Email marketing - scary stuff!!!

[Guest Guest75]

I've just read a little post from an old group of mine....

 

Scary stuff!!

No wonder I use Mailwasher!!!

 

<quote>

 

Often confused with spamming, and some would say rightly so, including

me until this week. And I'm still not sure.

But for reasons of the business kind I attended a seminar on email

marketing and you might be interested in one or two things I found out.

First off let me say I still have no love for HTML emails and my email

client only sees plain text. But the serious email marketing is all done

in HTML.

The seminar dealt with the creation and sending of HTML formatted

marketing emails and newsletters using dedicated software for the job.

No-one sensible uses Outlook for anything serious, it's just not up to

it.

 

Here's the interesting lowdown on what happens after the email is sent

to hundreds or even thousands of recipients.

 

The sender gets feedback on how many bounced, both soft and hard

bounces.

Which email addresses bounced.

How many were opened.

How many were read (not the same as opened in the preview pane)

When they were read. Time and date.

How many times they were read including times and dates.

How many went into the trash before and after being read.

How many fell into spam traps.

What email software was used to receive them.

What links in the email were clicked.

Most of these emails contain Google Analytics tracking codes as well.

All of the above are tracked to recipients email addresses, so if you

did any of the above, the sender knows.

 

Scary or what?

It's worth mentioning that I'm talking about opt in lists here, this is

not spamming. These are only sent to people who subscribe.

I dare say some spammers will operate similar systems but all the pro

email marketing applications are very strict on what they can and cannot

by used for.

 

So the next time you read that email from those nice people at Amazon,

Microsoft or Morgan Computers, make sure you're wearing clean

underpants, they probably know that as well.

 

<end quote>

[Moosh]

That's very true. I used to work in Marketing 10 years ago and we were using these methods back then even!

[adelaidenow]

However the stats that you (the sender) get aren't accurate.

 

If I open an email newsletter nearly all programs don't know I have, as they don't pick up Entourage opening the email.

 

When I send an email to over 2000 people, my stats only show 700 got it, and approx 100 didn't get it. So there is a huge void.