This week we launched a monthly newsletter for the Art of Living Panama. It looks something like this:
After designing in Photoshop, I hand-coded it (most templates give me the shivers), and then we used MailChimp to send it out. If you’ve never used a CMS like MailChimp or Constant Contact, etc. for emailing, it’s incredible (albeit in a slightly Big Brother way) the kind of insight it can provide into your readers’ interests and behavior.
For one thing, you can see how many people bother to open it. Here’s a shot showing where they are, but you can just as easily see who specifically they are.
And of those people, how how many people click on the links within:
This is all very nice, but what really rocks my socks is ability to see what specific links are getting clicked on, and by whom:
Were you to click on any of those percentage bars shown above, you’d get a full report of who clicked on that link, how many times, and when they did it. Kinda amazing, right? You can see what’s getting people’s attention, follow-up more directly with the people who showed interest, and/or adapt future editions of the newsletter to provide more of that type of content.
It’s kinda scary, also, no? This is probably not news to anyone, but it seems as though there are spies not only crawling our facebook pages and google searches, but our inboxes, too.
Good thing I’ve got nothin’ to hide…. how about you? 
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