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!
