MailChimp ‘opened’ stats and MS Outlook reading pane - update

Not entirely sure why I didn't do this earlier but I asked MailChimp yesterday about a problem I blogged about a few months ago regarding their very useful 'opened' stats not taking into account Outlooks default reading pane. Here's their response.

Hi Stuart!

Thanks for posting that article. ;) I'm afraid there isn't anything we can do because this is an Outlook security setting that we don't have control over. Basically, Outlook doesn't like the fact that we send from different domains - so it won't remember who you are and just download the images. Other email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. will learn based on the reply to/from email and once you approve that the images can be downloaded, it will continue to do so for all newsletters.

You can read a bit more about this at http://eepurl.com/hcKv

Thank you,

Bob

MailChimp.com / Client Services

So, unfortunately it's a Microsoft issue that they can't do anything about. But I'm very impressed with MailChimp's customer support - so far I've tweeted, web chatted and emailed him and had very rapid responses in each case :)

MailChimp 'opened' stats and MS Outlook reading pane

I'd said in a previous post about MailChimp reports that I was a bit disappointed with a 25% open rate from our mailing list emails. However, Marta suspected that this was partly due to high numbers of users subscribing via their official University of Leicester email account which, common to many institutions, uses Microsoft Outlook. And the default setting for Outlook is for the reading pane to be on. This enables users to read an email without actually clicking on it to open it. Well, Marta and I tested it, and she was indeed correct - viewing a MailChimp email via the Outlook reading pane isn't recorded as an open in MailChimp reports. And given that more than 75% of our (now 4,000 strong) list use their .le.ac.uk address - I've come to the happy conclusion that our open rate is much better than I thought :)

I've got round the MailChimp problem

By Za3tOoOr!

You may have seen that I've been quite excited about MailChimp lately. My excitement subsided though after Vic pointed out last week that there was a problem with users subscribing from .le.ac.uk addresses. I hadn't noticed because the initial 3,500 subscribers (which I blogged about here) had come via a Plone form - and I simply imported the csv file into MailChimp. And because I was already included on this list via my .le.ac.uk address I tested the subsequent form with other addresses - hence missing the .le.ac.uk problem (school boy error).

I contacted our IT Services and they said that MailChimp wasn't blacklisted. I contacted MailChimp and they said that there must be some kind of filter which was blocking it. The answer in the end was to create a non .le.ac.uk address for the mail to be seen to be coming from so as to get through the spam filter which blocks messages that seem to be pretending to be from .le.ac.uk addresses but are coming from an external service. So I created a sdzhelpdesk@gmail address and set up an auto-forward on that to send all mail to sdzhelpdesk@le.ac.uk. I then made sdzhelpdesk@gmail the default "Reply-to" email in MailChimp and it works! Confirmations from .le.ac.uk address are now received and replies to messages are routed through gmail to .le.ac.uk.

I've tested it with three different people but if you would be willing to check for me (if you have a .le.ac.uk address) you can do so here. And as I said in my tweet, thanks to Matt, MailChimp and ITS for helping solve the problem. And to Vic for spotting it.

Now I can get on to the serious business of using it for student engagement.

MailChimp report

It's been just over a week since I sent my first MailChimp email to our distribution list of nearly 3,500. I blogged about it briefly but now that a week past since I sent it the report looks a bit more interesting.

Of the 3,456 messages sent 858 were opened, 136 bounced and 2,462 were unopened. To be honest I'm a bit disappointed about these figures - but they're pretty close to the industry average (apparently) and previously we didn't have any data on who had opened what so I'm going to use this as a base line.

What I'm more pleased about is the click rate.; 473 of the 848 who opened it clicked on a link - which suggest there was something of interest in it.

MailChimp even gives me a 'Click map' so I can see which links recipients clicked on. Very useful.

I also know from the report that the 848 people opened it a total of 1,285 times. 1,202 of the opens were from the UK, 47 from China, 4 from India and various single opens from other places.

Also, only 2 people unsubscribed. Which is good.

Now I need to decide what to do with all this lovely data. I've also figured out how to create subgroups within the list so we can differentiate on the basis of year of study (assuming people are happy to tell us this information). More on this later...

MailChimp mail delivered

Got in this morning to a confirmation email that my first MailChimp mail had been delivered. See below.

The reason there were 3,456 on the list rather than more than 3,500 (the figure I mentioned last week) is because when you upload a list the very clever little chimp notices duplicates. It also notices syntax errors so I was able to alter an address which was to @g,mail.com and and one which was @hotmail.,com. Very clever.

Now I need to wait and then check out the reports when more data has arrived. The report about 20 minutes after the delivery said as follows...

I’ve taken the plunge with MailChimp

Having mulled it over for a couple of days I've taken the plunge and become a fully paid up member of MailChimp. Having had more than 3,500 students sign up to our mailing list (yup, it surprised me too) I came to the conclusion that we couldn't manage such large numbers on an internal system. Doubtless I'll blog more about MailChimp when I've had more time to have test it, but just for now there are two features in particular that were clinchers for me.

1. It puts users in control - they can unsubscribe or update their profile at any time
2. It give email a social edge (no, really) by supporting Facebook page likes and adding sharing buttons

I thought I'd spotted a catch last night when I said thought they tied users in by not letting you export contact lists. I tweeted the thought and within two minutes I had a reply from MailChimp telling that I could export lists and with a link to the place telling me how. I was very impressed.

What I'm most concerned about now is what to say. Here's a link to a browser based draft and there's a screen shot of it below. If you have any comments on any aspect of the email (content, tone, style) then I'd be really grateful to hear them. I plan to send it tomorrow afternoon. Or maybe I should wait until Monday morning?

Mailing list managers

An update on the Good old fashioned email post - I've now had more than 3,000 people sign up to our mailing list. With that many people on the list I need a mailing list manager. Obviously I'd like to push more of them to our Facebook and Twitter accounts but as Marta said in the comments 'I guess we have to give them what they've signed up to'. They've asked for email. What I want to avoid though is having to reply to lots of emails - so we'll just use it as a channel to push information out - which is why I'd prefer it if they used social media because then the communication can be much more responsive. We can quickly reply to a tweet or a Facebook post and the one-to-many nature of social media means that everybody else can benefit from the answer. With email it's one-to-one and there's no way we're spending time responding to 3,000 questions, many of them probably similar.

So, does anyone know anything about mailing list managers? I think I need to learn about them quickly. We can't use our University CFS system for mailing to such large numbers easily because there's a limit of 1,000 people per email. Also, if we're going to use email then I want people to be able to unsubscribe easily should they want to, again, there's no easy way of doing this with CFS. A good mailing list manager should also give us several other useful features, including easy delivery, tracking and groups that support preferences.

I've heard of MailChimp and it looks good but we'd need to pay for it ($50 a month) because the free accounts are only for up to 1,000 addresses. It also has the potential to integrate with Facebook and Twitter.

Becka told me that they use Majordomo at Bradford. It describes itself as "a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintenance. "

I've also stumbled across Mailman whic says "Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more."

I'm desperately in need of some advice from this from people who have used such things...

Good old fashioned email

I've thought a lot about how we publicise our services in the last 12 months (for instance a couple of posts tagged publicity and all the Facebook stuff). I've thought about our website, social media, digital signage, email newsletters and print. All with a view to engaging students in what we do. More recently we've summarised our diverse range of services in some simple statements (I blogged about the first draft of those here), which have helped both staff as well as students understand more what we do and how it fits together. They're as follows:

• Succeed in your studies
• Gain experience
• Develop your career

Incrementally we are getting more engagement, evidenced in part by the number of 'Likes' on our Facebook page (but I'm trying to get beyond likes). We've also been running a Student Development roadshow this week to get out and about on campus to tell students (and possibly staff) about what we do. In spite of all this activity I was still suspicious when I got in this morning to find more 1,800 emails in my roadshow signup subfolder. I asked on Twitter if anyone knew why it might be (I'd suspected David might have popped something up on the Students' Union Facebook page) but in the end I found out it was via a good old fashioned email from Paul Jackson, our Director (see below). It went to all students and we now have more than 2,300 responses since 17:46 yesterday (more than 500 of which were since having made the form University of Leicester login only).

So I've been musing about why this worked so well. I think there are a number of factors:

• timing - I suspect people are more responsive to this kind of thing at the beginning of the academic year (especially freshers?)
• tone - I think Paul struck a good tone in the email - supportive and friendly
• simplicity - the email only asked students to do one thing 'click the link to receive important information'
• clarity - I also think that the 'succeed in your studies, gain experience, develop your career' thing is nice and clear
• incentive - there's a chance to win a £50 iTunes voucher if you sign up (as a University of Leicester student) - but I'd be surprised if that made a big difference

Now I need to do make sure that we capitalise on this initial interest. I also need to think about how to manage such big numbers. I'm certainly going to encourage people towards our Facebook and Twitter accounts, but maybe students just like good old fashioned email. I thought that was for old people.