter.

Profile Settings Page

Make sure Add New Filter for Profile is selected and give the filter a descriptive name, like “Blog Traffic.”

The filter type you want to select is labeled “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”  and you’ll want to use Google’s example as a baseline for finding the subdirectory. Something like “^/blog” where “blog” is the name of your main WordPress directory.

Your new profile has been added.

Save your changes and head over to your WordPress Admin.

3. Use Your New Profile in Analytics360 for WordPress

After you log in to WordPress, look under the Settings menu for Analytics360 and click over to your Analytics360 settings.

Under Step 2, you’ll want to select your new profile from the “From now on track:” select box. Click “This One!” to activate your new blog profile for Analytics360.

Your Analytics360 Settings in WordPress

What gives? There’s No Data?

It’s going to take about 3+ hours for some data to start rolling in, like when you setup Google Analytics for the very first time. It’s actually best to give it a full 24 hours, so you’ll at least get a full day’s data in your Analytics360 Dashboard.

Be patient! All is well in the world of WordPress Analytics now.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

Turns out I passed all the major spam filters!

My Spam Assassin score wasn’t great (anything over a 5 is DOA but I like to stay well below 3). But that seems to be because of other problems.

In terms of the extremely disgusting alt-text descriptions I used, they don’t seem to have triggered anything at all:

Got any questions you want the MailChimp team to answer here on the blog? Submit them here.

Learn more about MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector:

Blocks occasionally happen to everybody, so I told him we wouldn’t be immune. And believe it or not, ISPs have been known to have email problems themselves. What sucked about the guy’s situation was he couldn’t tell for sure if he was having a problem.

In MailChimp, if you want to know if your email campaign had troubles with any ISPs, you can always check your Email Domain Performance report:

In the stats above, 39% of all emails to comcast.net were bounced. It’s not a full 100% bounce rate, but it’s way above the average bounce rate for his industry. This particular user wrote me an email asking what they should do…

Since I know Comcast uses Cloudmark, I suggested they run an Inbox Inspection, because it includes actual scans using the Cloudmark spam filter. Then, they’ll know if it was a Comcast + Cloudmark issue.

If the email is extremely urgent, they could then send a followup email campaign (revised, based on their inbox inspection results) to their Comcast recipients by using MailChimp’s built-in segmentation.

The segmenting criteria would look like this:

since the user had MailChimp’s optional AIM reports installed, which tells you those who did NOT open or click (among other cool things), he could further segment his list like this:

You can see how adding the extra “those who didn’t open” criteria reduced the segment from 109 recipients to 75. Potentially, that’s about 34 fewer comcast subscribers who’d receive the followup email.

Two more tips for re-sending campaigns like this:

1. Open tracking (and did-not-open-tracking) is not 100% reliable. Duh. So phrase your followup email in such a way that if people get dupes, it’s okay. Don’t just re-send the same email. They’ll get really annoyed, and report you for spamming. Change your design (good thing you already setup those 7 basic template types, right?) and write some copy like, “our last message seemed to have some issues with ___, so we’re re-sending it because it contains some urgent blah blah etc.”
2. If at all possible, wait a day or two before resending. If your campaign caused a problem with an ISP that got a lot of your emails blocked, the problem is not going to magically disappear in a matter of minutes. If you impatiently resend bad content, the only thing ISPs will see is, “Oh, big surprise. Bozo the clown over there, who got more than a 0.1% complaint rate for his last campaign, seems to be trying again. Time to reset the un-block-when-the-complaints-subside timer.”
3. If the email campaign is extremely urgent and you can’t wait, you should dramatically alter the content (including the design and coding) of the email to reduce the chances of any of that triggering spam filters again. Make it a plain-text-only email. Put the content on your website. In the email, point to that page on your website. I’ve even seen some users micro-segmenting their lists based on criteria like, “First name starts with a, b, c, etc.” This will minimize your impact on ISPs, and help you spot further problems quickly.

They call it a “cure for writer’s block” but that doesn’t do it justice imho. My problem is the opposite of writer’s block. I can write stuff all day long, but I have no idea if it’s the stuff our customers actually want to hear about. Some customers contact me directly with questions. Our customer svc team gives me topics too.

But Skribit is finally a way for me to see how many other readers are interested in that topic. Suggest a topic for me to write about

It can answer important questions like, “Are any ISPs blocking me?” and “Which ISPs do my subscribers use most?”

It can also answer expensive questions, like, “Should I invest in email certification services like SenderScore (which gives you some benefits with Hotmail, Roadrunner, and Cox), or Goodmail (which gives you some benefits with AOL, Comcast, and Yahoo), or SuretyMail (which works with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink among others)?

Email certification can get email past spam filters and into inboxes with images on by default, and in some cases, video will work.

But are they too expensive? Why not test? Here’s how:

For your next campaign, segment your list by an ISP domain, like hotmail:

(the segmentation screen is also a nice way to see what % of my list is actually using hotmail)

Send your campaign to this segment of Hotmail recipients. Do the same for AOL, Comcast, etc. if you want.

Log back in to MailChimp.

Check your ROI for each segment (you’ll need our e-commerce360 or Analytics360 plugins turned on):

Now you’re armed with actual data that you can use to determine how much each domain is worth to you.

Go talk to the email certification services to find out how much it’ll cost to implement for your organization and list size  (your annual email delivery volume is usually the factor), and what kind of improvement in open/click rates you might see for each domain.

Look back at your domain performance:

If you could get x more opens or clicks out of y domain, how much might that add to your bottom line?

I got this tip from Anna Billstrom, who has consulted for some really, really big companies (think mainframe computers) and writes a nice blog called Adventures in Email Marketing.

P.S. SuretyMail says they work with spam filters like Postini and Spam Assassin. Is it worth it? Why not check your campaign spam filter scores, with MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector?

Did you know you can ALSO translate your signup process to over 25 different languages?

Simply select it from the pulldown:

Here’s a list of supported languages (it’s constantly growing):

• English
• Chinese
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French (France)
• French (Canada)
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Spanish (Span)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

For fun, we also threw in:

• Chimplish
• Redneck
• Jive
• Elmer Fudd
• Swedish Chef
• Pig Latin
• Hacker

If you don’t see your language on the list, and you’ll volunteer some time to help add it, submit your translation here.

So we created this: http://caniuseapurchasedemaillist.com/

If you run an abuse desk somewhere, and you’re tired of answering that stupid question over and over, feel free to link people to it. If you’re not sure why importing a purchased email list into a 3rd party ESP is a bad thing, then promptly turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Thanks.

click image to enlarge

When you’re on the MailChimp dashboard, just click over to the “Reports” tab.  Then just click on the big orange “compare campaigns” button on the left side of the screen.

Click the button to download a spreadsheet containing stats for ALL your campaigns, ever.  It’s chock full of all kinds of data, will let you run your own reports in Excel and then you can build just about any pretty graph you or your boss could ever want.

For example, you can even calculate the best day to send emails based on your previous campaign open rates.

Tell us what other kinds of innovative things you’re doing with your reports as well.  We love to hear from you!