Marketing Studies

Yes, the time has finally come ["the time" should have come much earlier, but was continuously being postponed].

Tomorrow our subscribers will finally be receiving their first issue of our brand new infoMarketing e-zine. Yes, a happy day indeed:)

I sent all our subscribers an e-mail announcing this, and also giving them a shot to unsubscribe before they even get the first issue. Yes, I know, I'm a nice person.

OK, here are the delivery statistics for this first e-mail:

Total list size: 1366 [total subscriber count]

Confirmed (double opt-in) subscribers: 974 [71,3%]
[the number of people that actually confirmed their subscription; this number is actually quite high; especially considering other projects I was working on]

Total recipients after "remove" list check: 945 [97%]
[the total number of people that the first mailing was sent to; we got this number after removing the people that were already on our removal list]

Undelivered: 46 [4,87%]

Removal requests: 4 [0,44%]
[up to now; not enough time passed yet, so this number will probably be higher after a day or two]

Of course I still don't know how many really got the message delivered, how many actually received it in their inbox (instead of their "junk" folder) and how many actually opened it and then read it:)

I could of course measure how many opened it, but using a tracking pixl would probably decrease the chance of delivering the message even further, since many filters nowadays also block e-mail with these.

Yeah, getting e-mail delivered is becoming one heck of a job ? not to mention getting people to subscribe.

I was playing with a "delivery model" yesterday that demonstrates how difficult it really is (but I'm quite sure I must have left out at least one or two important "barriers"):

1. E-mail and Permission Acquisition -->

2. Send -->

3. ISP Blacklist barricade -->

4. ISP Spam Filter (or other server-side filters) -->

5. User-side Spam Filter -->

6. User-side E-mail Client Spam Filter -->

7. User-side Quick-Scan Human Content Filter -->

8. User-side "In-Depth" Human Content Filter -->

9. [delete / move to "to read" older / read]

So, according to this little model, we need to get through 7 different barriers to get our message "delivered" to the right people, and when we do deliver it, our recipient still has to choose whether to delete it, move it to the famous "to read" folder or actually (yes, I know it's quite unbelievable) read it.

This model still requires some work, so expect to hear of it again very soon.