You may have seen the announcement over at Laura Atkins’ blog about Yahoo no longer giving preferred delivery to Goodmail certified messages. I’ve got no insight as to why this might be, and have zero opinion about Goodmail anymore.
But I did find this comment from Laura very relevant to something we’re doing at MailChimp:
“Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement.”
That part about how “they must continually monitor”? I can’t blame Goodmail. That’s extremely hard to do! In a way, MailChimp tried to do this sorta thing ourselves…
What’s a good, average open rate? Our customers ask us that question all the time. So much so, that a few years ago we analyzed close to 300 million emails and posted our findings to ChimpCharts. Next, we embedded that data right into your campaign stats:
learn more about industry comparisons
But I send a lot of campaigns. Because I use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool wired up to this blog, I send almost daily. And I look at my stats all the time. So I already know my average open rate, and I already know my click rate, and I already know that I’m usually a few percentage points above industry average (c’mon, step it up a little Internet & Software industry!).
Nowadays, I find myself seeking anomalies in my stats instead…
Our inbox inspector will tell you if your email will get blocked by spam filters.
But diagnosing the exact reason your email was blocked can be extremely difficult.
The only way to really figure out why your message was blocked is to systematically test each variable: change your subject line, and send another test email. Go check all your test accounts. Did it get blocked again? Well, change this link. Still blocked? Change another link. Wasn’t your links? Swap out the images. Not it? Change your content. Over and over, till you find the culprit. Then, do all that again for the next spam filter. Complete p.i.t.a.
So we automated all that with our new Delivery Doctor tool. Push one button, and we’ll automagically slice and dice and analyze your email and run dozens of tests until we find the root of your block.
Then, we tell you what to fix…
Contrary to popular belief, switching to an ESP (email service provider) like MailChimp, ConstantContact, etc., is not a silver bullet for deliverability.
Spam filters and email gateways look at two kinds of things: 1) your email message, and 2) your email infrastructure. In terms of your email message, ESPs can’t help it if you send spammy content, manage your lists like an idiot, or if a link in your email has a bad domain reputation. But as ReturnPath points out here, ESPs do have one important advantage: our infrastructure.
So if you’re managing your own email servers and delivery issues with ISPs, firewalls, throttling, feedback loops, and bouncebacks are becoming a supreme headache, you might be thinking about moving to an ESP.
This article is about how one email sender, Photojojo, decided to switch from their in-house solution to MailChimp. We’ll show you how we helped them make the transition, what we experienced, and how it impacted their deliverability.
