Email Optimization Ezine Promotion Tested, Section 1 (Research)
| Ezine Promotion Tested, Section 1 (Research) |
| Tuesday, 20 March 2001 | |
Topic: Ezine Promotion - We test 36 directories announcement list, and review sites. Test Number: #112501-SD Word Count: 1950+ Focus: 7 Questions
Credits:
We analyze GOOGLE's new "adword" program. The results are promising. We are projecting 27,900 highly targeted impressions for just $418.
So how many subscribers can you win with a 30-day blitz in 36 directories, lists, and review sites? What if you were featured on the popular List-A-Day web site? What if you hired one of the web's leading authorities on ezine promotion to coordinate the campaign? Disraeli ruminates, "What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens." The truth of his maxim has proven itself, once again, as we completed this study. Here is a brief synopsis of our findings: TEST SUMMARY We worked with Brian Alt, consultant and editor of the highly popular daily, Ezine-Tips, to craft a comprehensive promotion campaign: We submitted to 16 directories, 17 Announcement Lists, and the 3 leading review sites. TEST PRODUCT We were seeking subscribers for a new ezine focused on web marketing (one of the most popular categories). TEST COSTS The labor to perform the (tedious) submission work cost us $600. It took approximately 10 man-hours. TEST METHODOLOGY We channeled responses to an isolated email address, which then forwarded them to separate tracking locations. We also created a mirror web page, with a meta-refresh tag. The function of this page was to identify visitors who came to the site directly, bypassing the email subscribe link. TEST DEFINITIONS
TEST RESULTS Here are the results we achieved after 30 days:
*Though we setup a specific URL to track subscribers who went directly to the web, we still cannot account completely for those who may have just typed in the name.
Why is this bleary-eyed researcher (somewhat) pleased with a marketing campaign that has, thus far, cost (an outrageous) $5 per subscriber? How can he find any satisfaction in a directory submission effort that has only achieved a 44% listing success? Read on... but read, first, the bad news. The haphazard collection of ezine directories which now litter the Internet are, for the most part, under-maintained, and over-hyped. Many (for us) seemed to be complete waste of time. We submitted to 16 of these directories, and then 30 days later, we re-visited their sites to study the results. Here is what we discovered: DIRECTORIES
In general, we failed to get results in 56% of the sites to which we submitted. That's a fairly pathetic track record when you consider that the submission work was performed by one of best known ezine promotion experts on the Internet. Still, there is a silver lining to this dismal cloud and we will reveal it soon enough. But first... What about the announcement lists? How effective were they? ANNOUNCEMENT LISTS > 00-list-announce - 473 members The Yahoo! lists were small and probably not worth the effort. ClassroomConnect's NEW-LIST proved to be of no value to us, as they do not accept business ezine submission. They do, however, accept consumer ezine submissions and they have a circulation of more than 5000. Their URL is: <http://listserv.classroom.com/archives/new-list.html> We also submitted to NewJour, but they never responded. Their URL is: <http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/> The most effective announcement list we discovered was New-List.com. They boast 9732 subscribers, but that number is an aggregate of 21 different categories (lists). We also submitted our test ezine to 3 review sites. To increase the likelihood of an acceptance, we packaged our submission with a professional, hype-free, pre-written evaluation. We selected: REVIEW SITES> List-A-Day.com On February 20th our test ezine was featured on List-A-Day. During the next 24-hour period, traffic and subscriptions increased by approximately 700%. The results were encouraging, if also deceptive. In the final analysis, we don't believe that the review sites will produce as high a yield as the directories. And as intimated earlier, we project this campaign to be more cost effective then it would seem at the moment. Here is why... Section 2 (Continue...) |
