7 rules of effective mailings for startups

In the course of testing the channels of promotion of our service , it turned out that the most appropriate channel at the current stage is the mailing lists. For this we use both our own subscribers base and third-party resources base (forums, Internet portals).

And in the course of working with the direct-mail channel, several recommendations were born that may be useful to your startup. :

1. To find a contractor whose base of email addresses you can use - look for specialized resources (forums, portals, electronic mailings). And even if the resource doesn’t initially declare mailing services, negotiate - for example, we have found one of the most effective bases in this way - the service owner just never thought about this kind of advertising and having spent a test mailing with us, saw that the users of his resource are loyal refer to this type of advertising.
2. Always find out the size of the database of addresses, relevance, and how the mailing is done - to regular email addresses or addresses inside the service itself. We got a negative experience on this when the post factum turned out that 60% of the newsletter is to send messages to personal mailboxes in the Internet portal itself and which users do not actually read.
3. Always find out how long the mailing will take and what measures have been taken to check that the mail reaches the addressees and does not get into spam filters in mail systems and into special black lists of spam servers. Dispatching to 1 million addresses can take a week or more for this reason.
4. If you include your advertisement in someone else's mailing list, then also watch the following parameters - so that your advertising message is not 2 lines at the end of the 500 line original mailing, no one will see it then - then reduce the size of the original mailing list or place your advertisement at the beginning and the selection accordingly. And make sure that the subject of the mailing and even a specific letter matches the theme of your advertisement, otherwise many potential users will simply erase the letter without reading, for example, when the title of the letter does not meet the expectations of the target audience - in the newsletter about new training courses, IT people will read only letters with news about IT courses and will erase all other letters with news about courses not on the topic of IT.
5. Whenever there is an opportunity - demand testing - sending out a partial sample of the subscriber base of various advertising messages in order to select the best one in terms of conversion to the site and conversion to customers. By the way, it is necessary to distinguish these characteristics - a greater number of transitions to the site does not automatically mean a greater number of purchases or registrations, rather, on the contrary, a greater number of purchases, registrations in absolute terms will bring another letter with a smaller percentage of transitions to the site.
6. Never land a user by the link from the letter just on the registration form in the service - either create a special landing page with a description of the service and why you need to register in it, or in our case we used just the main page, which we have in the style of one-page and provides high conversion rate in registration.
7. And the most important thing - always make (and especially in test mailings) the parameters of the links to your site so that you can be tracked according to web analytics by which links in the letter were most often transferred and what percentage eventually registered or made a purchase.

And what were your mistakes, achievements in electronic mailings?