My Little Voice

Just a quick update on some testing of our hard ‘opt in’ and soft ‘opt in’ eCampaign.

Just to qualify what I mean by these terms;

Hard – the person has been asked specifically if they would like to receive details by email, and have elected to do so by ‘ticking’ a box. This list is also cleaned on a regular basis, with the person being asked either, “do you want to remain on the list”, or at worst “here are your subscription details, do this thing if you want to be removed”. So in principle a high level of “buy in”.

Soft – these are the ones where the “box is already ticked” and they need to untick it, or the data comes from ‘other advertised’ sources, with contact details soliciting contact.

Now, I guess my initial instinct was that the Hard opt in details would get a higher delivery rate, as these are actively checked, and that was the case. But there has been a percentage of these addresses that were undeliverable, which is odd if the address was checked within the last 8 weeks (as the case with the list we purchased), and some of the Out of Office Replies indicate that the address has been retired for some time – I got one, from a small business, that said they were closed as the owner had literally retired, so no emails would be read on this address, Hmmm so could that really have been checked in the last 8 weeks, perhaps, but seems odd!

Of course there will be address details that have just “gone away”, are incorrect (human error), or just got sick of receiving emails and turned the address off, but if what you are paying for is clean data, and this is being ‘sold’ to you as a service to maintain the cleanness of the data (8 weeks check period), then I might have expect less problem records.

The other big thing for me was the ‘click through’ rate.

We track, through OpenCRM the click throughs from the email, and the specific links that get clicked. We track this right down to the specific contact that was sent this email. Incidentially, we track each click through, so if you click on three different links, we receive the activity report of each click, from where (campaign, mail piece and link in mail piece), when and context in terms of the campaign, and because we run a live statistics component on our site, we can see who enters the site (in real time, not just Google analytics), which pages you view, in which order, and can invite you to a Live Chat to help answer any immediate questions. Now this is all a bit Big Brother, but a great marketing tool.

Back to the plot …….

One interesting point relating to click throughs, we received 40% more from the Soft Opt In list, than the Hard list. Which given logic, we thought was odd.

We actually received a higher number of enquiry from the Soft list, and incidentially, they spent more time online.

Part of our sales process is to make it very easy for prospective clients to see the product ((OpenCRM Demo) so the ability to see browsers who start at the OpenCRM website, go to the online demo and see what they view and how long they are online, gives us a wealth of information to help profile our approach.

So, upshot at this stage, ‘Hard’ did not give us anything more except a higher bill to procure the data, and ‘Soft’ is easier to come by so gives us a larger marketing opportunity.

We will do the next batch of 20,000 pieces and keep you updated.

Note : just a point, one thing that does need highlighting, when we relay emails we need to be aware of any potential high rate of undeliverable’s, this can have an impact on the mail cluster and any black marks against the IP addresses. So ‘Hard’ (with a lower % failure rate) does have an advantage in lower human resource costs, in short we don’t need to check as often or as deep when sending to the Hard Opt In list, as generally the data is more accurate and therefore undeliverable’s are less.