Get People to Click: we did, and you can too

Posted on May 7th, 2010

Archived in Free Marketing Made Easy blog

Open Rates:

Below, you see a snapshot of the open rates from our initial launch announcement. Like many of you, I am starting my business with a limited prospect list. Some people have already signed up to receive email from Free Marketing Made Easy, but that number is fairly small compared with the number of contacts in my personal and professional networks.

Lesson 1: The network is most important BEFORE you need it.

I am a Connector by nature – someone who helps folks make valuable connections with other people and potential opportunities, even when there’s ‘nothing in it’ for me. You are probably the same kind of connection-oriented person (many entrepreneurs are). Having a big-picture, long-term outlook on valuable relationships is one of the most important things you can do as a small business person. Cultivating, and maintaining relationships is like money in the bank – and you’ll be allowed to withdraw some of it when you need it, providing you have established enough ’social capital’ by giving before you take.

Let’s see how I did:

There are several interpretations we can make here:

The top two reports are individual sends, so it’s ok to disregard them and focus on the others.
I segmented my list into 5 categories, representing people I know from Clear (former customers from my first business), my friends, small business associates (owners), colleagues whom I have worked with and BWP (Boston World Partnerships) a networking organization from Boston.
I am least in touch with people from Clear. Not surprisingly then you’ll see that this list wasn’t current – 35.6% of the emails bounced because of address changes, etc. As I said before, building and maintaining these networks is important. Let’s see how I did in the other categories.
The average open rate was 46.14%. It would have been significantly higher had I kept that list of former customers current. But the important thing to know is how our 46.14% open rate compares to other industries?

As you can see, the standard open rate for Marketing/PR email is 13.5%. So the Free Marketing Made Easy launch outperformed our competitors by nearly 350% (3.5 times better results). Would we like a 100% open rate? Absolutely. But this seems like a pretty good start.

However, getting people to open your email is only the first step. Getting them to take action is the goal.

Click Through:

We did notice one remarkable click-through trend, which is illustrated in the images at the bottom of this page: the link to our video had an average click through of 79.94%. Now I need to be clear about the way you should interpret this: I am not saying that nearly 80% of the people who opened our email click on the video link. While that would be fantastic, that number is actually far lower. But the really positive news here, is that of the number of total clicks from this email, nearly 80% of them came from this one link. Clearly that strategy got people’s attention. Here’s a sample of how it looked in the email they received:

Example of our Launch email with embedded video link

The Takeaway:

Clearly, people like video. Framing it the way we did in this launch email attracts their curiosity – it’s like seeing a movie trailer (you want to see more of it, unless it is exceptionally lame). And it gives them something to talk about – which is almost always good for business.

These techniques are quite easy to implement. Get our Core Program, and/or join our Mentorship Class and we’ll show you how. Or just post your questions/comments below.

Cheers!