Dramatic Traffic Increase Thru "Niche Email" Campaign

I recently implemented a niche email strategy that has resulted in a major increase in traffic to the website. It was entirely free and cost me only my time and energy. For those interested in trying it, I'd like to share it with you.

Here are the numbers, leaving out the Christmas/New Year time frame, since those numbers are rarely normal.
• Averages over the previous three months = 1,781 page views from 699 unique visitors daily
• Numbers since the niche email campaign = 2,420 daily page views from 940 daily unique visitors.
• A 34% increase in unique daily visitors
• A 36% increase in daily page views
• These recent numbers are sustained, not just a brief blip.

Digital Point members were very good to me, offering much free advice in the early stages of my website endeavors. So at the risk of losing some ground to the few competitors in my niche, let me share how I used niche emailing to achieve this sustained increase in traffic. It may take some space to explain here what I did, but it will be worth the reading time to any who wish to increase traffic and are not yet doing targeted, niche emailing.

Mine is a nonprofit bible study and free sermon website. In the broad, major categories of worldwide Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Pentecostal), my website falls in the Pentecostal category. That is where I made my big mistake in the first email campaign.

I came up with the idea of emailing the “mainline” Protestant seminaries and bible colleges. My intent was to let them know of the website and offer it as a free resource, if they were interested. Naturally, I was hoping for a link back from these .edu institutions. So I Googled up a good list and sent hundreds of personal emails to deans, presidents, and faculty of these Protestant seminaries and bible colleges. The results were a virtual zero! Only a handful of addressees even bothered to reply.

I believe that the first niche email campaign was disastrously unsuccessful for two reasons:
1) As the old saying goes, I was “fishing in the wrong pond”. Mine is a website of Pentecostal sermons and bible studies, and in the email campaign I was offering it to non-Pentecostal seminaries.
2) I was suggesting a link back from them to my site. In retrospect, this was, I believe, a mistake. It probably aroused suspicion, when my primary intent was just to offer them the free use of the site’s content.

By stark contrast, the recent niche email campaign has been wildly successful. And again, I believe it is for two reasons:
1) This time I fished in the right pond, limiting my emails to the leaders of Pentecostal Christian seminaries and bible colleges — that is, those with foundational beliefs like mine.
2) I made no mention of a link back.

The results couldn’t have been more different from the first email campaign. To date I have received 90 personal replies to my emails. Many of these were from the Deans, Presidents, or other leaders of Pentecostal seminaries and bible colleges. Every single one was a positive reply, some with a simple “thanks”, others with a declared intent to make the website available to their students.

As noted above, traffic has soared dramatically and has stayed up. In sum, I have drawn three lessons from this, which I’ll share here in closing for those who might likewise wish to launch a successful, specifically-targeted “niche email” campaign:

1) In the emails I did not ask for a link back. I offered the website’s resources entirely free of charge, for the benefit of their students. (FYI, on each page of the website, unobtrusively at the bottom, are instructions for linking back if the reader so chooses.)

2) I took the time to Google a list of seminaries and bible colleges and addressed the emails personally, by name, to the leaders and faculty. This was the total opposite of the boilerplate “Dear sir/madam” type of email that you and I hate to receive.

3) The most important key was emailing those in my “niche”. Mine is a website from a Pentecostal perspective. In the first campaign, the Protestant (non-Pentecostal) addressees pretty much ignored me. When I wrote to the Pentecostal educational institutions, the response was far beyond my wildest expectations — 90 personal replies and a major increase in traffic to the website. Why? I was on “the same page” as them, and I was offering something directly useful to them, and in our case at no charge.

I hope that my gratifying experience in this successful niche email campaign encourages some of you to undertake something like it in YOUR niche.

Best wishes to you all.

 

Nice post, and I am pleased you are having success. Long may it continue.

 

Thanks, Brian. A side note of interest is .edu links. I'll check over the next few weeks to see if this email campaign results in any .edu back links.

 

Interesting, but I think this idea is only working for your website, for a website as mine, maybe it's not.

 

I think that not every website would be a "fit" for this type of campaign. But for many it will indeed work well.

 

Great tip, thanks for sharing!

 

Interesting strategy, thanks for sharing it!

 

Very helpful. I've always been a bit cautious about emailing a group of people out of the blue, not wanting to be labeled a spammer. Did you get any negative feedback from either your first or second messages? What does everyone else think about sending an email to a group, even if it is targeted?

 

Yeah..Email marketing has always been a good way, only if you have right people on the list.

 

No, there was no negative feedback from hundreds of recipients of either message. I think that the reason for no negatives was that the content was always relevant to their needs and was not perceived as "junk" mail.

 

Follow-up info two months after original post:

I have continued doing the niche emailing, with the following results:

• Traffic continues to increase and to sustain the higher numbers.

• I have not picked up any .edu inbound links.

Conclusion — Traffic (not .edu links) is the major goal we all seek, and that continues to increase as I continue niche emailing. And this is despite a home-page drop from PR5 to PR4 in the last update.

 

Absolutely. The key for me was getting the right email list. I googled it and found literally thousands of potential addressees for whom my website would be a match.

 

Just out of curiosity, how big is your list, and what did you use to send it out? Did you send it from your account where your site is hosted, or did you use a third party site like Aweber?

 

Comenius, the list is quite large (many thousands). I am still emailing and will be for months to come. For example, at present I am going state by state emailing the pastors of the Assemblies of God denomination. Their email addresses are a matter of public record in the denominational website. When I am done emailing those pastors, I'll begin with another Pentecostal denomination.

I am using the ______.org email that comes with my website hosting. I think that looks more professional than an email coming from Yahoo or Gmail.

I have typed up a "boilerplate" message that I paste into each email. Then I personalize that with the actual name of the recipient. The mail program I'm using is the MacMail one that comes in Mac OS X. Responses continue to be encouraging.

 

Wow, you're sending out thousands of emails by hand, one at a time? That must take a lot of stamina!

Have you ever considered using a newsletter type application in order to send out your emails in groups? Many will let you personalize elements like using the recipients name in the greeting. There are companies that provide this functionality as a service, and also open source solutions if you're comfortable setting them up.

If you prefer to keep things local, you can also use the mail merge capabilities of applications like Microsoft Word. I'm not familiar with the Mac, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have a similar capability.

 

Comenius, good tips. I'll give that some thought. Thanks.

 

Very interesting approach. I'll have to give it some consideration within the context of my own SEO efforts.

 

That was really good tip... I have started to see where I am going next ..

Cheers

Malik

 

but sry. what is niche email campaign? is it maillist?

 

Its nice to to see that your email campaign has become successfull in second attempt. but is it effective for long term,i mean in email marketing i found regular visitors may not bring..some people have negative feelings about email marketing and they even don't read those emails simply delete those...
Anyway wish your success goes higher....