I’ve been sending out emails as self promotion for years. For my last mailing, I signed up with a mailing service, Constant Contact, to fulfill the task. All of a sudden, I feel like a real e-marketeer.
For the entirety of my career, I’ve done promotion of some sort. For most of the last 20 years, it was direct mail. In the last 4 years, it has been almost entirely email. The source of my list has been my clients who I’ve worked for, graphic designers and art directors who I want to work for, people who have signed up at my exhibits, and the friends in my Eudora address book. For a time, I was harvesting email addresses from Adbase (only those who said they would accept emails, really). I felt like I was a spammer though, sending these unsolicited emails to people I had no prior contact with (I was sending out a proto-photoblog before such things became ubiquitous, a Photo-of-the-Month). After attending an SPGA event about e-marketing and the current practices, I learned that I indeed was a spammer, and I halted my email activities for months while I figured out what to do next.
I returned to a strictly newsletter format, and cut down the list. I’d been managing it myself, with Group Mail Pro and an html editor, so advancing to a service has been a big jump. Now, I get a flashy template to organize my content. I get reports on the behavior of my respondees, which is really cool, and a bit unnerving, because now I know that people are doing it to me too.
My list has 381 people on it. Two days after sending the newsletter, I can report that over half of them opened the emails, and 40% clicked on one of the links in the newsletter. 4% bounced. Only one person opted out of the list. Compared with other sites, as they say in Lake Wobegone, I’m way above average (which are: 18% bounces, 37% open, and 9% click through).
There’s a new button near the top of my Typelists there on the right (under the About and the email), where you can subscribe to the next issue of my newsletter. Or you can click here to do it.
It sounds like you're really onto a good marketing tool there. I have been considering starting up a newsletter to promote my sites, so I might just check out Constant Contact. Thanks for the tip!
Posted by: zhonghuarising | June 08, 2006 at 06:46 PM