Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ 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.

Wendy’s quite keen on Yorkshire though she’s not actually been there and knows it principally through the books of James Herriot.

Normally, the reality of a place is quite different to that which you read about in a book but that’s not the case for Yorkshire. Those rolling dales really are like that and many of the cute country towns that you see on the TV series haven’t changed a whole lot either.

For that matter, you can even go to the Skeldale House which these days houses the Herriot Museum and for that matter you can even stay in the Wheatsheaf Hotel that he stayed on his honeymoon. I’ve been told that we’re going to be staying there when we get around to going!

Yorkshire is one of those areas of England where you have a considerable choice of different activities to choose from too. If you tire of the dales, there’s York itself which just oozes history as do many of the medieval towns around the area. It’s easy to spend a week or even two going round it all.

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.

Many people these days work their way through a short list of the top directories when they’re promoting a new website. For some it’s a very short list: addurl to google and they’re done, for others they either slog away for months or just use one of the manual submission services to do it for them.

However, many people ignore all the new directories that are launched every day. After all, they’re weighing in with PR0 so why bother about them at all?

Well, for one thing google had PR0 when it started out (OK, so they probably fiddled the books to give it PR10 from day 1, but it should have had PR0). It’s the same with all the little directories that are launched. Certainly few of them will get beyond PR5 but links from all those little PR1-4 directories add up even if the bulk of them are sitting around PR1-PR2.

Also, they are usually free at the start but charge for listings after anything from 6 months to a year, essentially when the owner gets swamped with all the free submissions (which, in my case amounted to over 100 a day this time last year on Whole Earth Directory which I assume is fairly typical). So, if you go for a free entry now, it’ll save you money later and indeed it will save you from having to add a reciprocal link to the directory (generally the first step in trying to stem the flood of free entries).

Sounds good then? The problem is that these directories are launched just about every day of the week right through the year so it’s a major hassle in trying to keep up with them all (yes, I tried for a while). Fortunately, those nice folks in India have come to our aid again though and some services are on offer to do it for you for around $20/month which should net you something like 50 new directories each month and, even better, is the kind of growth in inbound links which the search engines love.

Although it might sound obvious, you need to ask people to do what you’d like them to do when you send out a marketing e-mail.

It might be obvious but many marketing e-mails are sent out without a clear “buy this” message and even more go out without giving the reader a clear means of actually buying the product. Many newsletters are sent out without containing links to specific products sold by the company sending it out yet it’s one of the easiest ways to pick up easy sales as you’re sending it out to people who’ve asked to be on your mailing list so they’re already interested in your products.

Don’t forget to vary your message too. For example, if you’re sending out a travel related newsletter, pick out upcoming vacations such as Easter and special interest periods like Valentine’s Day. Hallmark spend a LOT of money to produce cards that address every possible situation that you could imagine and you should approach your newsletter with the same originality (or just copy Hallmark!).

However, the most important thing is to ensure that there’s a very clear “buy this” message and a very easy way of a reader doing exactly that.