Email marketing? ugh!

[WolfeMacleod]

Anybody here have any advice for a one-time shot of email marketing?

Our Kickstarter project is not gaining enough steam, and I'm starting to think it might fail.

I've got about 20,000 people in my inbox that I've communicated with, stretching all the way back to 2005 or so. 99% are people who were customers.

I'm considering sending a large amount of them a one-time email to draw attention to the Kickstarter, but Outlook 2007 isn't liking it so much. Just adding them into my contacts list is turning out to be a major PITA. Hundreds of duplicate email addresses! I don't want one person to get 30 copies of the same email!
I had to export my imbox to some comma delinieated CSV file or something, then re-inport back to the contacts. There are large gaps, email texts, it's a mess. There were a few thousand "mailer@paypal.com" emails I had to delete manually. I coulnd't find a way to remove duplicates.
Trying to sort the contacts to easily remove duplicates? Forget it.. "The data is too large to handle"


Any ideas? Why can't I highlight all my email, and add all to contacts?

[Ayles]

Typically You need an email service provider to do the bulk send and you need to comply with CAN SPAM laws. Most of this is around giving people the opportunity opt out of future emails.

Have you tried creating a distribution group? It does sound like you need to do some data cleanup though. Is the file too big to manipulate in excel?

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-contact-group-from-a-list-of-contacts-in-Excel-4d7ab35c-0bdf-4dc2-8279-477c1a79ab72

[Holger]

Dont do it.
Most people reciveing such emails will be annoyed and that wont help your project at all!

[stomachmonkey]

DO NOT send 20k or even 10k emails through your business email account.

Someone will very likely get you flagged as a spammer and you may end up on blacklists.

If your ISP catches it they may shut you down.

Just not a good idea in general and bad for business.

You need a legit mass email service.

Mailchimp is free for 2,000 contacts and 12k emails sent per month. Send Better Email | MailChimp

So what you can do is load up 2k names, send to that list, delete the list, load another 2k names, send, rinse and repeat until you hit the 12k limit.

You could sign up under two separate email addresses and get 24k in a month that way.

Or you could pay $25 to get unlimited emails for the month but you'd still need to do the list rotation.

20k names in the list will run you $155 for the month so you could look at it as a one time fee.

Now the thing with email addresses is they tend to expire, don't be surprised if that 20k is more like 15k or less.

Who is your ISP?

Often as part of your hosting package they will provide a way for you to send mass email campaigns.

Check that first.

[id10t]

If it is something of a technical nature that geeks would appreciate it, post it on slashdot.org as an article. If there are forums related to the product, see if you can become a paid supporter (usually dirt cheap) and post it on those forums.

[widebody911]

Don't do it. Spam is spam is spam. I know organizations that are starting to block mailchimp, constant contact, etc for this very reason.

[MBAtarga]

I don't agree that what he is sending is "spam." By his claims, 99% of these are customers of his - and therefore very likely some would be interested in his kickstarter project. He's not sending out emails for p3nis pills or the like.

How about posting to reddit? Don't they have musician subs?

[WolfeMacleod]

Originally Posted by MBAtarga

I don't agree that what he is sending is "spam." By his claims, 99% of these are customers of his - and therefore very likely some would be interested in his kickstarter project. He's not sending out emails for p3nis pills or the like.

How about posting to reddit? Don't they have musician subs?

Yeah, at least 99%. A great many of them have inquired about exactly what the Kickstarter offers, too. I've done my best to weed out those who aren't. The only others I can think of are people who I purchase parts from, who are also in the same industry and might have an interest as well.

Reddit does have an r/ Guitar subforum, but they're pretty strict about the policy.

[porsche4life]

I'm assuming reddit won't let you advertise your own business, but could a friend post a "hey check out what I just found?"

Mailchimp or a service like that will cost you, but is the best solution.

Also its good to utilize to keep in touch after the sale. You should really be following up with past clients quarterly at a minimum. Its MUCH easier and cheaper to retain old clients, than to get new clients.

[MRM]

My firm uses Constant Contact. We send a newsletter to our clients every month. I think spam has more to do with the content of the email than it does the number of people you send it to. No one has complained to me about getting our newsletter, but it's pretty well written with topical articles and it's only sent to people who have a connection with the firm.

If you send an email blast that says something like we'd like to keep you informed on the WolfeMcCloud line up of products that includes a section on the Kickstarter campaign and a link to its page, I don't think many people would mind.

[stomachmonkey]

SPAM is a HUGE HUGE HUGE deal for ISP's.

That anyone can register a domain and open a web hosting account that's set up in 15 minutes with email that's capable of blasting out 10's and 100's of thousands of emails is a nightmare for the industry.

SPAM is any unsolicited email, period.

Mail servers and mail clients do identify and classify some SPAM based on content and where it's coming from but anything unsolicited is SPAM.

When SPAM gets reported by recipients the ISP's network can get blacklisted meaning that for some period of time, typically 24 hours. either specific IP addresses or even entire blocks of addresses are blocked. That's bad for business.

When ISP's see heavy email traffic originating from hosted accounts they will often shut those accounts down but the whole thing is like a global game of whack a mole.

There is nothing really wrong IMHO about what Wolfe wants to do, the problem is how he was going about doing it.

Use a legitimate service.

Doing it the wrong way hurts everyone.

[87maniac]

I design & produce HTML emails and use MailChimp to deliver.
HTML emails are a black art / standard web code does not apply.

Basic Rules of email marketing:
- Do not use templates. Use HTML email (same as Fortune 1000 companies)
- If your email looks like spam, it will be perceived as spam.
- Hire a talented graphic designer who understands HTML email marketing.
- Poor design is bad business. Good design will increase sales & customer loyalty.
- Be sure to test before sending, broken emails are worse than spam.
- Use a high quality list. Users should opt in to receiving your emails.
- Many of my clients buy commercial lists, in the false belief that huge lists
will result in huge returns.
(that never works- Recipients report spam and MailChimp will suspend your account.)

[cstreit]

Definitely DO NOT send it from your business account.

One of our accounts got hijacked and was used to send spam. It took 2 YEARS to get off the spam filters... ...and for a while no Hotmail, Yahoo, or MSN customer could receive an email from our business. We had to create a seperate email account to communicate to those customers.

You can sign up for short-term contracts with mailchimp who does a nice job of sending larger email campaigns. Have you considered hiring a digital marketer? I can make a recommendation if you are interested. PM me.

[id10t]

Originally Posted by 87maniac

I design & produce HTML emails and use MailChimp to deliver.
HTML emails are a black art / standard web code does not apply.

Basic Rules of email marketing:
- Do not use templates. Use HTML email (same as Fortune 1000 companies)
- If your email looks like spam, it will be perceived as spam.
- Hire a talented graphic designer who understands HTML email marketing.
- Poor design is bad business. Good design will increase sales & customer loyalty.
- Be sure to test before sending, broken emails are worse than spam.
- Use a high quality list. Users should opt in to receiving your emails.
- Many of my clients buy commercial lists, in the false belief that huge lists
will result in huge returns.
(that never works- Recipients report spam and MailChimp will suspend your account.)

HTML mail is of the devil and one of the things I block immediately on my own mail server ...

[aigel]

If you send one semi-customized email every 2 minutes, you can reach out to your top 300 people in 10 hours of work. Average kick starter contribution of $10 will get you an extra $3k.

G

[stomachmonkey]

If you want my honest opinion I think you are beyond the point of saving this campaign.

You are not quite 1/3rd the way there yet on the money side and more than half way through it on the time side

To succeed you really wanted to be close to where you are now out of the gate.

That means getting a commitment from "friends and family" to jump on board early on and get momentum.

I also think you have too many tiers. Too confusing and leaves a lot of $0.00, unbacked, tiers which does not look good.

Product campaigns come down to two basic types.

A new and innovative way to deal with something everyone already knows about.

A new and innovative way to do something that has never existed.

Your campaign is kind of in both camps.

It does lean more to the experienced side in that a p90 in a humbucker route is not a new idea so those in the know will get it.

For less experienced guitarists they likely don't get it and I don't think you've given them a strong enough reason to care about it.

Your main video is nice but it's just pictures of pretty guitars and takes nearly a full minute to get anywhere. People don't watch that long if they are not getting any info. You need to hit them with "the why" a lot sooner.

If I did not know what your product was I'd think it was a pickup cover. Not terribly exciting.

They are pick ups, let potential backers hear them so they understand why they should care.

There's more but that's what I have time for now.

Best
Scott

[Ayles]

Valid points on a lot of this stuff.

If want to clean up your data (.csv), i have an R script that will dedupe and remove the @paypal.com email addresses (just about anything else you can think of to) in about two seconds.

You would have to install r studio, and change the file paths. Nothing to it though.