Back in August 2004 my company VerticalResponse bought a small business content site called WorkZ. The site was made up of about 1500 articles and various categories about how to grow your business. Roughly 40,000 people had signed up to recieve the WorkZ newsletter.
What we did for WorkZ
Alf, our Creative Director redid the look of the site and I spent hours and hours weeding out old articles recategorizing the artices to enable visitors to get to the content quickly and easily. For instance instead of "Make Money" we categorized by "Marketing>Email>Copywriting".
Then we launched and sent our first email newsletter. What happened next is startling.
ALL of our AOL addresses bounced. How could this happen, i wondered? ALL email marketing campaign sent through VerticalResponse is on the AOL whitelist! So i talked to the kind folks in the AOL Postmaster group myself and told them my horrifying news.
"Oh, WorkZ was blocked years ago because of complaints and lack of a feedback loop," they uttered. "But we'll give them one more shot if you are taking over the emailing of it."
So we got WorkZ unblocked. STEP 1 in increased response.
Then we looked at our overall bounce rate, and a significant portion of the list bounced. Why? Because the list hadn't been mailed in 4 months. Ouch.
So we cleaned out a portion of bad email addresses and now mail each week, like we told members we would. STEP 2 in increased response.
Now it was time to start to grow the list and get a better click and open rate. Our open rates were pretty low because people hadn't been used to getting and reading our content. Alf's idea to Tracy, our Marketing Specialist was to test the "from label" from "Weekly WorkZ" to just "WorkZ".
Testing the "from label" increased response by a few %. STEP 3 in increased response.
The next thing we knew we had to do was to get NEW names on our list of business owners. So Alf asked Robert, our Marketing Manager to help him acquire new members. Robert works with various companies to include us in their registration process so Robert started to send Alf hundreds of leads per week who had legitimately given us permission to email them.
We also advertised the WorkZ newsletter to our VerticalResponse customers telling them that WorkZ was the place to go for informational articles on how to grow your business. This garnered thousands more new leads.
The response went up by 20% by getting new email addresses. STEP 4 in increased response.
And finally, Alf had the idea that perhaps some people deleted our email or passed it by, so maybe we could just email those people that never responded at all, a few days later.
Mailing the same content the 2nd time around gave us 30% more of a response. STEP 5 in increased response.
So here are 5 ideas that might help you to increase your response rate and clean your lists! Oh, and check out WorkZ, it's got tons of great information.
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