Rented Email Lists - vs Renting Newsletter space

We've been preaching organic growth since we began email marketing, way back in the last century!

This lead us to the realisation that a newsletter that talks about more than just how great we are would be more interesting, more valuable, more useful to the recipient... and in turn, they are more likely to take a quick look, see WIIFThem.

 
We tend to assume we know what an email is going to tell us... if it's from WeAreGreat.com then if the first and second emails major on the owners, the third - three hundredth emails will probably go unread and added to the spam filter rather than unsubscribed... and when you hear about them 2 years later you'll assume they are still being great when they may have moved on to being happy!

One of our regular clients used our email system to send a message to a list they'd bought in. He did a spot of DIY, grabbing a web page and sending it out to over 14,000 schools... guess how many opened it... about 2000... and the real measure for success (for me), how many actually wanted to know more and clicked through? Less than 20!!!

He was gutted... I wasn't surprised and explained that why should they open it... had you made contact before... how many people do you think the list has been sold to... etc.

His own newsletter get around a 4% click through... not fantastic but realistic for his market where customers may buy once every couple of years. Many of his key accounts comment on the newsletter... so they may be too busy to click but are happy to be kept in touch.

As part of our www.businessinberkshire.co.uk newsletter, a recent article we published for him around the World Cup saw 23 people click through... the story was 12 in the stack and the most popular story had 40 people click on it.

Our target is to get 25% of those that open the email to click on an average of 2 links... And to get 20 links to achieve at least 10 click throughs.

Yes you can achieve 100% click through if you send 10 emails to 10 people who are ready to buy PS3... but we tend to live in the real world.

When your dealing with a community email / website then the reality is not just the email distribution... it's the traffic it picks up due to the volume of content and other factors that will make it attractive the search engines... the chances are it has not grown up over night... lots of hard work, sweat and tears will have been committed by the team behind it.

Let's say we despatch to 3000 email newsletters, 1000 will be open and 250 go clicktastic... on that same day 1500 - 2000 people will visit the site.

My advice would be to build your own organic list and connect up with web communities that can help you increase your website ranking and drive visitors to your website.

Upgrade your www.e-consultancy.com account so you can add more articles and press releases via its trusted network, take a look at www.businessinberkshire.co.uk and our call to UK Business Networks across the land... www.businessinberkshire.co.uk/ukbn/extra2.html

 
Have a nice day...