
Mailgun Campaign Analytics: taking analytics beyond bulk email - twakefield
http://blog.mailgun.net/post/18581472770/mailgun-campaign-analytics-taking-analytics-beyond
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old-gregg
Co-founder of Mailgun here. One of the triggers behind this kind of analytics
came from the excellent blog post by Paul Stamatiou
([http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-
em...](http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-email)) which
highlighted the importance of detailed analytics for _all_ types of emails you
do, not just "weekly newsletters".

Additionally, we discovered that most of our users _also_ use traditional
email marketing companies, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone.

This new product we've launched basically allows you, the developer, to become
your own Mailchimp over the weekend at a fraction of the cost. And slice/dice
your email traffic with arbitrary granularity, down to individual message
level.

~~~
joshkaufman
This looks great - I'm sold.

Question: what's the easiest way to send drip content via Mailgun? I'm putting
together a few apps that rely on email, and I couldn't find drip email
information in your docs.

Are there built-in features to make drip mails easy, or do I need to code a
message sequence + cron job myself?

~~~
twakefield
We don't get involved with your application logic for when to send emails. We
just make it very easy to send and track them programmatically.

Edit: For example: you can create and destroy mailing lists programmatically,
send emails without worrying about MIME, set a specific delivery time for your
emails based on when users are most likely to click on them, access analytics
through API, etc.

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elb0w
Mailgun is probably my favorite service. I have never had a problem using
them. Any perl devs that want to use it I started a wrapper here
<https://github.com/gtsafas/mailgun.perl> . Havent had a chance to really
finalize it yet but feel free to fork, its just using LWP::UserAgent.

But then again their api is so simple its almost not needed

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aepstein
We've been using Mailgun for the last couple months at COLOURlovers to manage
and analyze our weekly newsletter campaigns (400k+/week) and handle our
transactional email. Easily worth every penny, and the support from Taylor and
Ev has been fantastic.

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rokhayakebe
I am a free user of Mailgun who emailed the team about a feature request. It
was a Sunday. They responded immediately. Again,it was a Sunday. 36 hours
later, they emailed again; the feature was LIVE. Oh. Needless to say I am
gladly turning into a paying user in a few days.

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simonw
Wow, this looks fantastic. Can't wait to try it out.

(We've been using MailGun successfully for over a year now to send all of our
outgoing email for Lanyrd - hasn't caused us a single problem)

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ary
I've been looking at Mailgun for an upcoming project, and I must say "bravo"
on the new website design.

~~~
eberfreitas
I was just going to say the same. I'm very happy with the new design :) I just
wish the admin panel did get the same attention, but it is great anyway!
Congrats!

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riobard
Mailgun is a really great service for us at Zhihu.com. We switched away from
Amazon SES to Mailgun for sending weekly newsletters three months ago and got
amazing improvement in deliverability. The API is much simpler and well
designed. No more XML parsing with SES!

A few days ago we moved our transactional notification mails from Postmark to
Mailgun, and we are very pleased with the result. Given our volume, Mailgun's
price is significantly lower than Postmark's ($0.10 vs $1.50 per thousand),
and we don't have to deal with many issues we had with Postmark.

Ev and the whole team are fantastic at support!

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nicksergeant
Just a quick pet peeve. Your Twitter link text in the header says "@mailgun"
but your twitter username is "@mail_gun".

:)

~~~
twakefield
Ugh, I know. We've been trying to get @mailgun but Twitter's policies don't
make it easy (not saying they're right or wrong).

~~~
nicksergeant
Yeah, bummer. At the very least, you should just update the link text (I just
slapped "mailgun" into Twitter for Mac and couldn't find you).

~~~
twakefield
Oh, yeah. Thanks for the catch. Will do.

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zaph0d
We have been using Mailgun at our startup for a month now and to say that I am
very satisfied with Mailgun would be an understatement. Mailgun rocks and I
would highly recommend it for any startup.

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malachismith
We're huge Mailgun fans at AppFog and LOVE the new analytics!! Nice work.

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shykes
Mailgun rocks. We use it at dotCloud and it has never failed us.

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webbruce
The pricing plan is very confusing, definitely should simplify that. Maybe use
something like heroku pricing page

~~~
epoxyhockey
I agree. It took me an uncomfortably long time to figure out that the cheapest
plan was on the _right_ side and got more expensive on the left.

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jules
How do you determine "unique opens"? How do you determine the links clicked
on? Do you send them to your servers first and then redirect to the actual
url?

~~~
twakefield
Yes, exactly. You set up a CNAME record that points to us, which is one of the
DNS records in your Mailgun control panel.

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AznHisoka
I need user acquisition as a service before I can worry about user retention
as a service. Got something for that?

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Porter_423
Truly informative.For the last couple of days I was looking for a flexible
mail analytic product.It sounds good.The fact that I like most in mail gun is
that it will give a time line of the events of the day when recipients are
interacting with my email.

