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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So, the Chimp Charts are here! You could just skim the page and see a bunch of charts, but if you look very, very closely you’ll see valuable information to help you better understand how to engage your subscribers and track your newsletters. You can even mouse over the chart for detailed performance.

So let’s take a look. The first two charts in our “Quick Insights” shows the email opens based on time of day and day in the week. The ‘y’ axis displays the percentage of opens on our tested data. This is an average per campaign rate and what the campaign can expect. It may look simple, but it’s very useful. (Scratching head) “So, what you’re telling me is Thursday around 3 pm is an awesome time to send my Morning Coffee Newsletter?” Not really. Keep in mind that you should use this data as a reference. You certainly don’t want to send your Morning Coffee Newsletter at 3 pm. That would be silly, but then again…some of us need a little afternoon pick me up.

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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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Around the office, we love taking new services for a test run. You never know when you’re going to find the next “must have” feature for our users. When Facebook began rolling out @facebook.com addresses, we had to take a look.

There’s been a lot of good commentary on the scope and impact Facebook Messages will have on the email using community.  That’s a big community, by the way, and it happens to include my mom.  Bless her heart, she signed up for Facebook last week, and now I have to explain that email, chats, and text messages aren’t separate things anymore.  It was difficult enough explaining the difference to begin with! For our MailChimp users, I thought I’d go into a little more detail.

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Below is a common question that we get on the topic of deliverability. I’m posting our response because we’re getting this question so much lately. By the way, the comment about one of our competitors (whether it’s true or not), is also why we don’t have sales quotas at MailChimp. Heck, it’s why we don’t have sales people here at MailChimp. Their goals sometimes get out-of-sync with the truth (I blame this on upper management, not on the sales people themselves). Anyway, here’s the question:

Hi MailChimp,

My name is [NAME] and I am the Marketing Director of a Group Buying site in [COUNTRY] ([COMPANYNAME]).

I am currently looking to upgrade our Email Marketing System and am in conversations with [COMPETING ESP]. I have never used [COMPETING ESP] and have used MailChimp.

[COMPETING ESP] seem to think that they can gaurantee 20% better deliverability than MailChimp. Is that something you can disprove? How can you disprove this (e.g. comparison of technology, types of examples)

We will be sending many emails by the end of the year (in excess of 200 million). Can you guys effectively handle this type of volume?

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