Stats from VIP ARC Reader Group Recruiting Emails Mailchimp vs Elastic Email
Below are some of the results I received while attempting to recruit VIP ARC Readers/Street Team members. I sent out emails to my list of approximately 4,000 members which is divided between MailChimp and Elastic Email. In order to sign up they had to complete a google form with a few questions and join a closed Facebook group. Overall commitment has been good with 83 people joining the VIP team.
MailChimp
The MailChimp results were pretty good. An initial email to 1,945 subscribers had a 46.1% open rate and 14.4% click through rate. Below shows that about 95 or 4.9% unsubscribed.
I then sent it again to those who didn’t open the first email (1,163 subscribers) and received a 23.2% open rate 8.3% click rate, and 1.1% unsubscribe rate. I also used some A/B testing and tweaked the email subject. Overall I was pretty happy with these results.
Elastic Email
I essentially did the same thing through Elastic Email but got some very different results. First I sent to a smaller section of my subscribers:
As you can see this was 694 subscribers of which only 10.3% opened, 3.28% clicked, 1.35% unsubscribed, and an amazing 0.43% reported a spam complaint. Until this point I have had either none or maybe one spam complaint so this was a shock.
I then sent to a different 553 under elastic email using a few different subjects in A/B testing:
This had an even lower open rate of 6.35%, 2.72% clicked, 0.54% unsubscribed and another 0.18% spam complaint. I sent a third time to the remaining portion in Elastic Email:
This was again A/B testing, this time to a different 679 which resulted in 9.73% opening, 2.10% clicking, 0.75% unsubscribing and ANOTHER spam complaint 0.15%.
At this point Elastic Email paused my account due to spam complaints until I filled out a form. I was shocked at these numbers as the subscribers from MailChimp and Elastic Email are essentially the same mixed source.
My only natural conclusion is that Elastic Email has a MUCH LOWER open rate, click through rate, and MUCH HIGHER spam complaint rate. Perhaps this is faulty logic as several people have pointed out, but it certainly feels that way and I am now monitoring the differences VERY closely.
Update! I also tested with Benchmark email and got much better results than with Elastic Email:
With Benchmark I sent to 1,714 subscribers, had a 28.2% open rate, 19.2% click through rate, and 3.6% unsubscribe rate with no spam reports. My real only problem with Benchmark is that they do not allow segmenting unless you upgrade to a paid account.