eNewsletter Takes Off

I've worked, over the past few months, on rebooting the company email campaign. Prior to the reboot, we were sending out too many emails and not enough meaningful content. Our members were losing faith in our product and no longer wanted to hear what we were saying. The restructure planned followed two main philosophies:

1. provide content - give readers a reason to read. while we wanted to keep pushing our products, we needed to give them a reason to interact with us as well.

2. be reliable - establish a time frame of when emails go out and plan ahead to make sure there's enough time/opportunity to publicize all events.

3. follow through - make sure that we're doing the things that we tell people we're going to do. give our audience a reason to believe in our 'product' again.

So far things have worked out great. The first email went off on time and we saw a great return: 17% open rate and 29%(!) ctr. That's a huge jump from where we'd been in the past and from what I can tell, some pretty solid number as email marketing goes.

Take two. Our second email went out as planned but hasn't had the same response. This time we only had 13% opens and 17% ctr. How to account for the big change? The email went out three hours later than the last one. There weren't as many links. The bulk of the content was different, though some was the same. Would all those factors decrease the numbers that much?

It's all trial and error with a new campaign. We'll play with the details a bit before next month's edition and see where that puts us. Hopefully after 6 or so we should have a more solid sense of what our readers want to get, when they want to get it, and what will make them read on.

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists day.

For the past few days, I’ve been working with list rental services, collecting quotes, choosing demographics, and signing forms, to make sure that we have 200,000 names ready at the mail house when our big mail piece is (finally) ready to go. I’ve run into a number of problems in doing this: 1. it’s taken nearly a week to come to a consensus on what types of names we want to purchase and how much we’re willing spend on them; 2. we’re not willing to spend much, which means taking a lot of time getting quotes and then declining the offers; 3. we need more free lists (my job) though the time to arrange trades for them is dwindling.

Decisions were finally made yesterday – yea! – so by the end of today all should be in order to be done by deadline. My organizationally inclined brain is pleased as the constant back-and-forth of the past week had been getting a bit frustrating and being the representative voice of indecision to the various list companies was making me look like I don’t have it together, which I hate.

Today I work on the in house mailing list. A list, which, despite having a few thousand bad entries, is not entirely disorganized. It shouldn’t take too much clean-up to get it ready for the mail house and the task, should give me a pretty mindless, relaxing morning.

A few things I’ve learned while working on collecting mailing lists:

- List services generally need a week to process an order, but can often do it quicker.

- Mailing lists are (usually) cheaper than email lists.

- When selecting demographics of a list “AND” is the assumed conjunction – creating a highly specified list. Specify “OR” if you want a collection of all the selected demographics.

- Lists can be marked by the mail house, showing you which lists are most effective in generating a return.

- List generally cost between 10 and 25 cents per name, with a minimum amount per order.