We’ve been sending Josh, our video guy, around the world to do these mini-documentaries on MailChimp customers (here’s his explanation). The most recent story is for Vice UK. At first, I thought Vice was just another edgy, NSFW website (which I likey). Turns out it’s this huge CNN-like media company. They’re a record label, a magazine, a music venue, a creative agency, and an online network. They’ve got people in 30 countries, and serve clients like Intel. And they’re growing. Fast.
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?
We just sent out a System Alert email to several hundred thousand users about a planned server upgrade this weekend. I know that whenever people receive transactional emails like this, they’re not expecting any humans to actually be watching for replies. That’s exactly why I enjoy sifting through all the replies and personally responding to as many customers as I can (just to freak them out a little)…
Every year around September, we create some kind of internal challenge for our employee holiday bonuses. Last year, we based it on the number of users we added after going freemium (we went from ~85,000 in September to about 210,000 in December) so everyone got nice bonuses. This year, we doubled our freemium plan, and we figured basing our bonuses on raw user numbers would be too easy. So instead, we based our bonuses on the number of “first time sends” (FTS) that new users accomplished from September 1st through December 15th.
I won’t bore you with more blah-blah. Just wanted to show you how we do data visualization around here. Instead of boring bar graphs and pie charts, this screen was projected up on our wall at MailChimp HQ:
Technically, I guess it’s still a pie chart. Anyway, as we chipped away at our FTS goal, the pizza got smaller and smaller…
A screenshot from an Elf Yourself clip being passed around our office:
What I find interesting is not so much how someone at MailChimp put my face on one of the dancing elves (though I did get a chuckle out of my breakdance routine), but that this year, there’s a “Report for Abuse” link in the upper left corner.