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Very Interesting Email Statistics
Posting over at ClickZ recently, Jeanniey Mullen shared the following statistics as part of a post about permissions databases:
- Every year an average of 30 percent of the people who signed up for your e-mail marketing list will not get your e-mails because their ISP will incorrectly block them.
- 85 percent of the people on your e-mail list will stop reading your e-mails (without unsubscribing) after the third message your company sends to them (yes, company, not just your group inside the company).
- 25 percent of the people on your list who receive your e-mails and never open them will be among the top 10 percent of your best customers.
- An average of 39 percent of your current year subscribers will either unsubscribe, or stop reading/engaging with your e-mails by the end of the year.
- Over 10 percent of people who initially read your e-mail on their handheld device will file it away, intending to take action, but never doing so.
- About 15 percent of your list will read your e-mails and look to a social network like Facebook or Twitter to see if others are buzzing about the message or offer before taking action.
- Over 49 percent of people who are happy with their recent purchase from your company will open future e-mails seven times faster than those who have not made a purchase in over three months.
Read the rest of her post here…
Collecting Email Addresses For Your Business
Are you having problems building a legitimate email list? That is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers. With the CAN-SPAM laws and email providers restrictions it is essential that marketers have “clean” email lists. How can you do it?
Well, Vertical Response, our email partner, has a nice post on some good ways that a marketer can solicit email addresses and be in compliance with CAN-SPAM. It’s well worth the read, and, for implementation, we are happy to consult, design, and implement both simple and multi-touch email marketing campaigns, just contact us.
Here are their top 10:
- Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
- Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
- Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
- Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
- Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
- Host your own event – Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
- Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
- Incentivize your employees – Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
- Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
- Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
Social Networking Survey Results & More
Well, we promised you the results from the Social Networking Survey, and, we’ll give them to you… but, first, I want to talk about how doing something as simple as publishing a survey, and then doing some network marketing about that survey drove substantial results.
Let me set-up the situation, we have been discussing some of the problems with Social Network Marketing here internally and wanted to start doing some data gathering, independent of big research firms. We wanted anecdotal evidence for our clients. We didn’t have a big budget to run ads, send email solicitations, etc. What we did have, however, is a good survey tool (provided by Survs.com), and the social networks themselves. We built a quick survey, (to get some initial findings, more short surveys will follow), and then posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, our Facebook page, and a couple of local business sites (like OCMetro). Within five minutes of posting about the survey we were beginning to get results.
This illustrates the point that when you’re talking to people that are engaged in your subject matter, and don’t ask them too many questions, you’ll get good results. The same thing can be done with product owners, VIP club members, etc. Even without an incentive to take the survey we got a 97% completion rate!
Not only did we get a successful survey, but, overall site traffic and awareness went up as shown by these stats:
Unique Site Visits (vs. prior week): +107%
Absolute Unique Visitors (vs. prior week): +92%
Pageviews (vs. prior week): +86%
Increase in Twitter followers (vs. prior week): +350%
In addition, traffic came from completely different sources than normal:
Search (organic & paid): -70.46% (vs. prior week))
Referral: +141.67% (vs. prior week)
If the referral traffic it came from the expected sources based on our efforts:
Facebook: 16.67%
Our Blog: 13.33%
Twitter: 8.33%
LinkedIn: 1.67%
Other: 1.67%
Now, enough about the positive effect of the survey, let’s look at the survey results:
How Many Social Networks Are You Using?
Most respondents (>80%) are using between 1 and 6 social networks. There were no respondents that were unaware of social networking, or un-connected; this isn’t surprising, however, given our solicitation methods.
Do You Read All Of Your “Friends” Updates?
In an unsurprising outcome, more than 60% of our respondents do not read all of their friend’s updates, stay tuned for our next survey where we ask the question, “Why Not?”
Tell Us About Those Updates
The last question was interesting, it asked what people thought of the updates from their friends. Over half (>54%) of those surveyed said that the updates kept them perfectly informed, or, lead to interesting places or information online. Only 18% said that they were too much information, and another 27% replied with “Other.” Of those “other” responses, here is one that was intriguing, “Updates can be interesting but many are worthless attempts at attention.” Most of the “other” responses were a combination of the other answers.
We would like to thank you for your participation in the survey, and remind you to stay tuned for more.
Social Networking, Is It Overwhelming?
Are you overwhelmed by social networking? We’re conducting a quick survey on the topic, please participate before Friday. We’ll be releasing the results and discussing them on the 17th.
New York Times Loss Widens as Ads Shrink
The WSJ ran a story (subscription required) on the 22nd about this issue. This problem is hitting all print publications:
Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!
Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).
Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”
WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!
These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.
We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.
Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online
Small business is flocking to the online marketing space, why? It’s cheap, it’s easy to measure, and, well, let’s face it, print is dead.
What are local advertisers to do, though? They don’t have the large budgets to go to a “big agency,” they don’t have the technical knowledge (in many cases) to prevent being taken advantage of by small agencies, there are too many options for free or almost free web based services, etc…
They have to do research and they have to trust their network. What do successful small agencies have to do, then?
They have to be good at working with small businesses, they have to treat each of their customers well, they have to be successful, because small businesses can’t afford the expense of a failed marketing effort, no matter how small.
Email campaigns and PPC campaigns are the best entry into online marketing for most small businesses, after getting themselves a quality web site. However, they should definitely use a someone to help them, they do not want to upset their targets with violations of CAN-SPAM, or just over communication.
Read the whole article Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online – eMarketer.
Search Marketing Spending and Trends – eMarketer
Search Marketing Spending and Trends – eMarketer
A new story out from eMarketer is showing how search marketing dollars are being spent by clients. The data, from Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) used research from a Radar Research study.
The short version of the article is that of the $13.5 Billion spent in 2008, 88% went to Search Marketing and 11% to SEO. The assertion, however, is that more money will be flowing into SEO programs in 2009 because it delivers longer term results.
DMIdeas caveat… SEO works as long as you spend the big $$ on an infrastructure that eliminates human error.
The other takeaway from the article is that Search Engine Marketing spending will grow rapidly over the next 5 years as shown in this chart:
Social Network Marketing For Small Business
Social Network Marketing is here to stay. Right now it’s the next “big” thing, soon it’ll be as ubiquitous as email marketing or PPC. So, for those of you that are trying to do it yourself because you want to see what it’s all about, or, don’t think you can afford an agency to help you here are some tips from Perfect Business:
- Write A Killer Profile
- Focus on a Quality Network Rather than Quantity Network
- Establish a Time-Saving Routine
- Respect Your Friends
- Start to SHARE
And then, from us, some advice:
It’s important that your Social Networking profile/site be as professional as your business. Make sure that your copy is well written, that your page is free of typos, that you friends list reflects your potential customers and employees, and, perhaps most importantly, make sure that your profile provides potential customers with a method to contact you, either email or phone or physical address.
Whether you do it yourself, or use an agency to help you, Social Networks are here to stay and having a presence, no matter how small your business, is important.
On a larger scale, the folks at Procter & Gamble (P&G), just held a little “summit” to figure out how to use Social Media to help their business…read more at Cincinatti.com.
And here’s some anecdotal evidence that Facebook has overtaken Google as a source for referrals to some sites…
More Evidence of Print Dying…US Local Ad Market Shrinking
In this article from eMarketer, The Kelsey Group & BIA Advisory Services LLC are projecting a 13.2% drop in local print advertising spending in the next 5 years.
This is huge for the newspaper business. Over the last several years, as national advertising dollars have moved online they’ve increased their focus on their traditional strong point, local & small business advertising.
What is causing this shift in ad dollars from offline to online? Well, the increasing ability of marketers to geo-target their PPC advertising. PPC (both display based and text based) are far superior to offline print advertising competitors in their ability to geo-target, demographic-target, and, in general, perform far better from a conversion perspective. Now, with PPC advertising, you’re not locked into a click through to a web site and then having to convice a user to fill out a form, no, you can have that add drive directly to a phone call to your business or call center. Something that print definitely can not do. This makes the impulsive click a definitive lead generator for both small and large businesses alike.
We’re seeing not just a shift in small businesses, but other, larger, more traditional print advertisers, your regional businesses like car dealers and their networks, medical groups, and other regionally focused (and traditionally print based) advertisers.
Click on over to eMarketer and read the article, it’s a short, but informative piece.
US Local Ad Market Shrinking – eMarketer.
Why Retail Loves E-Mail
Why Retail Loves E-Mail – eMarketer
The link above is to a pretty good article at eMarketer discussing the use of e-mail by retailers during 2008.
An interesting take away from the article is that retailers increased their email quantity from 8.8 per month in January 08 to 14.6 per month in December! Another strong point was that 90% of the top retailers increased their holiday email volume as well.
“Retailers ratcheted up their e-mail marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers’ dwindling spending dollars,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Mail: Online Marketing Strategies. “That was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”
Still, with all of the increased volume in email marketing, it still only accounts for 1.5% of direct marketing budgets in the US!
However, between email marketing and PPC marketing, that is changing rapidly. Spends in both categories so far in 2009 are up versus the same period in 2008. Why, you ask? Because email and PPC marketing are measurable, testable, traceable, more cost effective, and much more customizable than traditional marketing (both brand marketing and direct marketing) and advertisers can do more for less.