My love|hate relationship with mailers

[essentialsoflife]

I became enthusiastic about using mailers after joining Your Viral List and reading the Top 25 converting sites and seeing how quickly the site grew.  So, I thought I'd do testing on my own because I wanted to find out "the rest of the story"... you know... like what's the CTR? and what is the ratio of how many messages to read versus how many views delivered?

 

Here is what I found as an average for 2 weeks (each using the free account):

 

List Surfing - 4% - read 3:1

10x mailer - 3% - read 3:1

Marketing Checkpoint - 2.5% - read 1.5:1

List Impact - 2.5% - read 4:1

List Jumper - 2% - read 2:1

Traffic Bonus - 2% - read 3:1

List Joe - 2% - read 4:1

List Bonus - 1.5% - read 2:1

Bweeble - 1.5% - read 4:1

#1ProfitRing - 0.8% - read 6:1

WebBizInsider - 0.6% - read 6:1

Herculist - too low to mention

 

I can view about 500 pages an hour. 

 

My end result was that I spent 2 hours earning credits for 1 subscriber; which, I don't think is terrible for this test, but obviously needs improvement!  If paying 0.01 per click, that would be $8/subscriber. 

 

I'll weed out the ones that take a lot of work for low CTR, try a few others, and change my landing pages to see if I can get better results.  Though I haven't lost interest in mailers, I can certainly see why it'll be necessary to pay for some advertising if I want to grow my business into something that will support me this year!

[Darren Olander]

Interesting..thanks for sharing your stats!

[topviralbiz]

Thanks for the post, very useful stats....yes, mailers can be hit and miss, just like TE's, it's just a matter of doing the numbers and seeing what works

[john566]

thanks for sharing, Im also an affiliate for "your viral list", my first week i was also promoting using the top free traffic sources and managed to get 20 subscribers and 2 sales, i then paid for a solo ad from udimi and got about 40+ signups and about 8 sales...so if your wanting fast results would reccomend paying for a solo ad with 85% - 100% tier 1 visitors...

[paulserban]

Yes, in mailers and TEs is a low rate of subcribers & sales, but... it exist!

[weblord]

yes listsurfing is on top of the list, as i've expected it, but now it has changed a lot.

[Bruno Duarte]

A combination of both paid and free is optimal. I use Mailers, TEs, PPC and Solo ads. Balance 

[weblord]

wherever there is free ad i'll be there. though i never paid for advertising since i can do it myself.