Email Marketing Hard Numbers

Just got the email from Inbox Promotions.  Here are the hard numbers:

Total Emails Sent = 102,000 within a 30-mile radius of Compass Point

Total Emails Opened = 17,948 or 17.5%

Total Visits To Our Site From The Email = 751 or 4% of the total opened or less than 1% of the emails sent

Total Number Of Butts In The Seats On Sunday = 0

Like I said…the staff is still weighing whether we’ll do this again.  No offense to Inbox…I’ve heard great things from other church pastors that had better results.  Again…super guys to work with!!!

Email Marketing Results

So Sunday has come and gone…and I thought I’d better post an update about our email marketing campaign.  We used Inbox Promotions…I gotta say…they are the nicest guys in the world to work with. I gotta give them props for the fact that they accommodated us even though we waited until the last minute to do this.

The bottom line…no butts in the seats.  However, I don’t think I’d classify it as a total flop…but that’s not to say we’ll ever do it again.  I’m still waiting to get another report about the actual amount of emails that went out, but my impression was that it was somewhere around 25,000+.  According to the Inbox guys 17,948 emails were opened and 751 people clicked over to our website.  As of this morning that pretty much is in keeping with the Google Analytics we are seeing.

Now for the bad news…a lot of the clicks were not anywhere in our target area.  Like I said in an earlier post…we found out a little after the fact that the emails would be sent in a 25-30 mile radius of our location.  Unfortunately that is in Tampa and Orlando….WAYYYYY out of the area that we would attract.  Also there was a little misunderstanding on exactly what day the emails would be going out.  We thought it would be last Wednesday…instead they started going out last Monday.  Our new website was not “live” until late Tuesday…most of the folks that clicked over saw absolutely nothing about the sermon series or updated info about Compass Point.

If I had it to do over again, there would be some things I’d do different:

1. I’d start working with the Inbox guys MUCH earlier.
2. I’d probably consult the Inbox guys a little more when it came to developing the artwork for the campaign.
3. I’d want to emails to be sent only to folks within in a ten mile radius of our location…even if it meant less emails going out.
4. I’d seriously think about doing the three weeks of mailing instead of one…starting two weeks out from the sermon series.  That would give us two full weeks ahead of the series and one week after the start to hit it.
5. I’d make sure the email all went out only on Wednesday or Thursday….Monday and Tuesday is too early in the week and very few emails get checked on Friday or Saturday.

All in all…we are still evaluating whether we’d do this again.  There is still talk around the office about giving it one more shot.