Quick Query: MailChimp CEO on Email Strategy

Many ecommerce merchants rely on email newsletters to drive sales, but the success of those campaigns varies. There are frequently issues related to open rates, click-throughs, and even deliverability. To offer insight and suggestions on these issues, we spoke with Ben Chestnut, co-founder of MailChimp, an email marketing firm located in Atlanta with more than 60,000 clients.

Practical Ecommerce: Can you tell us the range of ecommerce open rates you have observed over the past few months?

Ben Chestnut

Ben Chestnut: If it’s their first campaign with MailChimp, we usually get around 50-60 percent open rates. Then, as they get into some monthly sending, you’ll start to see that plateau around 20 percent and, after a few years, close to 10-15 percent.

PEC: What about click-through rates for ecommerce merchants?

Chestnut: We typically see around a 5 percent click-through rate. [Five percent of subscribers click through the newsletter to the merchant’s site.] If you go to MailChimp Charts, you can see updated typical open rates, click-through rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and new complaints, all broken down by industry.

PEC: What errors do you see ecommerce merchants making that affect open and click-through rates?

Chestnut: Often, they’re initially sending to an old list, which can generate quite a lot of bounce backs and spam complaints, which can hurt their reputation. Any email addresses older than a year must be cleaned out before sending the first email.

PEC: What about merchants that have been sending email newsletters for years? Would you recommend that those merchants clean out email addresses?

Chestnut: With open rates, you never know if they are opening or not because they are not that accurate. You could be cleaning out people who are opening. If it’s really important to you, you could do it by clicks, but many people view your emails and never click. So, I guess I would not suggest those email addresses.

PEC: Any strategies for livening up a tired list?

Chestnut: Take a step back and examine what you’re sending. Are you sending too much? Are you not changing it up enough? You can single them out and try sending them promotions. You can also look into giveaways, sending good white papers, or something useful.

PEC: Could you explain third-party certification programs and whether you think they can help with deliverability?

Chestnut: Third-party certification involves paying a fee based on the number of emails you send per year. If you become certified, your emails will be marked as coming from a trusted sender, and many spam filters will let those emails through. If you’re a legitimate email sender and make money from emails, I think third-party certification is worth looking into.

PEC: If a sender does everything right, will a certification company get its emails through Internet service providers that it can’t otherwise get through?

Chestnut: If they do everything perfectly, they can get through. But it’s not just getting past spam filters; certification can allow images to be turned on by default and videos to be enabled.

PEC: Anything else on your mind for ecommerce merchants as it relates to email?

Chestnut: They need to run lots of A/B tests. Test two subject lines, test delivery dates, and what time of day works best. They should experiment with every campaign they send.