Bronto Blog

The post Email Address Shelf Life generated several interesting comments. One in particular struck me as worthy of responding with a new post. Linda Bustos, a reader and fellow blogger asked:

Would staggering the deployment or “blast” help? Could you segment out the different subscriber types you described? (ie send the first batch to the most recent time lags, then send to the next time group etc)?

After the hair on my arms returned to its normal, dormant state (the word “blast” makes me cringe), I thought about Linda’s question. My gut response was, “Sure. That would be a reasonable strategy.” In fact, I’ve worked with clients in the past helping them implement this approach. I have always cautioned clients that “you must be very careful with this strategy.” The key is sending to small segments - very targeted - and being diligent about tracking the key metrics. When your open rates, click-throughs, and conversions begin to slip while complaints, unsubscribes, and hard bounces rise…it’s time to call it quits.

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Lessons Learned from Bronto’s Marketing Team
Conversion Pathing, Part 3 in a Series

Delivering relevant messages isn’t only essential to email marketing, but also a critical tool for customer and prospect acquisition. Your respondents are simply not all the same, regardless of channel. An important lesson that we have learned is engaging your respondent with a targeted message is possible if you can create a dialogue while addressing their needs. This also enables you to segment your audience and assess their sales readiness. We began using conversion pathing in the summer of 2007 and have not only had an uplift in clicks but a dramatic increase in conversions.

• Paid search conversions increased from 2% to 15%
• Email marketing campaigns have an average of 63% conversion rate
• 21% conversion rate for online advertising

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