Newsletters

[fut]

This is for people who run a newsletter.

 

How much has a newsletter increased sales?

Is it weekly or monthly?

How much time do you spend on it? If you pay someone how much do you pay?

What do you include in it?

Any other helpful tips?

 

 

Big stores like drugstore.com uses newsletters ~2 times a week. Would something like this be beneficial or just spammy?

 

I have a database of 11635 customers currently (i'm sure many are fake) - what kind of sale increase do you suspect I can get from this big of a database?

[Guest]

if you have an unsubscribe link enclosed in the message, it'll bring you a bit of traffic to the unsubscribe page. other than that i've noticed no real impact that's worth noting.

 

i think the days of useful marketing via email are over, thanks to spammers. even a few people that willingly subscribe to your stuff will likely be a little p'oed after they get your newsletter... my guess is that they assume you will snail mail them coupons or something just by handing over their email address...

[fut]

Just another response I received on another forum:

 

While you can certainly measure the incremental benefit of a newsletter, it's important to realize that a major benefit comes from the residual branding impact, which may or may not be measurable over time.

 

I send out newsletters weekly with automated emails based on events and rules going out literally 24x7 when users do (or don't do) something.

 

With many of my past e-commerce clients, we found that regular special offer mailings could bring back 5-10% of customers and help increase repeat order rates signifigantly. Even having rich messages for order confirmation and shipping notices with personalized product recommendations can get huge responses so don't wait for a bulk newsletter, email people when you're still top of mind. Also think about how you want to segment your emails to make the most meaningful message. If you only offer a few SKUs, segmentation may be by life time value or last order date (i.e. give a stronger offer to a more valuable customer than to someone who is unlikely to shop again, or vise-versa depending on your clientele).

 

The most important thing in emailing is to measure the results where you can. A simple control group can serve as your base test -- track how frequently those users return versus people who get any email and as you layer in more messages and segmentation, you can compare those lists to your control and base list.

 

In terms of effort and time, for 11k clients you'll likely want to start small and do this yourself... unless of course your 11k clients are spending 10k a piece on something that is likely to be reordered (like office supplies), if that's the case, or if you think there's a lot of potential to bring in repeat orders than you would certainly benefit from an email consultant. There are many tricks to email marketing in terms of dealing with the preview pane, limited screen resolution, file downloads, subject lines, etc... Your initial emails will take you about as long as a landing page takes to create, from there you can spend virtually no zero time if you just update offers, photos and review the results briefly, or you can turn it into a full time gig if you want to really monitor, analyze and optimize the campaign.

[running wolf]

For more than 2 years we were sending out newsletters spiked with stories about our life in the bush in central Alaska. People LOVED the newsletter, we even had a 'Monthly Give-Away'. Some 2500 on the mailing list but no sales. They were just out for the freebees. Waste of time

[Priest]

We've ran a mailing list for about 2 years. We send out every 2 weeks to about 3,500 subscribers, informing them of our latest specials and usually giving out a coupon good for anywhere from 72 hours - 1 week. It really creates a sense of urgency to "act" on the special. We usually send out newsletters on Friday, assuming most people will be home to catch up on their emails and browsing throughout the weekend. And we never fail to bring in at least $1,000 in sales from each mailing.

 

For us, newsletters have been a great way to bring back customers, generate lots of extra sales, and communicate to our customers our newest specials and happenings at our company.

 

Good luck!

[Tail-Swishing]

I send out a monthly newsletter and I'm really surprised at how many people have signed up to recieve it,

the newsletter is usually as a mix of news, feature products, competition winners, special offers and adverts and so far it has increased traffic of returning visitors, The newsletter has been going now for 3 months and although it takes time and effort to put it together I think its well worth it.

[hubcat]

I run a monthly newsletter. It's really just an advertisment - what's new at the store, what's coming and always a coupon or special for newsletter subscribers only. It's an opt-in, so not really spammy, and I think more than 1 a month can be overkill. I've currently got about 600 subscribers (yes, small, I know), and I never fail to get at least one sale from the newsletter. Since there is always a coupon code attached, I can tell exactly how many sales. I'll also get quite a few visitors. Even if there's not something they want now, the fact that they came back keeps me in their heads. Maybe next months new products will interest them...

 

Adrienne

[Brucie]

Anyone got any advice on cleaning up our email list?

 

We've got about 8000 customers and about 800 opt-in newsletter customers that we would like to re-confirm but would l would like to clean up the email list before we resume sending out newsletters. I know of some automation programs out there but would wondering if anyone had any recommendations?