MailChimp Announces New Big Data Service: Wavelength And Omnivore

With over 2 million subscribers all over the globe, boasting of 3.2 billion messages being sent on a monthly basis, MailChimp is unequivocally considered as one of the largest and most influential email marketing service providers, with clients that range from large enterprises to SMEs and even one-man basement marketers.

Against the many talks about email marketing being an endangered service, MailChimp has proven the exact opposite. It has been able to grow their company and contribute to the strengthening of email as a marketing tool.

When MailChimp adopted a freemium model (basically, a sliding scale of services that range from free to paid, and everything in between – including free plans with services and features that can be purchased on an as needed basis) back in 2009, they managed to increase the number of their paying clients by 150%, while also growing their profitability by 650% in the first year alone. The rapid growth has put the company in the enviable state of having enough email data to participate in improving the email ecosystem via the EmailGenome project, which leverages big data in order to propose or implement changes that will help streamline and further improve the industry. They currently have a couple of big data-related projects under the Email Genome project, such as:

Wavelength

Wavelength is a new service that can best be described as a feature that will help users find similar newsletter publishers that they can partner with. It’s particularly useful for those looking to grow their lists and increase their reach. It used to be difficult in the past as businesses and publishers find it difficult to find like-minded publishers manually. Wavelength makes it easier by using the wealth of data that Mailchimp receives and analyzes on a regular basis.

Wavelength works by automatically analyzing selected MailChimp email lists, then locating similar newsletters from MailChimp’s database of over 2 million users and 2 billion subscribers. It will then display screenshots of some of the similar users’ recent newsletters (while withholding private information such as actual email addresses), which a MailChimp user can then use in order to decide if partnering with said publisher will be beneficial.

Omnivore

Omnivore sort of works as a defensive mechanism for MailChimp – it gorges on all the data the service has collected, and uses it to predict and separate the good and the bad senders. The AI it uses is very powerful, and knows how to crunch through over 10 years’ worth of MailChimp data, which is generated at a rate of over 4 billion email address interactions per month. It is essentially an automated abuse detection feature, which will help them weed out the bad apples and ensure their resources and attention are only devoted to users that deserve them. Omnivore works in tandem with another feature called Unfurlr, which helps uncover URLs and identify risky destinations.