A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

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I’ve put my business cards in quite a few fish-bowl drawings, because the amount of personal information I’ll give away for a free chili-cheese burrito is astounding.

At some point, the proprietor of such a card-collecting eatery might pay her angsty nephew to hand jam those email addresses into a spreadsheet. Odds are that one of those addresses is going into that list with a typo. The same thing happens with a single opt-in webform (huzzah for double opt-in).

You might think most of these typo addresses are going to bounce when you send to them, so no big deal—typos are merely a minor annoyance and occasional source of hilariousness. And when they bounce, you’ll just clean them up then.

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Someone in the email marketing industry (who is known, among other things, for sending out really good chocolates every Christmas) asked me if we had an update to this old blog post from 2009: Major Email Provider Trends: Yahoo and Hotmail Tops, Gmail Catching. I like it when he sends me chocolate, so I thought we better provide an update:

Back in 2009, Gmail was a distant 3rd, but trending up. Now, Gmail’s right there with Hotmail and Yahoo. Sorry, but there are a few months there where we kinda had an oopsie and forgot to track Gmail for this study. But you still get a good picture of how far gmail has come. C’mon, it’s at least good enough to earn my chocolates, Mr.Brownlow.

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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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Quick tip. Have you noticed, down in the bottom left corner of your MailChimp Dashboard, there’s a new(ish) module called “Top Fives“?  We launched this back when we revamped the app, but we never really talked about it:

It’s a quick way to see, across all the campaigns you’ve ever sent, which ones:

• Had the highest open rate of all time
• Had the highest click rate of all time
• Your most clicked links of all time (my personal favorite, because it helps me see what my readers are most interested in)