We all know you shouldn’t over email your subscribers. But we also know that within 4 months, your subscribers quit caring (don’t take it personally — you’re just competing with everything else in the world for their attention). So how can you keep customers engaged with your brand, so that when you do send them emails, they actually open and click?

At MailChimp, we think the answer is Twitter. Oh, and Facebook. And Posterous. And Tumblr. And your blog(s). And Flickr. And YouTube. And dribbble. And RSS-to-email.

You get the point. Try to create content that’s interesting and publish it everywhere, so customers can get to it (and share it) however they want. That way, when you actually send an email, your customers will still be engaged (maybe they remembered that funny video you shared on Facebook, or that really useful tool you linked to on Twitter).

Or will they still be engaged? Is there any data that can actually back that claim up? Why yes there is. So convenient of me you to ask…

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If you weren’t able to attend Dan Zarrella’s Science of Email Marketing webinar, he posted his slides and video here. There are some really interesting findings in that presentation, generated by analyzing over 9.5 billion emails in our Email Genome Project. There’s stuff I never would’ve thought to ask, like “effect of time-of-day on unsubscribe rate” (slide 17).

But this is the stat I found most interesting (slide 45):

After about 4 months, your average click rate for your average email subscriber drops to less than 1%.

We could talk about ways to keep people engaged longer, like sending more frequently (I think Mr. Zarrella recommends this in his presentation), sending less frequently, engaging with people on alternate channels (like Twitter and Facebook), and on and on. But 9.5 billion emails tell you something. You’ve basically got 4 months to entertain, delight, sell, and make your point to subscribers. More importantly, you need to do something awesome enough to keep feeding in new subscribers, because the churn might be faster than you think.

In the January of 2008, I was visiting my family in Iowa for the holidays. It was smack in the middle of the presidential election, and Iowa was the frontline of the political battleground as candidates jockeyed for position in the first primary. I attended a few rallies, and observed how the various campaigns organized their grassroots teams. At one rally, a campaign representative took the stage and asked that the thousands of people in attendance text a shortcode to a specified number in order to subscribe to a mailing list. In seconds, they had just turned a one time meeting into a recurring conversation.

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More and more people are talking about “Social Media Optimization,” which is the idea of making your website more “social friendly.” On the surface, it just sounds like adding “tweet this” and “like buttons” to your web pages. And yes, that’s all important.

But it’s also about how to use the networks between friends, and the power of friends’ recommendations, to make your website more user friendly, or even more trustworthy. For skeptics (like me) who also hate shopping for jeans (like me) this idea takes a while to sink in. So I just thought I’d post this simple screenshot from Levi’s website:

If you haven’t tried this for your website yet (especially e-commerce sites), now’s a good time. And don’t forget to optimize your emails, too.

On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.

Earlier this month, we actually doubled our freemium plan from 500 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers. So now, even more people can take advantage of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing and social features. We had been averaging around 30,000 new users per month (about 1,000 per day), but since we increased the freemium plan this month, we’re seeing +2,000 new user days.

Another thing that’s increased dramatically since going freemium is the number of lunches I’m invited to; seems entrepreneurs and VCs really want to “pick my brain” about how freemium is doing for us. Usually, it’s because they think freemium might be that silver bullet they’ve been searching for. It can be, but you’ve really gotta be careful not to point that bullet at yourself…

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