At the start of June, I began collecting email newsletters together to collect information from them. My main interest was in finding answers such as the most common day and time for sending email newsletters, how many links and images do businesses include in their newsletters?

So far, I have collected over 300 emails newsletters from over 50 sources with an average of 9 new email newsletters coming in per day. A summary of all the information collected is on the email newsletter information page.

At first, I wrote a simple PHP script to gather together the information and show it on the page. After receiving a few dozen large newsletters the script began timing out as it took too long for the information to be worked out and displayed. I rewrote the system for collecting the newsletter information and displaying it using CodeIgniter, a PHP framework using the MVC approach.

I used CodeIgniters Active Record class in a Model to retrieve and calculate the summary information to display in a View. Its performance is amazing, the same information that originally took too long to display, resulting in a time-out now displays in a second or more, without Caching. CodeIgniter has fantastic performance.

If you are developing any apps using PHP, I highly recommend taking a look at CodeIgniter, there is a fantastic User guide, Wiki and forum.

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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