Tip: Always Schedule For Later
Dan's our customer service guy. Needless to say, he's seen a lot of customers make "oopsies" with their campaigns. Many of them call us up to ask if it's too late to cancel a campaign they just sent. So here's a quick tip from Dan. Let's say you're sending an email campaign to your list of subscribers. When you're all done, and you get to the final step, you have the option to "Send it now" or to "Schedule it for later." Even if you know that your campaign is ready to go right now, Dan's tip is to schedule it for 15 or 30 minutes later anyway. Because after you click that send button, you always realize you forgot something. This way, you have a little time to go back and make your last minute edits.

Inbox Inspector Improvements
As you may recall, we launched our new Inbox Inspector in April. It's saved a lot of people a lot of time, and even changed what we thought we knew about "spammy keywords." Anyway, the company we partnered with (ReturnPath) to provide the Inbox Inspector has just announced that they'll be adding even more screens to our reports. You'll soon be able to see your campaigns rendered inside the "Preview panes" of most email programs (not just in "full screen" view). If you have no idea what a preview pane is, and how they affect your email designs, learn about them here. ReturnPath has also added "Images off by default" previews to some of the email programs. They say it'll be available to us later this month. We'll keep you updated. If you haven't looked at the Inbox Inspector yet, here are screenshots and details. It can be found under your "Account" tab, then click the "Add-ons" link.

The partnership with ReturnPath has been great. They've been fascinated by how much we've integrated their service so tightly into the MailChimp interface (hey, we're freaks when it come to our interface), and their engineers have been working closely with our resident uber-nerd (Mark Armstrong) to make their API even better-er. We're very excited about some of the upcoming enhancements they told us about. If you haven't tried the new Inbox Inspector yet, learn more about it here.

New Feedback Loop Reports
We're proud to announce that MailChimp has been added to yet another (very) major ISP's feedback loop system (see: what's a feedback loop?). Only problem is, we can't tell you which ISP. Because on the record, this ISP doesn't have a feedback loop (ssshhhh, keep it on the down low). It's still in beta, and the last thing they need is for a bunch of other ESPs knocking on their door, asking to be added. But off the record, we've been communicating with them for months, and recently met with some members of their team to convince them to add MailChimp. Just one more way we're working to protect the deliverability of your campaigns!

Anyway, in your MailChimp campaign report, look under "Abuse complaints." That's where you'll see all the emails that reported your campaign as junk, or spam. Any recipients who are under this ISP will be listed as "Email not available." But rest assured, they've been removed from your list (like all the others) to prevent further complaints.
Other FBLs that we're part of.

Are your campaigns getting abuse complaints? How many are too many? Some major ISPs say that 1 per thousand is about as high as you ever want to go. We've seen 1 complaint result in a blacklisting for one of our customers (mainly because their campaign also failed to include the company's mailing address). Here are some abuse complaint averages from other MailChimp users.

Authorize.Net Announcement
One of the biggest e-commerce vendors out there, Authorize.Net, will soon be adding MailChimp to their new Merchant Toolbox. We're pretty excited about this. Not just because MailChimp will be introduced to their 150,000-plus customers. This is meaningful for us because in the old days, when we first launched MailChimp, we used a very, very crappy e-commerce company to process our credit card orders. It was unbelievably bad, and their customer service was even worse. I'll never forget how they grouped their form fields in such a way that American Express numbers (longer than Visa and MasterCard) never worked properly. You had to break up your card numbers and enter them all weird to place an order in MailChimp. Why couldn't they just make it one single text field for Pete's sake? It took them a year to address that problem. So we switched to Authorize.Net, and have never had any problems since. They're a great company, with great customer support, and we're proud they picked the 'chimp.

Tip: Your Welcome Email
I feel like such an idiot. I do the email marketing here at MailChimp, so I'm supposed to be kind of a role model for our customers. I was the guy who setup the double opt-in process for our MonkeyWrench Newsletter, but I totally neglected our "Welcome Email." Stupid. stupid, stupid. See, we always recommend that people include more than just a simple "welcome" message in your Welcome Email. You can put a link to your newsletter archive there, so that new subscribers can read your most recent campaigns (learn how). Or you can include a special promo code (check out this example from MailChimp user RealTrucks.com) for someone's next online order. Or maybe even link to a secret whitepaper "for subscribers only." You should make your welcome email fun and engaging, because your subscriber is obviously interested in you (she just double opted-in, for Pete's sake), and this is your last chance to make a first impression. We used the example from RealTrucks as inspiration to revamp our own welcome email. Then, we tested it in our Inbox Inspector tool to make sure it wouldn't get blocked by spam filters. Here's the case study...

Bounceback Weirdness
Some of you may have noticed that bouncebacks have been behaving erratically in MailChimp (it all started around February/March). You'd send an email campaign to 100 people, then see 300 bouncebacks. Don't worry, we didn't send your email 3 times. And you can rest assured that we are properly cleaning your lists of bounces. It's just that the bounce stats have been kooky. What gives? We've got more people than we thought we would right now. It's a good problem to have, but we didn't think this would happen till at least June/July-ish. People were basically sending emails (and getting bounces) faster than our little bounce reader script could handle. We started to fix this problem in late March, but it was taking weeks to re-process all the old bouncebacks that had piled up. And then a hard drive started to fail on us. Sigh. We replaced the hard drive, then we got tons more customers, who sent even more emails, bogging down the bounce reader more. Good grief. So we finally just bought a new (super fast) server and added that to the data center. We also re-programmed our bounceback reader to process bounces way more efficiently (our server load is five times less now). Special thanks go out to the geniuses over at Rackspace for helping us with the server situation, and even with some programming. They do indeed have some fanatical customer service over there. We shouldn't be seeing anymore bounceback weirdness. We've gone back and retroactively fixed your old campaign stats, too. If you still see any weird bounce (or abuse report) stats that you think are wrong, we might have overlooked your account in all the madness. Just click the "Live Chat" button in MailChimp, and we can fix it pretty quick for you.