Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

One confusing aspect of an e-mail marketing campaign is that whilst there’s almost always a big hit in takeup just after you send out the e-mails, it can be months before you see the full effect.

You might think that you can assume that the majority of your sales will come in that initial hit or within a few days of your e-mail but that depends a lot on the business that you’re in.

For example, we’re primarily e-mailing private owners of holiday accommodation and, in most cases, this isn’t their primary occupation. Therefore, if we send our marketing e-mails out Monday to Thursday we normally expect to get a lower immediate response than if we send them out Friday evening through to Sunday. However, that’s not always the case as our highest response ever was from an e-mail sent out on a Tuesday evening.

The season is also a factor so in our case if we send out the signup e-mails from June to August, we get get lower responses than if we send them out September through to February simply because the owners are just too busy to do much in the way of marketing whilst they’re in the peak season for guests.

Even the time of day can make a difference. This one is harder to call but generally your best bet is probably around 10am or 7pm on the principle that a workd-based target audience will have cleared up their overnight e-mails by 10am therefore yours will be on the top of the pile and likewise for a homebased audience at 7pm.

Whenever you do it though, don’t forget that many people file their e-mail for action later. In our own case, we often get a response from e-mail sent months earlier and, usually, would expect to get around 50% of the total response after quite a significant delay.

The weather has taken a distinct lurch for the better over the last week or so and we’re having to go back to just the t-shirts as it’s just too hot outside at the moment for anything else.

Somehow I just can’t see that heat wave holding up but we’re trying to make the most of it while it lasts (well, will be once we all get over the flu that’s felled most of us over the last week).

It is pretty peculiar to be needing the airconditioning in February though!

Whilst I include most of my sites in an annual site-promotion programme I’m really bad at omitting the blogs from that. Why? Well, because it’s not so easy to promote a blog as most directories aren’t geared up to listing them in a sensible way.

So, now and again, I look around for new places to list the blogs and just came across rssHugger this afternoon.

As in most blog directories, this one considers blogs separately from normal sites and, of course, in this particular instance targets the RSS feeds which is always useful as you can get a whole bunch of new readers if you’re on the “right” RSS aggregators. Now, the question is whether rssHugger is one of those “right” aggregators but, at the moment, it’s just impossible to say as 1) this is a relatively new site and 2) I don’t know the demographics of those that use it and therefore whether or not they’d be generally interested in the stuff that I write.

Initially the sign-up was $20 for 10 years but they dropped that requirement recently for those blogs that write a review of them. Personally, I think that it’s good to have that notional $20 value as it gives a broad indication as to where they themselves feel the value of a listing on rssHugger would be.

What’s the site like though? It has a very clean look which in some senses is good but it’s a little too clean as it’s not immediately clear from the opening screen that there’s a directory living here. I think it would be better to move that directory onto the front page. It’s also quite a long directory and could do with being stuctured eg you get “Investing” and “Save Money” as two categories yet since the directory is purely alphabetical these related categories are nowhere near each other.

Is it worth listing with? In that it’s free at the moment there’s no downside and it has the feel of a site that could have a lot of upside so, yes, it’s worth listing with. How valuable the listing will be only time will tell.

I’ve been trying to build up the representation of properties that I have in Spain by way of sending out an e-mail in Spainish to a number of properties. Now, the sites that I have are basically targetted at an English speaking audience so I need the entries to be in English of course.

What’s interesting is that a number of properties have responded and are all excusing their “bad English”. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, these are largely Spanish owned properties. The funny thing is that the English is often better than the English that I’ve been getting back from properties based in the UK!

Still, what I must do next time is highlight that I’ll translate the entries into English if needbe which I suspect will bump up the take-up somewhat next time I’m trying to get more Spaniards onto the listings.

Whenever we send out a newsletter to our B&B people, we always get a number of e-mails returned with errors.

Now, in some cases it’s because the owners have sold up and moved on but in surprisingly high number of cases it’s because they’ve changed their e-mail address and not told us. In fact, when you do a search for them there’s usually a considerable number of places that they’ve been advertising with yet which still hold the old address.

It’s just crazy to throw away advertising like that and yet people do it.

OK, sometimes they are forced into a change when they change ISP (although, quite why they don’t use their own domain name for their e-mail escapes me) and, after all, who remembers everywhere that they’re advertising? Fair enough, except that they don’t need to remember all the time: just searching for their old e-mail will turn up a reasonable fraction of their advertising in most cases.

What they should do, of course, is to keep a list of everywhere that they’re advertising so that they can change the e-mails and other details if need be.