fanseed

I send out ~40k emails every morning through mailchimp to our subscribers and for the past three years or so have fairly regularly gotten low 40's% open rates every weekday. Then last Wednesday, it dropped to low 30's. Our format hasn't changed, our content hasn't changed. Mailchimp doesn't see anything wrong. We can't figure out what might have caused the drop. (Did anything happen that I don't know about in Mailchimp, gmail, etc?)

We never authenticated our domain (so our sender shows as 'via' mailchimps servers) and I think perhaps that's the next step to take. I'm worried about our open rates/deliverability taking a huge dip since our domain isn't 'warmed up' with sending that many emails out every day. Does that happen? Anything I need to do or anything else I should think about?

I can't figure out the math behind all of these smallish marketing agencies. In my city there are at least a dozen of them; 10-20 employees, very nice offices, they typically have one or two Fortune 1000 clients, some smaller clients, and a few local clients. They seem to launch one or maybe two projects a month. Projects are usually some mix of creative video and photography, a microsite, social media creative, digial ad creative and buys, content, "brand strategy", etc.

It seems most of them would need to bring in at least $100k/month to break even. Are the deals that big? Anyone have examples of number breakdowns for these types of deals?

I was watching the network logs as I logged into my credit union and saw that they attempt to request favicons from lots of third parties including dropbox, accounts.google.com, stackoverflow.com, squareup.com, instagram.com, skype.com, tumblr.com, expedia.de, pinterest.com, de.foursquare.com, eu.battle.net, store.steampowered.com, reddit.com.

The favicons are usually loaded from the login page of the service, so I'm guessing they are doing that old trick to see if the browser is logged into those services by requesting the favicon.

I emailed them about this and after two months all they said is that it's part of their security software checks and not from anything suspicious.

Do they do this to create a 'social media fingerprint' of me as an additional check? Even though a few of the services are the German versions (credit union is in the US) and a few have fixed this so that it doesn't work anymore. It just seems strange and excessive.