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.

[Update from Ben: 02/08/2011] We wrote this blog post to show that current self-reported “deliverability scores” and “inbox rates” are hard to believe. You have to take the ESP’s word for it that they get “99% to the inbox”. What we need is a truly independent scoring system that anybody can use to verify ESP deliverability claims. We thought we found that (or got pretty darn close) in ReturnPath’s SenderScore.

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.

We recently experimented with crowdsourcing the review of outgoing campaigns from MailChimp’s servers. Normally, if our Omnivore algorithms detect something suspicious about a campaign, we’ll automatically suspend the account and follow up with a review by our internal Compliance Team. But we’ve been testing the idea of also sending the campaign to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service for manual review by humans. We simply showed the email to a “turker” and asked them, “Is this spam?”

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…

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In February of 2009, we launched eepURL, a custom URL shortening service that would ultimately be integral to all of MailChimp’s social tracking and measurement features. A lot of people asked “why another URL shortening service?” especially when there are so many others out there, like bit.ly, with even more tracking functionality, and used more openly. Turns out having a closed, proprietary system was a good thing for deliverability (see: URL shorteners and blacklists).

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

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