OK, I finally moved to a better platform for my newsletters. I was using PHPList, but was getting very annoyed with it as it took forever to send out emails and I had no idea if people were reading them! My webhost server only allows 350 mails to be sent an hour and with PHPList sending needed browser refreshes (a bug I think) which meant it would actually take me about a day to send to my list!
So I moved to MailChimp, as suggested by +Mat Bennett, and sent out my first email last night.
So far today (it has been almost 25 hours) 10.1% of people have opened it. This is about half the industry average (according to MailChimp).
Better news is that 4.2% of people followed a link to the site, which more than the 3.4% industry average. So I must have done something right.
But I was wondering, how long do people leave it before deciding that if anyone is going to open an email, they would have done it already? Is 24 hours about right, or do some people open emails days / weeks after? I guess it depends how many mails they get each day.
So far just set up a basic sign up form. Hopefully this will get more people signing up though.
What I really like is that it records failed deliveries and deletes the emails. This is very handy. My list is a couple / few years old and I had no idea if people are receiving mails or not. Only 78 have failed, which I think is pretty good considering.
I was going to post this on Google+ but decided to blog it here. These social media sites keep trying to trick us into writing for them instead of us!
I believe you missed reading some info about the “open mail” report.
MailChimp inserts a tiny dummy image (standard industry practice) into your email. If the recipient opens your email and allows images then that tiny image sends a request to MailChimp and they report the mail as opened. If your recipient doesn’t allow images by default, doesn’t choose to have them opened or does not choose to accept html mail, that call to the MailChimp server will never occur. Since more and more mail clients encourage users to, by default, not load images, the open-mail report is not very reliable.
At Plumplucker.com we were getting 40% openings, when we knew we were getting 90%
Were you usung PHPList on a shared host or a dedicated server/VPS
No. Well, a reseller account. But a good one, i.e. one that is well managed to ensure that the servers are not put under too much pressure.
The only reason it took a long time to send mails was because of an email limit on my account. Using a 3rd party gets rid of that limit, to some extent. I had to run PHPList for about 6 hours to get through all the mails without going over my hourly limit.
I am assuming that with A FULLY MANAGED VPS you would not have email limits.
If you have the whole box then I guess there should be no limit to what you can do, but if you share any resources then there would be limits, I guess.