I'm wondering how many of you use monthly newsletters to stay in contact with their subscribers and send some great deals there via newsletters. I'm talking about legitime Email marketing only, no SPAM! I'm talking about people who opted in and confirmed their membership to your newsletter. Here I have some questions for you: 1) How many subscribers you have in your list and how often you send your newsletter? 2) What kind of content you use in your newsletter? 3) Do you use a third party to manage your email marketing needs? 4) Do you use a professional email marketing software that allow you to measure advanced stats for your campaign like: open rate, click rate, manage unsubscriptions automatically and so on...? 5) When you think of a newsletter, what do you expect to read when you open a newsletter that you have opted in for it. 6) Among: www.sendstudio.info and www.octeth.com do you still know other email marketing software to use on your own server? Thank you!
I have numerous newsletters across different niches so I can offer this from my model for using newsletters: 1) Each list has different subscription totals, some only have a couple hundred, some have thousands. As for how often I send mailings, never more than once per month. I treat my list subscribers like friends and never abuse them with too frequent mailings. This has pros and cons, the upside is most subscribers will appreciate it and you'll be able to offer more quality mailings by sending fewer of them out... the downside is there's a higher risk of people forgetting they subscribed to your list and claiming you spammed them. 2) Quality content. In my experience this has been vital. I have a 90/10 policy that I try very hard to keep, meaning 90% of the mailing content has to be strictly for the reader's benefit and no more than 10% can be aimed at making me money in any way. I know that flies in the face of what a lot of marketers do, but that could explain why I've unsubscribed from almost every mailing list I ever belonged to over the years. When writing your mailings just read over it with a subscriber's eyes to see if you'd find this of value or not. If not, don't send it out. 3) No, again I treat subscribers like friends and wouldn't trust their contact information sitting on a 3rd party service. No matter how reputable that company may be, if I'm not able to oversee the security measures and access logs of their servers then I don't trust them with my subscriber's data. 4) No, I use the conversion rates after a mailing is sent out to tell me whether or not I've hit a single, double, triple, home run or struck out. A lot of people care about open and click rates with their lists, I don't. I'm not in business to make clicks, I need sales--and sales conversions after a mailing will tell you whether your offering and sales copy worked or not. Remember, the mailing offer is only part of the story, there's typically a landing or sales page that readers are going to be clicking to from the mailing and that sales copy is vital to your success as well. Tracking open or click rates from the mailing only gives you a part of the picture that to me is useless on its own, and unnecessary when you focus on tracking conversions. Your web stats will tell you how much traffic reached the sales page, there's no need to track that with your email software, and your sales rates will tell you how many of those converted. Again, I know some people like to have all that data and scour over spreadsheets to the Nth degree. That's fine and there's information to be learned from it all, I just don't have time for it when at the end of the day my sales will tell me how I did. 5) Valuable and useful information on the topic(s) being covered. See #2 above. 6) I like DaDa Mail personally. The free version is easy to setup and has every feature I've ever really needed. The paid version is an easy and affordable upgrade once your lists grow to over 5,000 subscribers. I'm sure many will have different opinions, and may even take exceptions to some of mine, but like I said I'm offering this from my model. It may or may not be good for someone else's. Hope this helps
Scott your reply made some good things clear for many of us here. Thank you for taking time to reply! As for the advanced stats, now I use that on my newsletters, sometimes I have 2 or even 3 deals on my newsletter, some subscribers might be interested in only one deal and when they click it i can follow up a week later with a new campaign that will focus more on their particular interest and when I do this I always get 1-5 unsubscriptions at every 1000 subscriber list. This makes me think that people like to get news and deals based on their particular interest and not on "my particular interest". Regards!
Hope this helps 1) How many subscribers you have in your list and how often you send your newsletter? About 5,000 2) What kind of content you use in your newsletter? I provide tips on blogging and marketing 3) Do you use a third party to manage your email marketing needs? Yep I get Aweber it's useful 4) Do you use a professional email marketing software that allow you to measure advanced stats for your campaign like: open rate, click rate, manage unsubscriptions automatically and so on...? You can use Adtrackz Gold to track those 5) When you think of a newsletter, what do you expect to read when you open a newsletter that you have opted in for it. Great content to learn more great stuff 6) Among: www.sendstudio.info and www.octeth.com do you still know other email marketing software to use on your own server? I recommend you use 3th parties like Aweber to managed your email marketing because you will get banned or blacklisted easily on your own server
"gathersuccess" - www.sendstudio.info offers all the aweber features plus many more and they have a hosted version too, no need to buy and install on your server, they started to provide the same service as aweber.
Just a quick follow-up, and glad I could be of any help, but on the issue of getting banned or blacklisted by ISP's I hear that all the time and in my experience it doesn't hold true if you run a reputable operation. My oldest list (that I still use) began in 1999 and I've never been blacklisted by any ISP for longer than a few hours. In fact, I've only been blacklisted 3 times over the years that I can recall, and in each case I was able to get the listing removed immediately because I had the confirmation records on hand for every subscriber to my lists. Just be sure to use a double opt-in service and keep those confirmations archived and you shouldn't ever have a problem running your list off of your own server. Now, of-course that doesn't cover if you host on a shared hosting server because then you have the added risk of other accounts getting your IP blacklisted and you can't do much about that. I'm just saying if you run your own server, or at-least have a dedicated IP for your domain, then I've never seen any valid reason for not running your own list.
Well, I asked all these questions here as I'm an Email marketing Consultant with almost 8 years of experience in this field. I will soon launch my services under a new name as I found a better name than I used to work in the past. So, all my questions has the purpose of checking that people still use newsletters. I work mostly for real estate companies and most recent customer is a Coldwell Banker agent with a really huge list but plan to get into niches than real estate - even that RE it's a very good niche - i simply want to develop my areas of expertise. I use dedicated and very powerful servers and my server provider take care not to be black listed, even that I always work with 100% optin confirmed lists that contain records of: name, email, date when subscribed, IP from which user subscribed, etc.
I don't... yet... I tend to keep personal contact and often form relationships with the people who come to me for guidance or some help. Cheers.