Are you using email marketing?

[DanHorvat]

This is for people who are having trouble finding a good email marketing service. And I've seen quite a few people who complained on this forum.

So what are the biggest problems you're facing?

Do email marketing solutions have a problem with you being a gambling affiliate?
Is the service too pricey (how much)?
Are the emails getting delivered properly?
Is it difficult to set up?
Any other big problem?

Do shed some light on this for me. If you tell me exactly what the problems are, there's a chance I might offer a solution in the near future.

[sampendleton]

The problem is, thousands of emails sent but got less than a hundred clicks on it with no conversion at all.

[Jason FTA]

Hi Dan,

As Sam mentioned; delivery, low clicks through rate and poor conversions are the biggest issues. I think the market has just been flooded/spammed which resulted in certain measures having to be put into place to curb the abuse of email marketing. I know from my experience 99% of our mails don't hit aol inboxes.

Good luck with your venture and keep us all posted!

Regards
Jason

[DanHorvat]

Maybe the click through rate is low because most mails end up in spam or are marked as spam?

99% of our mails don't hit aol inboxes

That can be taken care of.

[Nosh]

I think the biggest problem are the spam filters

[universal4]

It's all about the list.

If they have subscribed directly to your mailings, they will #1 be more likely to read the mail, #2 be more likely to respond, follow links or whatever, #3 they will be more likely to take steps to white list your email address or use an email that has less filters or will use a rule to move the mail into a folder where they can easily read the mail.

If you did not personally create the list of subscribers, and its a rented, purchased or otherwise traded for list it IS SPAM, and will have a deservedly low response rate.

Rick
Universal4

[eenzoo]

For me its harder to get an email subscriber then a depositer.

[ARZ]

I use autoresponder with good offers to subscribers, works pretty good.

[Aidan90]

I've started building an email list for my Liverpool Betting Tips - sending out my tips the day before each match to my subscribers.

Getting people to sign up is the difficult part - I'm only sending it out to around 15 people at the moment so I have very little data to work with.

[Voids]

I've a list of about 1,200 people that I send to, all subscribed naturally. between 10-20% open the emails. 3 clicks recorded.

[universal4]

Voids that sounds like something is causing the view that is something less than a human reading the email.

Like maybe folks using Outlook with the preview pane turned on would most likely also load the tracking pixel or image that is counting the views. I wonder if there is a way to determine if that is the case.

You might be correct, but it just seems that if they are direct subscribers and are opening the emails at a 10% plus rate, it just feels like the click rate should be a little bit higher.

Rick
Universal4

[MediaGamble]

Sometimes it makes sense to send manually for more control

[Voids]

Voids that sounds like something is causing the view that is something less than a human reading the email.

Like maybe folks using Outlook with the preview pane turned on would most likely also load the tracking pixel or image that is counting the views. I wonder if there is a way to determine if that is the case.

You might be correct, but it just seems that if they are direct subscribers and are opening the emails at a 10% plus rate, it just feels like the click rate should be a little bit higher.

Rick
Universal4

The newsletter replaces the links with it's own tracking code, so should be fairly accurate unless I misunderstand you.

[Nosh]

Sometimes it makes sense to send manually for more control

More control? I guess you are using the wrong tool then

[Doolally]

Emails have to be interesting and the recipient needs to want to read them to be effective these days.

As an example, I could see how the Liverpool Betting Tips, see above, emails could become productive but perhaps people would be more interested in signing up if it was to receive Liverpool News. A tipping section could then be added to the bottom of the email or within the news content. I could see this doing well.

[sakisarv]

I totally agree with @Jason, applies perfectly <<low clicks through rate and poor conversions are the biggest issues>>

[universal4]

The newsletter replaces the links with it's own tracking code, so should be fairly accurate unless I misunderstand you.

Yes, My statement had more to do with the emails that are read, as you said 10% to 20% open the emails.

In order to track the emails being opened, the most common way would be a tracking pixel or image, and the image when being SHOWN would track the impression, similar to the way many affiliate programs track impressions.

If this is the scenario, I think it is also possibly for those impressions to be counted in some email programs such as Outlook (preview pane).

It may no be the case, but I suggested it as one possible scenario that could slight skew the impression or view rate.

Now if the view rate is slightly inflated, then you may not be doing to bad on click per read, so that you would want to study ways to increase how many are actually read.

If that is not how the impressions are being tracked, how are they?

Rick
Universal4

[eenzoo]

Last Friday i started to collect email addresses. Until this afternoon i got 36 subscriptions. I was pretty nosy and i sent the first newsletter today.

The result so far:
36 Subscribers
7 Opens
4Clicks

And yes i got 2 Signups and one small FTD. I´m a new email marketing fan
Just let me upscale this by a factor of 1000

[HodgeyBoy]

I get the sense that it's very hard now to deliver the Quantity/Volume model in email marketing.

The software has evolved; most importantly, the consumer has evolved and is much more savvy now. As an operator I would always recommend the quality approach and there may be opportunities for more niche email marketing that delivers a much higher level of value to the consumer. i.e. Simple list of Offers are no longer enough but, as suggested earlier, some decent Liverpool News and information with an offer tacked on could work. One area that lends itself to this is a Pre-Match report talking about form and injuries etc and conclude with a correct score prediction or first goal scorer linked up the a bookies bet slip.

This approach does require a step up as you need to be producing good quality copy - do you go to the cost of hiring a writer or paying for the article? The level of research required for such a report is another consideration. This model lends itself well to teams/sports/subjects/games that you really love and have the passion to keep reading and writing about.

Instead of 'BROAD'casting emails to a wide generic audience there may be more value, in the long term, in Narrowcasting to a specific niche audience.

[Aidan90]

I've started to focus more on building email lists recently, partly due to a realisation I had that there are very few things that we as webmasters have complete control over.

Search engines can remove our organic ranking.
Advertising platforms can disapprove our ads.
Social media platforms can suspend our accounts.

We could theoretically be put out of business by a combination of these things with very little that we could do about it. One of the few things we can actually have an ownership over is a mailing list and having a quality list is going to be essential if any of the above happen!