It’s no secret that Facebook doesn’t believe in email, but despite my previous research, I don’t have a clear picture of how their vision is shaping the company/customer relationship. Perhaps I should say the company/fan relationship.

To help clear things up, we called Jeff from PageLever. His site provides really cool Facebook Analytics to all kinds of businesses, so he’s in a position to have a uniquely informed perspective.

Jeff was boarding a plane as we spoke (the life of a busy man, er, businessman), so our conversation isn’t something I can just cut and paste. However, he did provide a lot of solid insights that I want to pass along.

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So, the Chimp Charts are here! You could just skim the page and see a bunch of charts, but if you look very, very closely you’ll see valuable information to help you better understand how to engage your subscribers and track your newsletters. You can even mouse over the chart for detailed performance.

So let’s take a look. The first two charts in our “Quick Insights” shows the email opens based on time of day and day in the week. The ‘y’ axis displays the percentage of opens on our tested data. This is an average per campaign rate and what the campaign can expect. It may look simple, but it’s very useful. (Scratching head) “So, what you’re telling me is Thursday around 3 pm is an awesome time to send my Morning Coffee Newsletter?” Not really. Keep in mind that you should use this data as a reference. You certainly don’t want to send your Morning Coffee Newsletter at 3 pm. That would be silly, but then again…some of us need a little afternoon pick me up.

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I spent a few days working with the lads at WooThemes getting some MailChimp magic into one of their most popular themes, Canvas.

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The Equinux team has been hard at work building the latest version of Mail Designer. The thing is, now it works with MailChimp! Mail Designer is a Mac app that lets you author great-looking emails without worrying about HTML, tables (eek!), and other geek-related topics.

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Autoresponders offer a great opportunity for engaging your subscribers over an extended period of time. You may have heard of this strategy referred to as drip marketing, but it doesn’t necessarily just refer to a series of campaigns that extend forward into infinity. It can actually work particularly well in the context of counting down to a special date, like a wedding or the birth of a child. So let’s take a look at how you’d set up this type of campaign using MailChimp’s autoresponders.

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