Running the Numbers – Email Marketing

Almost everything we do in internet marketing can be broke down in average numbers which gives us the ability to see if an offer is worth the time or money it takes to use the offer. This also helps us to determine the quality of the advertising source we are using.

In today’s technique lesson we are going to look at email marketing and how understanding the numbers can help you be successful.

First you need to understand that there are many many factors involved in any type of marketing. For instance if you are brand new to internet marketing and no one has ever heard of you, you will get a lower response rate than someone who has been around for years and is well known in the industry.

The individual program you are promoting can have a lot to do with your success. If you are marketing a program ran by someone who has been known to scam in the past, there is a good chance they will do it again and those who have been in the industry for a longer period of time will ignore your marketing efforts because of the program you are sending.

Of course the quality of your advertisement will also make a difference in the results you are getting. If you are sending prospective clients to a website that appears to have been designed by a 10 year old, you will not get as good of results as a site professionally prepared will get.

There are of course many other things that can and will affect your results, which makes it impossible to choose any one “magic number” as the goal you are reaching for. Yet there is a sort of “unwritten” average within the email marketing industry that gives you a good starting point for determining the success or lack thereof of any individual mailing.

In general for every 1000 email you have sent out to a completely cold list, (people who do not know you) you can on average expect about 30 of those 1000 people to actually open the email.

So if purchase a solo email to 5000 people and only get 10 clicks on your link, there is a good chance the site you are working with has padded their numbers in so fashion because you should expect approximately 150 clicks out of a mailing to 5000 members.

Of course the opposite is true also, if you send a solo email to 5000 and receive 500 clicks, there is a possibility it is a very good list. At the same time however, there is also a possibility the site is forging the numbers to make them look better, so do not allow this one test to be your entire reason for choosing a site, you always need to look a little deeper.

Converting to Sales/Joining

The next step to gauge is the number of actual sales you get from the advertising. Again the numbers can vary greatly depending on many different factors, but on average you can expect 1 person out of every 100 who actually look at your site to purchase something or join the program you are promoting.  When we convert those numbers out, it means that on average you can expect approximately 1 sale/signup our of every solo 3333 emails sent.

Were most people make a mistake in their numbers is when they mail a set number of emails and don’t immediately get the set number of sales to correspond they move on to the next site. A single mailing however, will never be a good test of the effectiveness of the site. It is entire possible to mail to 10000 members and not get a single sale, yet mail to only 1000 in the next mailing and get 5 from that single mailing. You can not average numbers over a single set of trials, it is only by repeated trials that you can determine the effectiveness of an advertising source.

Cost & Time Effectiveness

To make this section a little easy to understand I am going to use a real life program I am a member of.

ListQuik is one of the larger mailing lists and currently has about 11500 members. As a free member, you can mail to 200 members every 3 days or you can upgrade at a cost of just $8.91 a month and mail to 1000 members every 3 days. Lets use our averages shown above and apply them to these numbers and see what happens.

Mail to 200 every 3 days.

Since the average is 30 people physically looking at your site for every 1000 emails sent, if you can only mail to 200 at a time, you would have to make 5 mailings to get a full 1000 piece mailing or about 30 views.

Since it takes about 3333 emails to convert to 1 sale, you would have to mail 5 x  3.3 times or approximately 17 times to get 1 sale. You can only mail once every 3 days so to mail 17 times would take 51 days for a single sale.

To put it plainly, that just is not worth my time to make it happen. I would rather pay for a solo that wait 2 months between sales for this one site.

It all changes at the $8.97 a month level.

At that level you can mail to 1000 members every 3 days x 3.3 equals approximately 1 sale every 10 days. So over the course of a month, if you mail every 3 days like you are allowed you could expect to make approximately 3 sales during that time at a cost of only $8.97, making your cost per sale only $2.99.

That is less than the price many places charge for a single solo and well worth it in my book. List Quik at the $8.97 a month level offers a good value for your money.

Can we compare the actual costs of the two options? Of course we can. Lets assume it take approximately 10 minutes to place a single solo ad. In order to make 3 sales as a free member, you will need to place 17 x 3 = 51 ads, versus 10 ads placed as a paid member.

That means 51 x 10 = 510 / 60 = 8.5 hours of your time placing ads as a free member.

10 x 10 = 100 / 60 = 1.6 hours of your time placing ads as a paid member to get the same number of sales.

Figuring your time is worth a lousy little $10 an hour, your total cost to produce 3 sales as a free member would be $85.00 (8.5 hours x $10).

As a paid member is would cost 1.6 hours x $10 = $16.00 + $8.97 = $24.97 to produce the same 3 sales.

So not spending money could be costing you more than actually spending a few bucks. You simply have to run the numbers to find out where the true costs are at.

Use Positive Thinking to

Increase Your Income

When we talk casually with friends and family, we want them to be proud of us, to think only good things about us and to hold us in high regard. So when things are not working the way we would prefer them to, whether it is dealing with a regular 9 to 5 job or our work from home opportunities, we tend to look for circumstances we can blame our lack of success on.

For instance, how often have you been speaking with someone and said something along the lines of: “I had such great hopes for xyz program, BUT it turned out to be a con”. “I have everything set to start the money flowing BUT the program folded on me”.

There are many different ways you can say it and there are many different excuses you can use as to why things did not go the way you were expecting them to, yet in almost every case you can think of, there is one word you will see pop up over and over again, BUT.

The word BUT is a highly negative word and we use it to attempt to put blame for a specific set of circumstances off onto someone or something beyond our control. In reality however, we are 100% in control of our lives, yet there are times when we overlook things that allow things to go differently than what we expected.

To overcome this, we need to take responsibility for our actions by simply accepting the fact that we do make mistakes and we can overlook things that allow things to happen to us. For instance, in another article on this site I talk about List Joe being on my Do Not Join list. I take full responsibility for what happened because I did not take the time to research them, to ask others what their experience was like. The main reason I did not bother was because I saw the program as nothing more than an advertising source, not as a program for me to build a downline in.

Had I done my homework, I probably would not have bothered to purchase the credits from them, but I personally made the decision to spend the small amount of money rather than taking the time to do proper research and the result was, I got ripped off.

So rather than playing the pass the blame game, it is in your best interest to either choose to not speak of an incident, or to turn the situation into something you can learn from. A chance to grow not just your business but also your knowledge in your business.

You might say something like: “I am not making as much money as I thought I would, because I still have a lot to learn, and I am working hard to learn as much as I can right now.”

Don’t beat yourself up over your mistakes, learn from them. Seek out things you could have done to prevent it from happening and you will end up a stronger and smarter marketer because of it.

Balanced Advertising

If you have never heard of balanced advertising, don’t worry about it because it is a term I coined recently to describe what I am doing to fix something I see within the text exchange industry, that I believe is bad for everyone involved, except perhaps those operating the exchange.

Most ad exchanges offer multiple types of advertising. Click on a banner and you earn xx amount of credits. Click on a text link and you earn a different amount of credits, hot links, solos, header ads, footer ads and a huge arrangement of different types of solos from any one of a dozen or so networks. Every text ad exchange determines their own number of credits and or cash offered for each type of advertising and prices charged to the advertising customer is usually higher on ad types the give the clickers the most points.

All of that sounds perfectly normal and to be expected, but you only need to use a high quality tracker, that allows you to include sub ID’s and it is easy to see where the advertisers are taking a beating because of this type of system being in place in virtually all ad exchanges.

Over the past few weeks I have done extensive testing to see how well various types of advertising pull in ad exchanges and the results actually surprised me because two things stood out in glaring form.

First I noticed there are exceptionally few people that click on anything other than solos. Secondly, is that the network solos get clicked about 10 times as often as other types of solos.

From the advertisers stand point, it is obvious network solos are the way to go, at least on the surface, but on the other hand, it means almost all other types of advertising being offered is almost worthless. I watched banner after banner eat through 100′s and 1000′s of views with 1 or 2 clicks if I was lucky. The same held true with top and bottom solo ads, hot links and traffic links. PTC links got their 50 to 100 clicks they were due, but that is to be expected when people are getting paid to click.

The other things I noticed is that within the networks, there are way to many people that are in almost all of the programs using the network. I saw one ad get 2200 clicks in a network ad, but when I looked at the number of different people that were seeing the ad (based on ISP address), there was only 57 people that actual saw the ad. That is almost 39 times that each of those 57 people saw that ad.

I personally like people seeing my ad multiple times, but since I also know by my tracking that not  a single sale was made on that ad and it makes it obvious this is not a good thing.

The cause of the problem was obvious, the people seeing the ads are mainly clicking on the types of ads that give them the most credits. Considering it is common to see solos paying 3000 credits a click in the same exchange that only pay 20 credits per click on hot links and traffic links, it is easy to see why people ignore the lower paying clicks.

Knowing this it was easy for me to see what had to be done. All types of clicks have to pay the same amount or people are going to ignore the lower paying ones, basically making them worthless. That is exactly what we did with Goldmine Ad Exchange.

All clicks at the Goldmine pay 100, 300 or 500 credits per click depending on what level membership you have. It does not matter whether you are clicking a network solo, regular solo, text ad or traffic link, you earn exact the same when you click on them.

As our membership grows and all of our members learn they earn the same amount no matter what they click, we will see much higher click rates on all types of advertising.

One other major thing happens with this system. It greatly decreases the amount of credits you need to trade for ads because there are not huge differences in credits that have to be paid out. This alone should put an end to solos costing 2 Million credits.

I think you will begin seeing more and more exchanges starting to bring the credit value of the various types of clicks closer together because having all these various type of advertising choices available is worthless if no one is clicking on them. I will continue to run checks on how things are going and update you when there is more info available.