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
One Response to “Email Intelligence”
January 16th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
This is such a good example and also very true.
In our own tests we’ve seen wide disparity of results on the same offer with the same From Line, the same Subject Line and the same e-mail creative. There will be some minor difference based on your list but overall results should be consistent.
Although shaving and scrubbing are two factors another is slow DNS and then poor geo-targeting.
We tend to work very hard to find suitable alternatives for the non-country specific traffic that inevitably shows up in your email data, after all hotmail.com and yahoo.com are country agnostic.