Good and Bad?

I had an interesting day yesterday.  I’ll tell you more about it shortly, but first I’d like to lay out some background information.

For about 3 or more years now, I have been working on “building my list”.  If you don’t know what list I am talking about, well, most people who make money on the Internet will tell you that the money is in the list.

That’s great, Bob, but what list?

Developing your List

The list of people’s e-mail addresses that you have collected.  Usually, if you are seriously into making an earning on the Internet, you would set up an account with a company that manages your list and allows you to send out marketing campaigns and such.  Such companies would include AWeber, MailChimp, and others.  I use MailChimp.  On my websites there are places where you can enter your e-mail address to sign up to get my newsletter, that is how I collect my list.

Why use one of these companies?

Well, the main reason is that they make it simple to do everything from collecting addresses, verifying the addresses, and then the most important thing – getting your mail delivered!  I am not just talking about sending your e-mail to the e-mail addresses but additionally making sure that your e-mail ends up in the Inbox, not in the Spam.  How do they do this?  Well, because the people who sign up to be on your list must verify that they want to absolutely join by clicking on a link sent to them.  eMail providers know that mail sent from MailChimp and others is genuine, so they generally automatically place it in the Inbox.  If you tried to e-mail thousands of people with a commercial type e-mail on your own, the vast majority of the mail you sent would end up in Spam and few would see it.

I had big plans

At the turn of the calendar when we entered 2014, I had big plans to finally start utilizing my list this year.  I sent out one campaign in December 2013 and the results were great, so 2014 was to be the year to really buckle down on this.

In February, though, I got very sick and was sick for about 3 months.  It derailed me from my goal of doing a fair amount of eMail Marketing in 2014.

Yesterday morning, I was out taking a walk to get a little exercise to start off the day.  On my, iPod was listening to a podcast and the topic was about effective email marketing.  It motivated me to prepare a marketing campaign as soon as I got home, which I did.

When I arrived home, I spent about 30 minutes or so putting together what I considered a good e-mail to send out as my July Newsletter.  In that e-mail, I told about some new projects that I have been doing (particularly Podcasts).  I also promoted two products in the eMail:

• A package of eBooks that included 74 eBooks that I have written.  This package is normally $299 and I offered a special price for $199 through this coming Sunday.
• Another package of eBooks about How to Move to the Philippines.  31 books in all that is normally $49, but I offered $10 off.

I sent out this campaign at about 9:30 am yesterday, so we are nearly 24 hours in as I type this article.

How were the results of the campaign?

I would use two different words to describe the results of my efforts:

1. Sucked!
2. Fantastic!

Huh?  How could each word apply?

What made it suck?

Well, firstly, I sold only 4 products.  Secondly, 17 people unsubscribed from my mailing list.

What made it fantastic?

Believe it or not, the things that made it fantastic are the same as the things that sucked!  Ha ha.

You see, I was marketing relatively high priced products.  I sold only 4 products, but each of the items sold was the $199 items, so in less than 24 hours I made roughly $800 from the emailing campaign.  Not bad!  The special price still has 3 days to go, so I may sell up to maybe 5 or 6 more of the eBook collection before the sale is over.  So, we could be talking about another $1000 to $1,200 or so in sales, added on to the $800 I already sold, I may make up to $2,000 (more or less) from the 30 minutes of work that I did yesterday morning.

What about those 17 people who unsubscribed from the email list?  Well, to be honest, 17 people is only about 0.5% of my list, so that is still a pretty low number of unsubscriptions.  Any time you are sending out commercial type eMail there will be people who will unsubscribe, so I don’t have a problem with that.

Let’s look at some numbers

So for the email campaign I did yesterday, here are some stats:

Number of emails sent out:  3,471

Number of emails that bounced:  37

eMails opened:  36% (so far)

Clicks:  27%

Number of Facebook Shares: 8

Dollars in sales:  $796

Remember, too, all of these numbers are only for the past 24 hours.  I consider the 30 minutes of work spent on this project to be well worthwhile!  That is nearly $1600 for an hourly rate, and could still climb.

So, this only proves it to me.  I have to get more active in doing regular newsletters.  The payoff is high for a relatively minor amount of work.

Do you use a list?  How often do you send out mailings?