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.

A big part of the using-video-on-your-website mix is the video hosting service that you use. We’re a long way from 2005 when there was either YouTube, or an .flv or .mov embedded in your webpage. Today’s video hosting landscape is more like a food court at the airport; Do I want some cheap fast food? Or some cheap fast food posing as cheap healthy food because its on flatbread? Or do I want to spring for that place that looks all dark and leathery with lots of TVs and the $18 hamburger? There are plenty of choices out there, but making the choice of who to go with is not always so cut and dry.

We’ve tried out more than our share of hosts these past few years. All have had their pros and cons, their sweet spots and their misgivings. But this year we’ve moved our content to a new home that looks finally like a place to set down some roots. And that place is Wistia.

Along with a long list of the necessary fundamentals, such as solid service and performance, good support, and an easy workflow, Wistia provides some fun and helpful performance metrics that help us know how our videos are performing, and where there may be room for improvement.

One of the minor miracles of the internet and the video hosting revolution is that you have access to an abundance of statistics that can show you, down to the second, what your viewing audience is reacting to, and how. If you aren’t convinced that this is truly miraculous just do a little reading about the complexity and cost of the Nielson rating system for TV shows (viewer diaries, “Home Units” and “people meters”!), then realize that with the internets we get at least the same amount of information as they do for a minute fraction of what that system cost in terms of time, money, and effort.

Recently we sent an email campaign to 1.2 million users that announced a new service called Wavelength. In that email, we linked to a video hosted on Wistia, which meant we could go in after the fact to see how it performed. With Wistia’s metrics, not only can we see the normal stuff like total loads, total views, and average engagement,

The basic video statistic summary.

but we also get to see these nifty little “heat maps” that show each viewers engagement in a neat new way. They also show where in the world the view is from, which is always pretty cool.

Some Wistia heat maps.

The heat maps display a hotter color within the timeline of your video as people scrub or rewind to rewatch any portion of the video. So in a loose sense, we can look for patterns that may tell us what particular points in the video people needed, or wanted to see again. We can also see gaps in the timeline if they skipped sections. Of course interpreting these graphs is a fuzzy science, but if there are similar spots across the viewing audience that see more heat on the map, we can look at that point in the video and consider what was either extra attention grabbing, or maybe extra confusing, our maybe something so incredibly cute that people just couldn’t help but to watch it over and over again.

In this case, there wasn’t a strong pattern of viewing a particular point over and over again, but there was a telltale pattern of fall-off around the 20 second mark. After watching the video again I can see that in the first 20 seconds or so we define what Wavelength does in general terms. After that we launch into more detail. So, many people watched the first twenty seconds and got the gist of it, then switched off.

Statistics showed that 82% of the video was watched on average, which is actually pretty darn good for a web video that is 1:30 in length. If that number was significantly lower, I would be more concerned about that dropoff pattern 20 seconds in. I would be inclined to go back and rework the script or the treatment to encourage viewers not to leave. How would I do it? Maybe have the narration hint at something coming up later in the video, or possibly add a surprising or entertaining moment which may rekindle interest and buy us a little more time with our viewer. As more people are used to seeing and watching video on the web, convincing them to click the play button is getting easier. Convincing them to stick with the video, however, is actually getting harder imho.

All these cool metrics can really help us do just that. It’s simple enough these days to go back into the video and retool it as needed, then export a new version and swap out the last one. This way we can continue to iterate, update, and improve our content as needed. And in my experience, it’s rare that something that is ultimately a subjective piece of creativity, such as a video, gets so much direct objective feedback from a broad audience. So I’ve really found these stats to be a huge help as I’ve continued to create and shape the videos we produce. They’ve also thickened my skin a good bit.

Another nice thing about Wistia is how we also get a lot of control over the look and features of the player.

Simple player customization tools.

Many hosts allow you only limited control over what color your frame and buttons are, and what controls you can include. It’s nice to finally have an easy way to make the player look as minimal as we want it to and to be able to color it to match the palette of the page it will live in. It would have been a big bummer to have a bunch of big, off-color controls covering up the eyes and our pretty new logo in the poster frame of the Wavelength video.

As it so happens, we first learned about Wistia because they contacted us a few years ago when developing their own API thingy between MailChimp and Wistia. It allows you to integrate your video with your email campaign, which is pretty cool . And MailChimp has a Wistia merge tag which allows you to integrate a Wistia video of your own into your email newsletter and take advantage of the awesome statistics. Read about it here.  Ben also just wrote a blogpost about how we allow you to customize and automate your video merge tags.  Pretty simple stuff to do, but as you can see below, it may make waves if you actually use it:

Clickmap of an email newsletter.

This is a MailChimp click map of the email Ben sent out announcing Wavelength. As you can see, click rates on the text links averaged around 4-8 %, but that video staring atcha there got a whopping 62.8% of all the clicks. Maybe it’s that hypnotic eye power getting people to watch (I have a proprietary “hypnotic eye power” filter; merge tag coming soon!), or maybe it’s people’s inclination these days to prefer watching a quick video instead of, or in addition to, reading about something. Whatever it is, it’s these insightful statistics that help prove this video thing is worth keeping our eyes on.

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.

You’d be mostly right to think that. If you fat-finger the top-level domain, you’re going to get a bounce. If you mess up anything to the left of the @ symbol, chances are you’re going to get a bounce there, too.

But what if you fat-finger the domain? This past month, I was doing some big data wrangling for our Email Genome Project, and I saw something funky going on with fat-fingered domains of large ISPs and freemail providers—specifically, email to these typos wasn’t bouncing. We actually had great delivery to these domains, which was unnerving.

Typosquatting domains sit around sites like Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Comcast, etc., and many of them love to accept all the mail they can get. For example, just in November, MailChimp users successfully sent 100,000 emails to addresses at Gmai.com, Gmial.com, Gmil.com, and 15 other Gmail imposters.

I’m not saying that my doppelganger doesn’t have a gmai.com address, but I’d be willing to bet that while these sites accept all the email sent to them, they deserve slim to none of it.

In November alone, our users sent approximately one million emails to typosquatting domains.

Don’t navigate to these sites, please. I’ve done it for you. The creepy stylins of gmai.com:

It’s mighty good of them to thank you for your typo.

Who owns these sites? Darned if I know. Many of them have anonymized their WHOIS information. What if your doctor fat-fingers the email address your blood work results are going to? The hard-working folks at Gmai.com will know all about your iron deficiency.

Perhaps these sites are collecting email addresses, correcting the typos, and creating lists to sell. That’s bad.

Now that they have your content, they could copy it, correct the typo address, and send a customized phishing attack to one of your subscribers. That’s worse.

Why don’t we correct these typos for you? Even if we could identify all these domains and pass judgment on whether or not a particular email address is intentional, correcting the address gets into permission issues. On a single opt-in list, someone might have intentionally given a bad email address. From a data-science perspective, these typos are an excellent signal of list quality—and they’re useful in “scoring” campaigns before they go out the door (hint, hint).

So look out for typos, and seriously consider going double opt-in. After all, if you’re not careful, you may end up in a coma…cast. *rimshot*

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.

For those of you who prefer data in table format:

Each month, you see how many emails are sent through MailChimp to the webmail domains above. Kind of gives you an idea of how much email MailChimp is sending these days (about 2 billion per month).

Somewhat related:

• Track domain performance stats
• User agent stats inside MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector

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.

Begin Technical Babble

Before I throw the charts at you, it might help if we went over a few basics of how MailChimp delivery works.  When you send a campaign, your list is divided up and distributed amongst our shared IP pool.  Each IP has a FIFO queue for outbound emails, and the size of these queues directly affects your delivery time.

Clearly, we should divide your list evenly amongst all our IPs.  That would give us the fastest delivery time for sure.  Yep, it sure would.  It’d be really fast.  Are you getting the feeling we don’t do that?  Good, now let me explain why it isn’t the best solution.

At this stage, your campaign looks a lot like a highway.  One of the things we like to do is match your subscriber’s activity rating with the reputation of our IP.  We’re putting your best subscribers in the fast lane so they have the best possible chance for a successful delivery.  Of course, this means we can’t divide your list evenly.

If you’re wondering why we don’t send your campaign over all of our IPs, I have a simple answer.  “Hell is other people.”  I’m pretty sure Sartre would approve of me borrowing that phrase.

You see, every now and then we get a bad apple.  Sometimes it’s accidental and sometimes it’s malicious, but these rogue apples can get our IPs blocked.  By optimizing the number of IPs that any one campaign touches, we protect all of our users from the odd mushy apple.

More Complicated

This is where the highway analogy starts to get out of control.  Not only is your list divided among several IPs, but each IP has a separate connection for every receiving domain in its queue.  The receiving domain is the ISP your subscriber uses, like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com.  It’s worth taking a look at your list and noting which domains you send to the most.

The good news is that these connections can all send concurrently.  Of course, the ISPs themselves often throttle incoming email to their own preference.  You’ll notice in the charts below that one ISP in particular throttles heavily.

So it’s like there are different highways, but the lanes are kind of… No, it’s like each ISP is a different car manufacturer, and the speed limit is…  Okay, maybe if we all had flying cars and the toll booth was like a filter … Ugh, I honestly can’t think of a good way to picture this.  Feel free to make suggestions.

On top of all that mess, you’re not the only one sending a campaign.  Your emails are being queued along with everyone else who just hit the send button.  We do everything we can to minimize the queues, but there are certain times of day when our volume is off the chain.  It’ll make you think twice about the “schedule delivery” feature.

Actual Data

I took two weeks of data from our pool of shared IPs and added them up by hour.  The first chart shows the volume of emails we sent.  You can see our heaviest hours are between 9am and noon (EST), but from experience, that range shifts back an hour depending on the time of year.

The next few charts measure the time interval between when an email was queued and when it was accepted for delivery by the email provider.  Keep that last part in mind.  It takes two to deliver.  We send the email to the ISP, and they deliver it to your subscriber.  The first part I can measure.  The second part is anyone’s guess.

You can see that 85% of the emails queued between 10:00am and 10:59am were sent within 5 minutes of being queued.  For Yahoo, it took 45 minutes to deliver the next 10% (looking at the 95% graph).  To send the next 4.5% (looking at the 95.5% graph) of Yahoo emails took a whopping 285 minutes.  Yikes!

Notes

Why don’t you see a graph for 100%?  Well, it turns out that a lot of lists contain one or two addresses that don’t exist or can’t receive email anymore.  The way we figure it, there’s always a chance.  We’ll try to get the ISP to accept the email for up to three days, and sometimes it actually works.  It makes my charts look horrifying though, so I cut the numbers off at 99.5%.  Problem solved.

You may have noticed that Yahoo loves to throttle email.  If your list has a lot of Yahoo addresses, you’ll want to take this into account.  For those looking at the “All” line, it’s simply the sum of all the emails together.  As the percent completion goes up, the last few thousand emails tend to be heavily weighted with Yahoo addresses.  The “All” line reflects this by inching up as well.

I’m pretty happy with these delivery times. For most ISPs, 95% of the emails in our queues are sent out in 5 minutes or less. It says we’ve done a good job at balancing reputation and speed. In the second part of this series, I’ll go over all the stuff that happens to your campaign before it ever hits the queue. It’ll be a lot like going behind the scenes at Universal Studios. There will be flames shooting up out of nowhere and you’ll see that Freddie is an awesome robot.

Go to Delivery Speed, Part 2

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)

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…

Ahem, can you tell we’re having fun with our shiny new Email Genome Project?

Effect of Social Content on Subscriber Engagement

In our latest research, we used the same query that generated the chart Dan Zarrella used in his Science of Email Marketing report:

but this time, we only ran it on campaigns with social content in them (this would include the use of MailChimp’s social features like sharing links, Facebook like buttons, comments, tweet buttons).

What we found was encouraging:

It seems that sending emails with social content helps people keep their subscribers engaged longer. Instead of a drop in average click rates, we actually see an increase.

Caveat: the sample size is much smaller in this study, because we’re only looking at data from one of our data centers (hundreds of thousands of emails, not billions). We’ll crunch more data soon!

Before analyzing this data, we wondered if this “social emails” graph might come out flatter than the previous one, but to see it move upwards is kind of encouraging. I wouldn’t dare suggest this means that adding “Tweet this” and “Like” buttons are going to jack up your email ROI. I think this means that marketers who are combining their email and social efforts are generally trying harder to engage. And that things aren’t as dismal as the “Engagement Half-Life” research seems, because you don’t have to choose between over-emailing and under-emailing. You just need to use different tools in different ways to talk to your different customers.

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.

The first few comments we got were understandably furious. But eventually, the conversation changed. We think we were on the way to a very constructive discussion. I really enjoyed the dialogue I had with people offline as a result of all this, and I want to thank all the email companies who commented here — CritSend, CampaignMonitor, PostMarkApp, and Al Iverson’s A-1 Super Awesome Home DSL Email Service.   I mean, don’t get me wrong. We’re competitors. We’re not going to be singing Kumbaya around the campfire with each other any time soon. It’s just nice talking to people who know their stuff. I wish the discussion could continue.

But my patience has been worn down. ReturnPath is naggi—asking me politely to take this post down, because they “don’t want to arbitrate arguments between their partners.” [I didn't realize we were asking them to arbitrate] I suggested that, as an independent, unbiased scoring system, they should just do what I do: ignore the bastards. Actually, I suggested the complainers needed to “grow some” and that ReturnPath ought to tell them so. But that’s not how ReturnPath rolls (thankfully, I guess).

Anyway, some of the arguments we heard about our posted methodology seemed to go like this: “Your methodology is flawed, because SenderScore penalizes IP addresses that send very low volumes, and that don’t have a high reputation. For example, I have an IP address that has GREAT inbox rates (um, trust me) but that have a low SenderScore.”

Well, yes. We know that low-volume, low-reputation IPs can get great deliverability.

Buuuut we happen to think that an ESP’s very job is to send high volumes of email while simultaneously maintaining a good IP reputation. We send out tons of email through our infrastructure, 24/7. If it were a race car engine, SenderScore’s our tachometer. Does it show actual vehicle speed? No. But it’s extremely indicative of engine performance. If we see our SenderScore drop from 94 to 70, there’s a problem with the engine. It’s time to pull over and get that deliverability fixed.

So to people who say “SenderScore is a bogus number” we respectfully disagree. It may not work for all senders, but it works for ESPs. The ones who send high volume. And want to measure their reputation.

Obviously, I am not concerned with what other ESPs think, or how they respond. But personally, I think that ReturnPath’s naggi — um, polite requests for me to pull this blog post is actually going to work against them. I think they’re defending the very people who are disputing the validity of SenderScore. On the one hand, that concerns me. On the other hand, I’ve always appreciated irony. And I absolutely hate the blinking red voicemail light on my office phone.

So this awesome blog post, which attempted to highlight the usefulness of ReturnPath’s SenderScore, is now officially yanked — at the request of ReturnPath.

The experiment only involved sending roughly 7,000 email campaigns over to be reviewed. But within the first 2 days, we started getting back some unexpected, yet fascinating results.

In particular, there were certain email templates that kept getting repeatedly flagged as spam by these human reviewers, even though they weren’t spam at all.

All these “false positives” had some common design traits, so we thought we should share our findings…

How Did The Experiment Work?

When Omnivore detected an email that had traits of potential abuse, we sent it to Mechanical Turk. A copy of the email (sans private data, like recipient information) was displayed inside of an interface that looked something like this:

In general, we listed some rules at the top, then presented the campaign below it, then asked the reviewer to tell us if the email violated any of the listed rules, back at the top of the page. User Interface snobs will notice that in general, this interface looks like it was QWERTY-fied (designed to slow users down a little). We could’ve used very simple “Is this spam? Yes/No” buttons, but you don’t want people judging too fast.

How Effective Was The Experiment?

The experiment went as well as you’d expect, using people who weren’t heavily trained on the intricacies of permission-based email marketing. Generally speaking, Turkers like to work fast, so they’re best for picking out the most egregious offenders (think along the lines of porno or pharma spam). To that end, they’re great at catching the really evil spammers who try to penetrate into our system and send extremely bad stuff that would jeopardize our deliverability.

But when it came to reviewing an email from, say, a reputable business that purchased a not-so-reputable list from a local chamber of commerce, the reviewers experienced some difficulty. So crowdsourcing is good, but not a silver bullet with respect to abuse prevention (we are still crowdsourcing, but the experiment has changed significantly).

Though we weren’t thrilled with the initial results, this exercise revealed a lot about how people look at email design.

21 Seconds To Decide

Mechanical Turk measures how much time people spend performing each review, so we can tell when people are just clicking random stuff and moving on to their next task. On average, the human reviewers spent only 21 seconds reviewing these “false positive” emails. Now, we can’t read their minds, so there’s no reliable way of telling if they bothered to check for “permission reminders” or “CAN-SPAM compliance” in the footers. But it’s safe to say they weren’t doing a very thorough analysis. I’d wager that most of that 21 seconds was spent reading the criteria at the top of the interface, and not the email itself. They definitely weren’t visiting the senders’ websites to see if there was a proper signup form, and testing to see if they used opt-in best practices. They were making relatively quick, gut-level decisions on whether or not an email “looked spammy.”

The False Positives

Below are some email designs that kept getting marked as spam by Mechanical Turk reviewers. Keep in mind that at the time of this experiment, none of the senders of these emails were determined to be abusive. Their email stats suggested they were sending permission-based emails. Their recipients probably knew the emails were legit — but our independent reviewers did not.

1. Want to learn Photoshop?

In general, I think the above email has got some layout issues that make it look a bit sloppy. Their images are breaking the template. At the top, where people are accustomed to seeing a logo, the sender only used text. In fact, the text isn’t even the company’s name, but a bright red “salesy” kind of question: “Want to learn Japanese or Chinese?” Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that you know your recipient, or what he’s interested in. Unfortunately, the Chinese characters don’t help their reputation much either. We’ve all received a bit too much of this in our inbox:

2. The Red Flyer

I’m sure that loyal customers of this local pizzeria were happy to get an offer for a free t-shirt:

But I don’t think our human reviewers liked the “hyperlink blue” verdana font, then the giant red “FREE” text below that (then the green text below that, then the blue text below that, then the gray text below that). Something about this email made it look more like a stock template for a flyer, not an email newsletter to loyal customers. I couldn’t help but think that the scrunched up airplane logo looked like those images that spammers try to skew, in order to get around anti-spam filters who scan the content of images:

Aside from the image quality issues, some extra copy could’ve been added to demonstrate that this email was being sent to their customers. Don’t get me wrong. T-shirt giveaways can be  extremely effective (here are some stats to prove it), but you should probably do more than just yell “FREE T-SHIRT!”

At the very least, an image of the actual t-shirt seems in order.

Here’s a nice example from ScoutMob:

3. Not Plain Enough Text

This email repeatedly got marked as spam by our reviewers:

You’ll notice it has no images. No branding, no logos, no photos.

Yes, one could make the case that plain, old-fashioned, text-only emails can be more personal, and therefore more effective under some circumstances.

But if you’re gonna go all-text, you need to go all the way, baby. Centered text, colored backgrounds, and colored borders look like you’re going for an HTML email look. But when you fail to include any logos or images, it looks half-baked. Like a spammer, getting all “Rich Text:”

Even if you don’t have a logo, one way of showing your brand is to include your website’s domain. But this sender used the bit.ly URL shortener instead:

In their defense, that’s probably because the link to the event they’re promoting was really long or something (webinar links get that way sometimes). The problem is that spammers are known to hide malicious links behind reputable URL shorteners (see: URL Shorteners and Blacklists), so that helpful little link just ends up hurting them.

4. Read it and Weep

This one was actually surprising to me, because I thought it was well designed:

The title font even looks customized (it’s not arial, it’s not verdana, and it’s certainly not comic sans). It’s laid out pretty nicely. The pink is a custom color, too. The only possible problem that I can see is that it’s extremely text-heavy, with zero images. To the untrained eye, it almost falls into that “not plain-enough text” category above, but this doesn’t look half-baked or sloppy at all to me. This email shows signs of actual craftsmanship and skill with typography (web design is 95% typography, right?). This sender’s subscribers are probably fine with all this text (the sender is an author, after all). But to our independent reviewers, this email apparently looked pretty spammy. In this case, I personally wouldn’t change my design or behavior. If I had to make recommendations, I’d consider adding elements that made it look more “newslettery.” Perhaps a small avatar of the author could be worked into the template’s footer, or some “share this on social sites” icons. If this is all about the written word, and images are forbidden, text can be ornamental too.

5. Set it and Forgot it

Senders that used one of our stock RSS-to-email templates seemed to get flagged the most:

As I write this article, we’re actually working on tweaking this template so that the header is more customizable (forcing the title to be ALL CAPS, in retrospect, was not a great idea).

But many of the bloggers who used this template didn’t bother customizing the RSS merge tags any further to include images from their posts. They didn’t customize the fonts, link colors, or anything at all, it seems.

I also wonder if, in some cases, the Table of Contents was so large, our independent reviewers didn’t bother scrolling down to look for real content. All they saw was a bunch of nonsensical looking TOC links. This happens if you update your blog frequently, but you schedule your RSS-to-email campaign to go out in weekly or monthly batches. Not that I’d change my behavior just for random Mechanical Turk reviewers. What your subscribers want is more important.

But there’s a broader lesson here on image vs. text balance. A similar example plucked from my spam folder in Gmail:

Why this is important to email marketers

When you send a lot of email marketing, even to a totally permission-based double opt-in list, you’re going to get some spam complaints from your recipients. It’s inevitable. Sometimes, it’s because they’re too lazy to click your unsub link, they think the “spam” button is the unsub link, or sometimes it’s because they forgot signing up to your list (maybe because you send infrequently, like me).

And sometimes, when your email is marked as spam, a human from an ISP, or a human from an anti-spam organization, will actually do a manual review of your email (See: “Who’s secretly reading your emails?”). Some anti-spam organizations use volunteers, who are driven by passion more than pay (nothing wrong with that, but you have to wonder how detailed their training is). We’ve experienced enough “your client’s email has been reviewed by our team, and determined to be spam, so we’re blocking your IP range” situations to know that those reviewers don’t always do a thorough analysis of your list management practices (not part of their job description anyway). This is partly why our own terms of use seem so strict to some. ISPs get complaints, they look at your email, and they make a split-second decision to “blacklist or not.”

So even if you do your list management right, and you design everything perfectly around your subscribers’ expectations, we always recommend that you give some consideration to this “secret” audience that also reads your email (See: “What makes a good permission reminder?”). Don’t bend over backwards for them, or anything.

It’s kind of like how your mother always told you to wear clean underwear, “in case you’re in an accident.” Take a good look at your email templates, and ask yourself, “If my email got reported as spam, and some spamcop laid his eyes on it, what would they think? Would mom be proud?”

Related:

• How your email design can get you blacklisted
• Stupid Email Design Mistakes
• How to avoid spam filters (the non-human kind)
• Want 700,000 HTML email templates? (more fun w/Mechanical Turk)
• Is your email marketing human?

Besides, our plan all along was to keep adding more email-specific tracking functionality and visualization to eepURL anyway…

With MailChimp v5.3, we added some nice visualization to your campaign’s eepURL sharing activity.

Whenever people share your campaign’s eepURL via twitter, Facebook, or their blog, or anywhere, we’ll show you where on the planet their friends clicked:

we’ll also show you the aggregate clicks on your eepurl:

and the top 10 referrers:

Think of the new stats as having your own little bit.ly, but for your email marketing campaigns.

You’ll find them under the social stats screen within your campaign reports: