Promoting Through Email

[agerhart]

In direct marketing and direct mail it is known that when running a campaign you can expect 15% of the mail to be returned.

Is there any research that has given us percentages of the same sort for email marketing?

Is this percentage different for newsletters vs. emails?
Is this percentage different for text vs. html newsletters?

[MarkHutch]

In a good opt in system, the user can request what type of email they prefer to receive... ie. html or txt... We have used Topica to build email lists for several months and they take care of most of this stuff automaticly with their double opt in system. We would never send our own email to customers anymore. Even with opt in consumers about 10% forget they subscribed and complain to everyone they can find about SPAM. We always get it all worked out eventually, but it takes a person working full time just to prove you're innocent when a SPAM complaint is made against your company.

[agerhart]

Another question is:

What is the percentage of email that is bounced back as a result of changed email addresses? (ex: people changing their screen name on AOL which changes their email address)

[rcjordan]

>but it takes a person working full time just to prove you're innocent when a SPAM complaint is made against your company.

Good warning! Anyone dealing in quantities of email (or even replies to email from large websites) should heed it. There is a substantial network of blacklists out there, and it's easy to get in --not so easy to get out. Here's just one.

If you run your own mail server, you can configure it to utilize our list, if you'd like to refuse mail from these types of servers. Please note that if you do this, you may also refuse some legitimate (non-spam) mail, as some "bad" servers may also have good users on them. (It's unfortunate that one bad apple can sometimes spoil the whole bushel.)

The MAPS Relay Spam Stopper [work-rss.mail-abuse.org]

[beasscr]

Returns are totally variable. IF you have an in-house list it shouldn't be anywhere near that high. For example, our list had about a 5% undeliverable.

If you're renting a list from a vendor the vendor usually overdelivers to make up for undeliverable addresses. On one campaign that I recall we sent out about 7,000 emails, 1,000 of which were undeliverable. That's about 14%. Keep in mind the difference btwn undeliverable (bad address) and bounce (full mailbox). There shouldn't be much of a difference for newsletters vs. emails, nor for text vs. html.

[cfel2000]

My company regually sends out emails to it's customers. We have found that a few (about 1 every 1000 people) repond saying they can't read the email. However, we have noted that a HTML email boosts the response quite a bit higher than text emails.