Mailgun Campaign Analytics: taking analytics beyond bulk email | Hacker News Reader

Mailgun Campaign Analytics: taking analytics beyond bulk email

blog.mailgun.net

139 pointstwakefield29 comments

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...) 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.

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?

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.

Corey from Custora here (http://www.custora.com) - if you're interested, we provide online retailers with an interface to manage lifecycle/drip messaging. We integrate with Mailgun, as well - and are very psyched for the new API features!

I often get asked by clients I get to use mailgun if you have any interfaces like YMLP does for managing lists / generating programmatic email templates. I know we can implement this on our end but do you have any plans to build something like this?

We have a mailing lists API[1] and working on templates now. Send us an email if you want to be in the templates beta program.

[1] http://documentation.mailgun.net/api-mailinglists.html

old-gregg, I find your pricing page a little confusing. e.g. does Express ($59) include 118K emails a month in the price and then $.5/1k extra for overage or is the $59 just a base platform cost and then even the initial 1k is charged $.5?

I find the sendgrid "credits" term doesn't have that ambiguity. e.g http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html

The $59 monthly minimum includes the 118k emails in your example.

You are charged the per message rate, subject to the monthly minimum amount.

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

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.

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.

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)

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

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!

thank you for the kind words!

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!

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

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).

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).

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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