Email Marketing & Sanity Check

All forms of "random ish" marketing have costs that could potentially be burning money, but some once told me that each lead you get has some cost associated with it, question is what would pay to get more business?

A valid question, and it's one I am used to asking, as we currently use a mixture of Search Marketing and Direct Sales. I may be being a bit naive but Email Marketing seems more expensive even compared against Direct Sales and SEO. That's what I find a bit surprising.

Ahhh yes

Over the years we have bought in bucket loads of data from lots of different suppliers, most of them turned out to be rubbish.

Probably about the best quality data we got was from Selectabase, but it's expensive form of marketing, or at least it was for us, as we have quite a low price product. I suppose if 1 sale makes you thousands, then its worthwhile.

It got us off the ground in the early days, but conversion rate was low and we got very few decent sales, just mainly freebies.

As soon as we got to the tipping point of having our own internal database, we ditched buying in data and haven't looked back.

Even though our average sale price will go into a few thousand, it still does not make sense to me. I actually spoke to someone about collecting data via the website soon after I wrote this post. It looks like it's something I will need to do.

Definitely, it is so much easier to get people to part with cash if they have already heard of you, or are an existing customer.

Took us a while to work that one out. Expecting a sale from a cold mail is a big ask. In hindsight, it seems so obvious Could have saved a fortune...

Steve, I am curious, beyond this what other businesses are you involved in?

Your not working for the VAT man are you?

Our current bread winner is our UK Directory, My Local Services but we have a bunch of other sites of varying success.

Our US directory is coming into dry dock and getting a facelift in the Autumn, but currently project planning our next large site, which we are hoping to launch 2nd quarter next year, but has been 2 years in gestation so very excited. Shall reveal all when/if we ever get the thing working (if Kips watching, it's not a directory )

Forum is just to keep me occupied and give the illusion I'm doing some work As opposed to having a good old natter.

I also think some products lend themselves to a form of marketing, like all of us I get through the front door the usual leaflets and my wife keeps the odd one and I always ask her why that one and 9 times out of 10 the reply is just in case I need x

Never is it instant, and often if she see it 2 or 3 times then it gets kept.

The missus works in traditional marketing, and she was saying the reason you get bombarded with things like financial products, is that its a very hard market to gauge when someone is in a buying mode. So you have to keep up a blanket approach, in the hope that the one morning you wake up with the need for a new credit card, there on the door mat is the regular one from your bank, or capital one.

I suppose you can apply the same to online marketing, and email campaigns, where the cost will be less compared to direct mail.

But regardless of how many I put in the bin, or delete from my inbox, if it wasn't viable, these big boys wouldn't do it.

From our own data and mail stats, looking at some of our upsells, we can see they have received multiple promotional emails from us in the past, then for whatever reason, they move into a buying decision. Reinforces the idea that buying in and sending cold data doesn't work for our particular industry.

But it is fascinating trying to get into the mind of a consumer.