Hi All! Rob Willmann here.
Glad you're here reading today. I've spent some time working on my mailing stats, and wanted to share my results that I have with you.
These results are from my own mailing to 8 different mailers, promoting my site, RobWillmann.com. I used the same message to each one, and only changed up the Subject. (I'll cover WHY I changed the subject between these mailers in a different article.)
In essence, I surfed up or purchased mailer upgrades\mailer credits in the following Viral Mailers and Safelists listed below. I sent out around 29,000 emails. I tracked everything.
Here's the mailers I used:
- Fast Mailer - 1000 emails sent.
- List Nerds - 4045 emails sent.
- Prospect Geyser - 1000 emails sent.
- State of the Art Mailer - 1500 emails sent.
- European Safelist - 7837 emails sent.
- Mister Safelist - 4703 emails sent.
- TrafficLeads2Income Viral Mailer - 8010 emails sent.
- Classic Solo Mailer - 1000 emails sent.
Total Emails Sent: 29,095
Here's my results:
Trust the Numbers Over Your Feelings - Numbers Don't Lie
All of us have programs, Traffic Exchanges, or Mailers that we just 'like' to use. No reason except we like it.
Yet true analysis of results must be objective. In other words, it doesn't matter if you LIKE a specific mailer. What matters is this: Do you get results? That may sound harsh, but it's true.
I may really enjoy using a certain mailer and sending out my emails, but after weeks of using it, if I get ZERO conversions, then was it worth it? All I've really done is 'increased my brand' with the very small percentage of people who opened and read my email.
I highly recommend that you track your results, and use the Traffic Exchanges and Mailers that WORK and give you the results you desire.
Awesome, Now let's take a look at my numbers above. :)
State of the Art Mailer (SOTAM) has the Best Open Percentage.
This week, State of the Art Mailer (SOTAM) barely edged out ClassicSoloMailer in the open percentage of my mailing. I sent 1500 emails out via SOTAM, and per my LeadsLeap tracker, 52 were opened. Not too bad. That's a whopping 3.47 open percentage.
For me, that's pretty good. I usually expect between 1 and 2 percent for open mails.
Since using my method is a numbers game, the more opened emails equals more eyeballs on my offer. It doesn't matter how many emails I send if I don't get a decent number of people reading it.
Highest Percentage Converted is List Nerds at Around 7%.
Before we get into the numbers, let's talk about what I mean when I say 'Conversion'.
I am trying to grow my own mailing list, so I don't send out any emails currently for affiliate programs or anything else. I'm solely in list-building mode, and will be for the next while.
I believe this is the best method of long-term growth, since I am build my own mailing list, and can then build a long-term relationship with my subscribers.
I am specifically sending out an email that points people to my Lead Capture Pages with an opt-in form. I leverage two lead capture pages with the same body but different headlines. I rotate between them so that I can split test my results.
These two Lead Capture pages offer timely information to internet marketers on how to improve their results in their marketing efforts, and how to increase their email marketing results.
While the total number of List Nerds conversions to my email list was only two (which is the same as SOTAM), List Nerds had a significantly lower number of opened emails.
List Nerds had 2 conversions from 28 opened emails, and SOTAM had 2 conversions from 52 opened emails.
This matters.
It impacts the conversion percentage. I calculate my conversion percentage based on the number of opened emails. I think that it makes sense to do it this way.
Why?
Well, let's assume that I only have 5 emails opened on a specific mailer, but 2 of them sign up for my offer.
That's 40%, which is significant. Real humans are reading my offer, and it means I've found a mailer with results. I will send my offer again to the same mailer if I had such results. Makes sense? Great!
97 Opened Emails by Mister Safelist is Another Win
Even though I didn't get any conversions, I did get 97 opens (which is a 2.06% open rate) by the subscribers to Mister Safelist.
Jerry's mailer is one of the good ones. He has a serious group of marketers that use his mailer, and keeps his list clean. I may not have made any conversions on this mailer, but I may on the next one.
I consider this to be a good statistic as well under one condition: I need to eventually start making conversions. High open rate percentages with no conversions isn't sustainable long-term.
However, this was just one mailing to this list. If this happened for months, or over 10-20 mailings, then I would have a problem.
This was my first time mailing that large of a number to Jerry's list so I am fine with the results, considering it was 97 opens.
Takeaway: What do these numbers really mean?
There's a couple of important points that I need to make about my results.
First, I didn't send a huge number of emails to any one specific list.
The closest I came to a real statistical number of emails was Traffic Leads 2 Income Viral Mailer, where I sent just over 8000 emails. Realistically I need to send a lot more emails to these lists for these numbers to be statistically relevant.
Second, this means I haven't sent ENOUGH emails out through these mailers for the results to be significant. As I continue to send out emails, I will document the results as well since that will increase the accuracy of my testing.
Third, you MUST be tracking your results.
If you don't track your results, you're guessing. If you don't know which advertising source gives you the best results, you can't laser-focus your efforts to the sources that are really helping you.
For tracking results, there's plenty of options, but the one I leverage is LeadsLeap. Their Tracker gives you plenty of statistics, including unique visitors, 'Real' visitors (people who were there for longer than a few seconds), and a host of other options, including the ability to rotate through URLs. I definitely recommend LeadsLeap if you need to track your results. Best of all, you can use their tracker for free.
That's it for this article where I go over my stats from my May 5th Viral Mailer mailing.
I'm glad you came on this journey with me and read this to the end. :)
I would love to hear from you. What did you think of my post? Is there anything above that you feel I could explain better? Is there something you'd like me to cover in the future? Let me know below with a comment. :)
Peace and Love,
-Rob