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I tried using a marketing service for advertising. This one does it all, popups, popunders, bulk email to opt-in subscribers, search engine optimization, and a few others I'm sure I haven't listed. I've tried banner advertising with decent results but I wanted something more so I thought I'd give bulk email a try.
What a mistake. They guarantee a 3% click through rate from their email campaigns and when you look at your click-through page to see the results of your campaign, guess what click through rate you'll find? Exactly 3.33%. I tracked the campaign all day from 100 sent all the way to 27,500 sent emails and at every single point the click-through rate was exactly fixed at 3.33%. That's fishy enough for me to believe that these aren't even real emails. Not only is the ctr fixed at their guaranteed minimum, but it's instantaneous. If they're going to fix the numbers they should at least wait some time for the ctr to adjust so it looks like people are actually opening inboxes and reading emails!
Once I saw this instantaneous fixed ctr of 3.33% I decided to have a test email sent to myself. Nice feature. However, once I received the email I notice there's absolutely no way for them to track click-throughs. The link they included to my site was a simple link with no redirection through their servers. So no only is their ctr fixed at 3.33%, but they don't even pretend to be tracking it for real.
When I ask customer support about this I get politician style responses from them that don't answer the questions. That's fine. I went with the cheapest package to test it out. I was hoping for better results and was prepared to pay them for their most expensive package, but I'm going to stay away from these types of services. I'll stick to services with real ads on real webpages that I can visit myself. That way I know I'm getting real clicks. Not pre calculated nonsense.
JJ
[edited by: caveman at 5:53 pm (utc) on May 23, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS [/edit]
I'm no email expert but I know enough to know that testing, and finding good providers, often by word of mouth is important.
Since we don't allow specific recommendations/mentions of providers here, the best way I've found to get good recommendations is to hang out and post a bit, get to know some members, exchange stickies with those who share common interests and points of view (or not), and develop a trusted network of friends.
FWIW. ;-)
