Mailchimp: Get The Monkey Off Your Back

We’ve been going bananas for over 8 years with MailChimp. More than 20k people are subscribed to what we call, the 11th best newsletter in the real estate industry. It’s Real Estate Industry & Product News, Trends, Tips and Expert Interviews viewed through our experienced data focused lens.

Mailchimp was pretty inexpensive, easy to use and best in class. It just worked. We consistently drove business with high ctr and views of our blog. However, times have changed and we find ourselves switching, and you should too.

BTW: Please subscribe / Opt in to our New Newsletter provider here.

Why We are Ditching Mailchimp

Alex Shakhov recommended to me that we ditch mailchimp. If you send emails at scale to your farm or soi and don’t know Alex, let me introduce you to the email whisperer. We recorded an interview here about email blacklists and the new $50k SEC email fines thats worth a view.

The Most Important Metric

I asked Alex how he values the different metrics and measurements: “All email engagement metrics are important, including open rate, click-through rate, delivery rate, reply rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam report rate. Among these, the spam report complaint rate is one of the most critical, as it has the greatest impact on email deliverability.

The industry benchmark for spam reports is 0.3%, meaning that if more than 3 recipients out of 10,000 manually mark your emails as spam, it negatively affects your domain reputation and email sending infrastructure. This degradation increases the likelihood of future emails being filtered into spam folders.” – Alex Shakhov: https://sh.company/

Alex Spills the Tea on Picking a New Provider

If you’ve already picked a provider, skip down to How To Invite your Audience.
Per Alex: “The first step is to evaluate the health of their email sending infrastructure and determine if the system allows for the purchase of a dedicated IP address. A dedicated IP helps isolate your email traffic from shared IPs, which are often associated with spammers, thereby improving the company’s overall email deliverability.

Next, review the DKIM policies supported by the email system. Check if it offers automated DKIM key management for enhanced security and whether it supports custom link branding domains. Both features are critical for large-scale senders, as they significantly impact email deliverability.” – Alex Shakhov https://sh.company/

How to Invite Your Audience

After you’ve picked a provider, you can not copy and paste your list from one service to another. Won’t work. To quote Jasmine, This is a whole new world. So here’s what’s recommended.

Your new newsletter and or mass email ought to have the same appeal of your content. Keep it similar to your vibe and on point with your style. Our style a bit old school, is never too serious, but always on point. Frequent readers know Im prone to include too many puns and dad jokes in our posts. But thats who I am – it’s authentic. Keep your invitation, and your content authentic and readers will reciprocate by not clicking the dreaded “spam” or “unsubscribe button”. Tell them what they are getting, and be clear about how often as a lack of clarity will scare folks away.

We chose to launch our updated newsletter with an invitation, embedded in this very post, immediately below this line. (clever, no?)

An Invitation: How To RE-Subscribe to The Revaluate Blog

You are formally invited via the interweb, to join the Revaluate Newsletter FREE subscription.
Because we are following new strict guidelines we need everyone (even if you were already subscribed) to re-subscribe to the Revaluate Blog here.

See? We practice what we preach. That must be why we won the award for 11th best newsletter in real estate…. You are opting in to receive the somewhat-sought-after 11th best newsletter in the real estate industry emails about twice a month.

See you on the flip side. Happy reading, and good luck with the monkey on your back.