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Direct mailings at the service of small business

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Carried away recently by reading business literature, I noticed that many authors recommend using direct mail to promote their product. I, as the owner of two online stores, decided that it was time to increase sales, and began to look for a suitable solution. And soon I found out that you can do mailings yourself, with the help of the program, or through mailing services. Having looked that on all these services the subscription system, and will have to pay every month, I decided to try the programs first.

And, naturally, I am an ardent hater of spam (and who loves him?), And therefore, before starting, I tried to fulfill the requirements that Google considers necessary for “not spam”:


Programs for direct mailing.


MaxBulk Mailer

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Since I am the proud owner of a Mac, I decided to start looking for a program for Mac OS. The second wish was the presence of the Russian language. After the search, the program (which also works in Windows) of MaxBulk Mailer was found , with enthusiastic feedback from users. Already happily rubbing my hands, I downloaded the program, and uploaded 5 addresses (all my own) into it to test. All the programs that I downloaded, I will tell you in confidence, boasted that they have built-in SMTP servers, and they do not need anything. But, naturally, nothing worked, I had to enter the address smtp.yandex.ru for testing.

Testing was successful. All letters have been received, and I have already decided that I am quite ready to spend my hard-earned money, but there were very few opportunities for “beautiful” writing letters - everything is very primitive and ugly. Having access to the HTML code, I decided to insert a random beautiful template found on the Internet. Everything broke up and parted. Googled the problem - it turns out that all the styles should be written for the letters inside the tags, otherwise some (for example, Gmail) will not display beautifully. And besides, smtp from Yandex stopped working, and I decided to continue the search.
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Advantages of the program:

Cons of the program:

ePochta

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The second candidate was ePochta . I was recommended to her by a good friend whose letters I regularly read. The program immediately left a good impression (except that I had to run Windows for it), and without thinking twice, I bought it (1,700 rubles - 20% discount, found at the request of the “Atomic Email Coupon”). Immediately removed all the restrictions, I downloaded the mailing list (my clients from one of the stores) and prepared a letter. There are templates in the set, but they are really terrible, I had to look for my own. When a fully prepared letter flew to 1000 addresses (compiled, by the way, correctly, using the “Unsubscribe” links and referring to% username%), problems started. As it turned out the search method, Yandex does not allow sending more than 125 emails per day. And I managed to send 400, by the way. No, I used delays (1 email per minute) and 1 thread, but nothing helped. I tried Gmail and realized that the list to which I had already sent the letter was not saved. The program also began to slow down and take off. I decided that I would not send two identical letters to my clients, as I was afraid of losing them, so I gave up.

Lyrical digression

As you might have guessed, 400 letters went anyway. I somehow forgot about it, but sales suddenly became more active. And not just activated, they have doubled. That, accordingly, has beaten off all costs almost tenfold, so I did not despair, and with new forces I began to search for something more suitable. The time has come web 2.0.

Online services.


First of all, it was necessary to find them. Search on Habrahabr and other sources of adequate information gave me MailChimp . Others - no. At first, I decided to search Google, but in the first place there were continuous redistributed inconvenient services from the past (“from the past” - this means that you cannot look without tears). The second source of information was ... my own box. It contained so many mailing letters that there was plenty to choose from (the good of Gmail allows you to see which service sent the letter). And then I stumbled upon Mad Mimi . Well, in order.

Mailchimp

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As it is easy to guess, I somehow didn’t grow together with this service. Why? Well, besides the fact that some monkey constantly called me there, he is dear. As much as 30 dollars a month. But for this green money (by the way, there is no PayPal in the payment, or I was looking bad) you will get a lot of opportunities. No, a whole car of possibilities, with a small cart to boot. Think this is a plus? No, this is a minus. There is so much that I have not had the patience to compose my letter and send it to myself for testing. Although many companies from those that send me letters use this service (and mailing is mainly sent to bookstores), I would not recommend it. Why? I found out about Mad Mimi.

Pros:

Minuses

Mad mimi

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The easiest mailing service of all that I managed to try. Like two bytes about the joint, here's a button for you, click on it, here's your list (already very beautiful and cool), just add water (or text), here's a send button. I managed right away, sent myself a test letter, and was stunned - you can't tell otherwise. Everything turned out the first time exactly as I intended. Only the text was in English below, which “You can unsubscribe by clicking here ...” and so on. Then I began my acquaintance with technical support, asked the question - where is the Russian language? I was immediately answered by a cute man named Mark, saying that there were no Russian users yet, and if I could help, he would send me a file that I had to Russify. Why not? Well, I helped, my next mailing was already in Russian, which I personally translated (it seemed to work out pretty well). For testing, I sent 100 letters to my customers, now another store (why 100? This is a limited free service functionality). He waited 24 hours and realized that he was not mistaken. Two-fold increase in sales, no one unsubscribed. PayPal in the form of payment was not, but on the "call" Mark, he sent me a request for mail, I'm here already a paid user. 2500 addresses and incredible (this means a lot of them, and easy to use) the ability to track links, unsubscribe (two of 1280 addresses still unsubscribed) and the validity of addresses. As well as a convenient form of subscription for the site.

Pros:

Minuses:

Lyrics

The second mailing gave me a three-fold increase in sales. Well, what can I say, I checked, indeed, direct mailings work.

The main thing is to work very well on the text, it should not contain errors, curved links. We have only one chance to leave the first impression. Use the names of your buyers. Write rarely, but aptly (for example, once a week, before the new year or March 8). I invited discounts, promotions, offers. I painted a very beautiful hat (the design for me was Mad Mimi). Response - from 100 addresses - 10 broken. 10 - still not viewed. 80 received and watched. 60 - clicked. Sales +8 units from the average. That is, 10% of the success of the clicked.

For a year of Internet entrepreneurship, I still have a couple of tricks that will help increase sales, about them in the next series.
And be sure to read the topic about the usability of online stores , there it is written great about direct marketing.

PS: Thank you ITdirector for help.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/78152/

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