re newsletter

* I never got one!


Thursday, March 10, 2011

We are pulling together the next edition of our newsletter and I thought the stats from our first one were worth revisiting and sharing. The first one went out to approximately 10,000 registered individuals on February 16th and we achieved some impressive results - the report below summarises the key metrics but the context is also important i.e. how do we compare with other organisations doing similar activity?

We are working with a small Agency in Perth Bang Marketing who have helped us integrate our CRM system and optimise it for email marketing so thanks Renae and Chloe for your help and also produce the newsletter template and content. It is early days and the tone and pitch will change as we experiment with different content and balance the 'sell' with useful information and product news. I am pleased with the results..

According to our friends at Bang - "Your February Newsletter was sent 2 days ago and the results (in terms of open rate and clicks) are very promising! Please find attached a snapshot of your newsletter?s results to date. The average open rate for newsletters in your industry (or similar) is between 15.5% (business and finance) and 19.8% (professional services). So far, your newsletter has recorded an open rate of 53.6%. Of the 5,151 recipients that opened the newsletter, 38.46% of them clicked on a link ? that?s over 1,900 people. The most popular link was the before/after presentation on the Queensland floods (www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm) ? 1,657 total clicks, 1,161 unique clicks. The second most popular link was the link to view the images of the Victorian floods on your website."

The summary report paints an encouraging picture. What does this mean - we are not there yet in terms of being able to track a click through to repeat site visits or a transaction - we will - like I say early days. This was conducted a month ago and we attracted 10,000 plus registrations in a little over a week via a rudimentary pop up on the site so we can reasonably determine our users are enthusiastic about interacting with us. I am not going to say how big the database is now.. but its much bigger! We need to build on this interest and loyalty effectively and ensure we achieve the right balance of information and 'added value' content in our email newsletters with the need to also include an effective 'sell' proposition every month.

So there you have it - I thought I'd share this data once whilst we are still a bit rough around the edges and thank everyone for your support and you can look forward to Issue No2 next week.


http://nearmapceo.posterous.com/newsletter