Direct Mail study by sign-up.to
I finally got around to reading the latest report on direct email marketing from sign-up.to which was actually released way back in August. It’s one of those important but not urgent things to do.
For me the most illuminating thing about the report was the business sector split in who was successful in getting their recipients to open their mails, read them and click on the embedded links within them.
It seems, if you want someone to read your mail the best business to be in is not business at all but government (including both national and local). Government beats everyone else hands down in getting people to read their stuff. The worst ten sectors, included in the report are – in descending order B2B Sales, Finance/Insurance, Sales/Marketing, Fashion, PR, Education/Training, Property, IT, Events and HR/Recruitment. Hey, Guess what folks? Spare Time Billionaire covers at least five of those sectors.
Before I go on to discuss all this, I’ll just point to the other end of the scale for those readers who still (why the heck not?) have not got their own business up and running and are hunting for sectors that may be receptive to direct marketing techniques. The top ten sectors are Government, New Media, Restaurants, B2C Retail, Music, Health/Beauty, Publishing, Industrial/Manufacturing, Sport/Leisure, Charity. In the small business sector you can cut that down to Restaurants, Retail, Music, Health/Beauty, Industrial/Manufacturing and Sport/Leisure. Something to think on there.
You can read the whole report at http://www.sign-up.to/email-marketing-benchmark/2010BenchmarkReport.pdf – it’s fascinating stuff.
The problem with us internet marketeers is that we are simply hard and cynical animals. After all, we have seen all the scams and might even have tried some of them in our day, if truth be told.
One way to really get our hackles up is to trap us in a squeeze page or block our access to what we deserve for free with a forced sign-in.
As for adverts, we use ad-blocker on our browsers so we do not even have to look at the puny efforts of our rivals.
Yet we get upset at the low click-through rates we ourselves are getting, and how much rubbish we have to wade through on the internet before we find something that will actually be of some use to our business. Isn’t it time we woke up and realised that nothing comes for free. This site only exists because it is subsidised by Wick IT Services and if readers were willing to pay you might find that there would be more information and detail than you will get here for free.
Think this phrase through and see if you can locate the fault in the logic that you expect someone smarter than you to be dumb enough to do something you would never do yourself, i.e. give your secrets to strangers for no reward.
Doh! And kindly, turn off your ad-blocker when you come here – you might see something interesting!
Tags: direct mail, email marketing, internet marketing, research, sign-up.to
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