Is there anybody out there?

A little while ago I mentioned how impressed I was with the Mail Chimp service handling email newsletters. Those nice people at Mail Chimp were kind enough to send me a T-shirt for the mention - I had intended to include a picture of me modelling it, but #2 daughter snaffled it from desk and I don't know what she's done with it, so I've had to make do with a generic picture of it.

What I've been particularly fascinated with is the reporting that goes along with a mailing. Rather stupidly, given the number of newsletter type emails I don't bother to read, I had assumed that most would be opened - but no. As it stands, nearly a week after sending out a newsletter to the recipients from the Hymn CDs site, I find that just 34.7% have been opened.

In case you think this makes my newsletter unpopular, I ought to point out that, according to Mail Chimp, the industry average is 19.2% opens, so I'm doing pretty well. What isn't clear is just what 'opened' means. I look at most of these kind of emails in the preview window in Outlook without bothering to download any graphics. My suspicion is that this doesn't count as opening it.

My other impressive statistic is click rate - they industry average is 3.1%. Yep, after all that hard work, just 3.1% bother to click one of your links, but I'm up at 14.9%. What I particularly love in the Mail Chimp reporting is something called a click map. This shows you the percentage of clicks going to each link on the page - it's beautiful.

Just in case you're interested, this is the the newsletter I sent out... but I don't expect that link will get many clicks.

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