Murmurs

One of the ideas I had for my own software offerings was to create a email newsletter testing or validation service. A service which would allow people to send a copy of their email newsletter to a specific email address and receive a reply showing how their email newsletter worked in several of the popular email clients and desktop apps.

I did a little searching using Google for email newsletter testing / validation and I didn’t find anything similar to what I was aiming to develop. It seemed to be a promising idea.

Unfortunately, a couple of days later while searching for email statistics, I came across litmusapp.com which offers browser testing and email testing too.

Its a great service, I’ve signed up to their free account to see how well it works. The free offering tests a newsletter in Outlook 2003 and Gmail. The paid accounts offer a lot more.

You can send your email to a specific address and in a few seconds you get a reply. You can view your newsletter in Outlook and Gmail and also view how your newsletter looks by default, in text mode or html mode.

Its a great service, if you’re sending out newsletters I highly recommend it.

There is a heavy emphasis placed on market research on the Genesis Enterprise programme and rightly so. I am developing software relating to email marketing and for this I am currently learning everything I can about email marketing, software applications, competitors, usages stats, support, trends etc.

I want to learn what other businesses are doing with their newsletters, do businesses include a lot of images or links in their newsletter? how often do they send their newsletters? Are there particular days or times that are more suitable for sending out an email marketing campaign?

As I talk to more people and read any material on email marketing, I wanted to get some information directly from newsletters too. I’ve signed up to dozens of newsletters ( and continue to do so if you know of any good ones?). Thank you to those on Twitter that recommended a few over the past few days.

I’ve written an application to analyse these email newsletters that I receive. The app is online, checking for new emails every day and updating its summary information, its open for all to see, email newsletter statistics.

The information thats visible so far might be a little top heavy, a lot of the information reflects the date and time I signed up to a newsletter. As I sign up for new newsletters I expect the information to even out over the coming days and weeks.

The information on the left is summary information showing averages from all emails received over the past 30 days. On the right it shows some information from the latest 10 emails received. The lines are coloured according to the recipient so I can see if there are particular prolific email senders each day.

I will be adding more information over the next few days such as average size of emails, popular words or phrases seen in emails, how many emails include some unsubscribe links and some other information I’d like to see. One piece of information Im looking forward to seeing is the average time between sending for an organisation.

Hopefully this information will be of use to others too.

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