The Value of Happy Birthday!
What is the value of wishing someone a Happy Birthday? It takes less than 15 seconds of your time to write someone and say Happy Birthday, (insert name). Some people even abbreviate this already short sentence with Happy bday. In life and business we spend much of our time thinking up of ways to maximize our ROI. There aren’t many low risk/high reward investments out there, but wishing someone a Happy Birthday is one of those. That person may have recieved only a handful of birthday wishes. The fact that you took the time to appreciate him/her on the most important day of their life makes you stand out.
How does this relate to me or my blog about email marketing? First off, I recently had a birthday, January 21st, and secondly using email marketing to wish someone a Happy Birthday can really touch someone’s life. For example, one of the more memorable Happy Birthday wishes I recieved was a greeting card from a friend of mine. You can view it here. This is a contact I do business with and you can bet in the future I’ll continue to my relationship with her.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lycos calling it quits
I give credit to the guys over at Deliverability.com for bringing this to my attention. You can read their article here. Lycos has decided to shut it down. All the emails will be redirected elsewhere.
Below is the listing of all the domains that will be affected. Start scrubbing your lists now since these will be inactive.
benoist.name
caramail.com
caramail.lycos.fr
caramail.lycos.fr
jubii.co.uk
jubii.dk
lycos.at
lycos.co.uk
lycos.de
lycos.es
lycos.fr
lycos.it
lycos.nl
mail.lycos.at
mail.lycos.co.uk
mail.lycos.de
mail.lycos.es
mail.lycos.it
mail.lycos.nl
multimania.com
tripod.co.uk
tripod.de
tripod.es
Filed under: Email news, ISP News | 1 Comment »
Email Intelligence
This is more catered to the Affiliate Marketing industry but has revelance in other industries as well. Profitability in email marketing comes down to many factors, but one often overlooked component is the ad campaign itself.
For example, let’s look at two affiliate offers. We”ll call them Lead X and Lead Y. Lead X and Lead Y are the exact same lead with matching fields. Everything is identical except two small conditions, the leads are hosted on different advertising networks and vary in price. The advertiser on Lead X offers $20 per lead while the advertiser on Lead Y offers only $18 per. Natrually you want to go for Lead X, right? Not so fast!
Lead X | Emails Sent: 100,000 | Clicks: 3,000 | CTR: 3% | Leads 130 | Earnings: $2,600 |
Lead Y | Emails Sent: 100,000 | Clicks: 3,000 | CTR: 3% | Leads 160 | Earnings: $2,880 |
The above example is called Split A/B testing. I used basic examples to make the math easy for both you and me. Usually, Split A/B testing is done on a much smaller scale to test the conversion ratios of similar offers. Anywho, you might ask, “Why did Lead Y do better than Lead X eventhough Lead X has a higher payout and they are the exact same offer?!” One of the biggest factors to consider is the scrubbing of the lead. In an perfect world you would have generated the exact same amount of leads for both advertisers. However, Lead X has a larger database of leads they are scrubbing your traffic aganist than Lead Y. Even worse, I’ve experienced networks offering higher payouts, but they engaged in a practice called shaving. Shaving in a nutshell is stealing leads without paying for them.
Use your intelliegence and always test similar offers before you put your time and energy in promoting an offer. The example used above are very basic in nature. Email marketing is much more complicated than the example I provided. Do your research and your email intelligence will show in the form of increased profits.
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment »
Explosive Growth
One of the trends I’ve noticed in the different industries I’ve been part of is that growth occurs in waves, not steadily. It’s true that the actions you take on a daily, consistant basis affect your growth negatively or positvely. However, growth itself comes in small and large spurts.
I remember during my highschool years, when I first got into internet marketing, I was able to support myself with one or two great months out of the year. It’s true I still lived with my parents, but I still had bills in excess of $1,000/month plus other expenses that teens spent their money on. During the wild west of email marketing in 2000-2003 anything went. I would find various methods of inboxing ISPs, mostly AOL, and when those loopholes would close I’d move on. This explained the inconsistancy from month to month in my early days. As I got smarter , I began reinvesting all profits back into the company instead of buying the next hot toy. My dreams as a kid was to have the hottest car in the school parking lot to impress the ladies. Well, my senior year of highschool I bought a BMW Z3 for 23K cash. It was a real sick car but not the panty dropper I thought it was. I was still a dork with no social skills.
Anyways, enough of my teen years and back to the point of this post! When you are struggling, don’t be discouraged. Building a business takes time and effort. If you believe in the work you are doing, you will be rewarded. Explosive growth appears in waves. It could be an important contact you made, a presentation to an organization, or some new technology that you have mastered that triggers your growth. Keep up the work and you will experience explosive growth. It’s what you do after those first waves of success hit you that will make or break your company.
Filed under: Inbox Truth | 2 Comments »
A Little Self-Indulgence
Affiliate Summit West is comming next week in Las Vegas. I won’t be attending this year because of prior commitments. After all, it will be hard to top one of the best trips I’ve ever been on from last year.
Affiliate Summit is the premier event for affiliate marketers. Some of the more important contacts I’ve made to date were met hanging out at the bar or at hosted parties during Affiliate Summit. I know AS 2009 will be just as great, probably better, than 2008. Here is a little video footage of my experience at AS West 2008, enjoy!
I did not actually get to KEEP that Lambo. I won, err earned, the trip to Vegas, 3 night suite stay, and the green “Money” Lambo for 2 days. We managed to pull out the victory for top revenue during the month of their promotion.
XY7 went completely overboard with their promotion of this, in the best way possible for me! Live camera crew, hired show girls, man oh man! Additonally, nothing secured a business relationship like taking clients for a spin in the ultra fast lambo. It was definately a great experience to live out while I still have my youth.
Anyway, hope to hear some great stories from AS 2009!
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing Events | 4 Comments »