Readers of our newsletter in August may remember part one of this series describing the building of a website for my daughter Abigail, who is a bit of an artist.
If you missed it you can find it here. Well, as promised in that article - here is the follow up, in which we advertised the new site www.funky-cartoons.com to the HTMail list.
If you have read the previous article, you will know that funky-cartoons.com does exactly what it says on the label - it sells cartoon images at a low price using Paypal as the payment processor.
So the first decision to make was who to advertise the site to? I really was not sure who the target market would be, so I decided to try a basic UK list. The UK list is generally quite responsive, and also tends to give good feedback - and since this is a UK based site, might give the most helpful comments.
So that was the list, how many to mail? Well most of our customers start with just 100 names, so I decided to do the same.
What about the email message? Again, I am always advising people to keep it simple, so I opted for a very simple personal message:
Hi htmailforename,
I have a new website to show my cartoons and I would love to know what you think of the site and the cartoons!
If you have any ideas on how I can improve it, let me know!
Abi
Short and personal - in my experience that will tend to get the best click through rate. We also used plain text rather than HTML. HTML lets you use colour, graphics and so on - but tends to attract the attention of anti-spam software - so for the sake of a good CTR I decided to avoid it.
We then placed an order at www.htmail.com in the normal way, and ran the ad. Click through achieved was 72%(!) which even surprised me, as nothing special was done in selecting the list.
Abi was very pleased with the feedback she received. Most visitors seemed to like the cartoons. So as a start it was quite succesful.
However, this mailing led me to think that I would like to share the feedback results with you and all of our other customers when I wrote this article - and that led to my thinking that maybe other customers would be willing to share their feedback, and so our new service was born.
To see the feedback received, just click on the image below, and then visit the www.funky-cartoons.com feedback link.
