My brother (who recently launched his own ecigarette kit business) and I worked together on introducing my parents’ business to facebook and social media. So, he made the following graphic, which we sent to their 14,000 members strong newsletter:
Image We Sent To 14,000 Subscriber Newsletter
The whole graphic was a link to the newly made facebook fan page, which, at this point, had zero fans. The email subject was, aptly, “Budget Billiards is on Facebook!”
The email was sent using Aweber, which, thankfully keeps track of email opens and clicks through! It was set up as an autoresponder at the end of the sequence, which means it actually didn’t hit the entire list, and as a consequence it was only sent to 10,000. I might move it up in the sequence to hit the rest of the list in a few days but here’s the results so far on the click through and open rate:
Woah! What happened to that open rate?
At around the exact same period of time these statistics were gathered from Aweber — ~48 hours after the initial emailing — I also grabbed this snapshot of the number of people who had signed up on the facebook page:
So ~246 clicks with an open rate of 14% looks like 99 people on Facebook.
Not bad for a brand new page. It hasn’t finished bringing in people just yet for two reasons: Several people have joined in the last few hours even now, and also because there’s still another 4,000 or so that haven’t received the email just yet.
However! There were…
Possible Tweaks
In retrospect, the subject and email itself could have had better incentive of some kind for opening. The mere thought of interacting with a company on a new medium may not be enough to get them to even open the email. “We’re on facebook!” … and the recipient thinks: “Go you? Have a cookie?”
Of course, I typed the title. So. Yeah. Go me.
Additionally, the newsletter itself hasn’t been regularly updated. There has been a significant length of time between the creation of those first three autoresponders and this recent forth. Meaning, many of the subscribers currently on there may not have received any correspondence for some time. So, at this point, they may not even recall ever having interacted with the website at all. This is problematic, too, because they may report them for spam thereby hurting deliverability and seriously pissing off Aweber.
Feel free to drop in and become a fan of Budget Billiards on Facebook!
Tags: autoresponders, facebook, social media