How can you put a price on this level of success?. What am I talking about?. I’m talking about knowing, with complete certainty, that the people you are marketing too are getting your message.

There are a multitude of avenues available to marketers (and by marketers I mean the everyday business that is attempting to create a market presence or customer loyalty) to get yourself, your products or your brand in front of your clients. But how many of them enable you to actually know that your item has been looked at and considered. You can’t know with a newspaper unless someone calls you. Likewise with most other forms of advertising. But with a newsletter that enables you to view the statistics that show not only who has opened the newsletter, but also how many times, you have an immediate knowledge of whether your message is getting through and just how effective that message is.

We recently sent out an article to our client base in relation to the Australian housing market and whether we considered it to be in a bubble or not, and let’s face it, pick up any paper or periodical and you will see this sort of commentary splashed all over the place. Our point of difference was that we discussed it from the point of view and experience of our valuation staff (we’re a property valuation firm after all). Given the level of commentary in the market, we weren’t sure how it would be received and if we had of used any other form of advertising (editorial, one page spread, etc) we would never have known for sure.

Using our newsletter program (Using The Net) we were able to see, in real time, people opening the newsletter and reading the article. Industry standards say that if you can get 30% of your audience to open your newsletter you have a very successful newsletter. Our open rate was 20% and at first glance we considered this only average. The click-through rate however (the number of people who actually read the content and not just opened the newsletter) was an astonishing 99.3%. This was unbelievable. Often you’ll see open rates of 30% and click through rates between 30% and 60% which shows that the process of targeting has worked quite well. But 99.3% is incredible. We now know with certainty, exactly the type of content that these particular people are wanting to read which means we can target them even more effectively and build our relationships with them based on this type of content. This would be almost impossible using any other form of marketing strategy.

And what about the 80% of people who didn’t open the newsletter?. Once again, knowing the statistics gives us the opportunity to develop different strategies for future newsletters to attempt to capture the attention of these people. The power is in the knowing. You can’t do this with other marketing approaches (or at best you get a delayed statistical set which always keeps you behind the eight ball). With a newsletter system the results are immediate. Add on to that the extremely low cost of this form of marketing and the ability to use it at your leisure and you have something that makes success inevitable..