There are 30 people who subscribe to my blog by email (what, hold on, I can subscribe by email!? – sign up here). They all receive a daily digest, at 5:00 a.m. Atlantic Time, of the posts from the previous 24 hours.

Many of my subscribers are obviously early risers, as when I receive emailed comments from them they have “sent” times like 5:43 a.m. or 6:08 a.m. When do they sleep?

I set this up when I stopped pushing notifications of new posts to Facebook and Twitter. Because this.

I use MailChimp, which is free, to do all the heavy lifting: I just point MailChimp at my site’s RSS feed, and it does everything else (this is not a paid endorsement; I just like using MailChimp).

MailChimp provides me with statistics.

I’ve been doing this for 11 months.

Over that time the list of subscribers–MailChimp calls this “the audiance”–has almost doubled in size from 17 to 30:

Over the last 45 days, 53.7% of subscribers have opened the daily email on average, and the average “click rate” (where someone clicks on at least one link in the daily email) is 8.9%. This fluctuates from day to day, but is fairly consistent:

That “open rate” is about twice the MailChimp average, but, then again, I’m not trying to sell anyone a blender.

About 60% of my subscribers read their email on a computer, and 40% on a mobile device.

Of the desktop email readers, half are using Gmail to read their mail.

Of the mobile email readers, a quarter are using iPhones, 7% are using Android phones, and 4% are using a BlackBerry.

Half of the subscribers are in the U.S.A., 46% are in Canada, and the rest are elsewhere.

If you want to enjoy all the benefits¹ of a ruk.ca email subscription, sign up now!

1. There are no benefits. Other than receiving a daily email.