Last week, email expert Stefan Pollard at ClickZ posted an informative article about getting into your subscribers’ address books or on their contact lists.  This is one of the most simple and often overlooked tactics for improving email deliverability.

When your subscribers add you to their address book, they are essentially telling their ISP that they want to receive email from you, and in some cases it can even get your correspondence to show up with images turned ‘on’ by default and rendering correctly.  As Stefan notes,

“ISPs want to deliver only the e-mail their customers say they want to receive, so they check those personal whitelists when deciding whether to deliver, block, or direct to the spam folder your e-mail.”

Read More


We’re getting more questions from customers with large email lists about sending their campaigns from a dedicated IP address, vs. using MailChimp’s “shared” pool of IPs.

They want to know if their deliverability will be any better if they use a dedicated IP.

It’s not a question we can answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Mark Brownlow has a good overview of all the different points to consider before sending from your own dedicated IP.

At MailChimp, whenever we setup a new IP address (either to add to our overall rotation, or a dedicated IP address for a high-volume customer) it takes time to “break it in.” Here’s what we go through…

Read More