Laura Atkins posted over on her blog about how Yahoo has chosen to stop offering preferred delivery to Goodmail certified email. She says:

“Quite frankly, I am unsurprised by this. My impression of Goodmail has always been they never really understood the role of a certifying agency. For any certifying agency to be successful, they must continually monitor certified customers and enforce standards. Goodmail’s initial certification process was fine, but they never seemed to follow through on the monitoring and enforcement.”

Did you catch that part about "monitoring and enforcement"? That's really hard stuff to do. ESPs (like MailChimp) have a similar obligation to monitor users, in order to protect our deliverability. More on that...

Timewarp and Geo Targeting
Our MailChimp v5 launch got a write up on Mashable a couple weeks ago. In case you missed it, there are some super awesome features included, like:

• TimeWarp: The ability to schedule a campaign to send at a specific time, based on each recipient's time zone
• Geo-Targeting: We automagically track your subscriber geodata, so you can send targeted campaigns by location.
• Delivery Doctor: Our Inbox Inspector tool can tell you if your email will have delivery problems before you send it. The Delivery Doctor can tell you why.

 
Why'd My Open Rates Drop?
By now, we all know what our average open and click rates are and how they compare to others in your industry, right? If not, check out this article, or just bookmark ChimpCharts.

So what do you do if you discover that suddenly, your rates just dropped dramatically?

Here's an article on how to use your MailChimp stats to troubleshoot strange anomolies and phenomena in your email performance.


How I Use Flowtown
Have you ever heard of Flowtown? It's an interesting social network service that lets you enter someone's email address, then get back a lot of their public profile information. Whether they're on twitter, their age, gender, location, etc. They've actually integrated with MailChimp, via our API, so that you can segment your list on demographic information.
Here's how I use it (it's probably not what you think)


 Hope you found this issue useful.

Sincerely,

Ben ("can't dance") Chestnut