mailalytics

Mailalytics looks at subscriber engagement at three levels: per member, message frequency, and conversation (thread) length. These three metrics can provide a lot of useful insight. By looking at the number of people who only send new messages but never reply, we can see how many folks are sharing but not really discussing. By looking at the number of original (non-reply) messages versus replies, we can tell how much actual conversation is going on on the list (as opposed to “check this out” or “here’s a job posting”, etc). By looking at the total number of messages in a thread, it’ll give us some rough estimate of the quality of the conversation (generally, the better the convo, the more replies in it). By looking at the number of people who are only sending one message, versus the number who are sending five or more, we can see how many people are regularly active within the community versus those who may listen frequently but only participate on occasion.

Checkout this Case Study: Philly Startup Leaders Engagement Dashboard, based upon mailalytics results.

Of these three metrics, Cody was responsible for the functionality of member-level statistics and message frequency statistics. He was also responsible for DRYing the code and creating the basic library API and command-line scripts. (Cody loves data-driven business and enjoyed applying it to PSL itself.)