Today for improving House of Rave I went through adding some products and correcting some templates. However the more notable thing was I sent out the first proper email blast for HoR.
The newsletter basically looked like the original one I made:
I added a few things and removed a few things, but it was essentially pretty similar to what’s above.
I was originally going to send out the newsletter to the first 4,000 people on the email list, but I realized I could definitely improve the email blast, so I decided to slice the email list up and send out several different versions. Yesterday (Monday 5-19-2008) I sent out the first email blast to 500 people. Today (Tuesday) I sent it out to the next 500 people on the list. I plan to do these 500 person email blasts for the rest of this week.
The reasoning behind this is I can make small changes to each email blast to see what works and what doesn’t. So far I only have 24-hour old statistics of the email blast sent out on Monday:
*QUICK NOTE*
The 500 email addresses sent in this initial first-500 test were collected several years ago, so I suspect this will be the lowest performing group.
Anyhow, within 24 hours 20% of the recipients had opened the email, and 13% of the entire 500 actually clicked on links which direct them to HouseOfRave. This equates to roughly 65 extra visits to the site from potential customers.
Far as email campaigns go, I believe these click-through rates are on the high side, especially for several-year-old email addresses. As for how many sales this generates, that’s a difficult metric to measure.
One of the cool things about email campaigns is you can see which links were clicked to access your site. The links which got the highest number of clicks on the first campaign were images, in particular the animated images….especially this one:
So for the next week I’ll be doing more email blasts and improving upon each one. With decent results so far, the HouseOfRave Newsletter may become a regular monthly thing.