Back in August I did a little of spring cleaning and cleaned out my mailing list for my WordPress podcast network WPwatercooler.
The idea was that the number of opens and click through’s are pretty low and the number of people that were joining the show as participants was getting smaller so what I did is I took a list of all the people that were recently on the show for the last 12 months and added them to a do not remove list and then went through and removed all the folks that have never opened one of the emails and got rid of them. I went through and looked at all the people that haven’t clicked on the links in the emails and I set them with a special tag that I will at some point clear out. The reason why I did this is I wanted to figure out who the audience actually is and by having a bunch of people receiving the email I had this bit of a hesitation whether or not my efforts were actually worth doing sending out this weekly.
So a bit of background regarding this I send out an email each week asking people if they would like to be on the show. I also include links to the previous episodes so that they can view at their leisure and watch one of those episodes. I think it pretty important considering we have had some people on the show as speaking participants who have never seen the show before. Primarily these folks are marketers looking to get the word out about their thing, which is all fine and good except they don’t know any of the in-jokes or the reason why we make fun of a particular person or say a particular thing so really we would much rather have people on the show that have actually watched the show at some point in their life.
One thing I’m not a fan of is having big numbers for the sake of having big numbers when really those numbers should equate to actions that are occurring on the thing that I’m putting so much time and energy into. So by clearing out the closet of all the old craft I am able to really talk to the people that I know are engaged in the content are willing to participate and would like to be notified of the latest posts. I’m pretty happy with the results because with my 300 people subscribed to the mailing list I am able to determine that a good percentage of them are actually opening and clicking on the links. So far an average of 23% opens and 3.5% clicks is pretty awesome.
One of the other reasons why I wanted to clear out that mailing list is because I wanted to have a good idea as to whose actually doing what on the mailing list and are they actually involved. This helps me with running house ads on the mailing list as well as looking to see if advertisers are interested in running ads for my audience too.
Early on I started running ads for my friends products on the mailing list in hopes that I can drum up some data to determine how many people are actually clicking on those particular links. So far by including offer codes and other things like that I am seeing some click throughs which is pretty good. I think overall it’s a good idea for me to run a test like this so that way if potential advertisers are interested in running ads for a very niche market which WPwatercooler to be WPblab and CommunityConnections are that the advertiser or potential advertisers Well actually know that my mailing list is worth advertising on and will hopefully want to run an ad on the show as well.
Podcasting is a business is really interesting there’s a lot of moving parts with it from creating good content distributing the content tracking to see how many people are actually cooking on or doing things through that content and then using third-party tools to track how all of those efforts are resulting overall.
Jason Tucker
If you’re someone like me that has a mailing list and you’re noticing that your click through rates and open rates are really low I would highly consider going through your mailing list and seeing how much bait you can cut. Sending out emails to people that aren’t even going to look at the email let alone click on it or do we need type of actionable thing with it I feel isn’t worth sending an email to. Obviously there are many types of million lists and content and mailing lists that this very hard and fast rule doesn’t apply to you but to me and my content a lot of it has to do with actionable items.
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