I have been experiencing problems with my email marketing provider GetResponse for around two months. I do not want to bore you with the details of their terrible service again, so if you want more information on why my weekly newsletter was not delivered for seven or eight weeks, please read my articles “My OnGoing Issues with GetResponse” and “Searching for the Perfect RSS to Email Marketing Solution“.
Those of you who read my last article may be disappointed to hear that I have not moved away from GetResponse as yet. I was leaning towards moving to MailChimp, though I was a bit concerned that their contact page does not offer online chat or telephone support. They still appear to be the best alternative to GetResponse, though I am concerned that I cannot pick up the phone and speak to someone. Therefore, I am going to look at some more email marketing solutions.
Since I have not migrated my email list away from GetResponse yet, I decided to test the RSS to Email tool on GetResponse further. To my surprise, it appears that they have fixed the issues that were plaguing my newsletter previously. I therefore decided to send out a newsletter yesterday.
Doing this has presented me with an opportunity to compare my open rates before and after GetResponses service started to fail me.
The newsletter sent on 14 July shows that my newsletter was sent to 2,023 people. The income report I published five days before this newsletter was sent shows that on 8 July, I had 2,154 newsletter subscribers. Therefore, the number of emails sent appears to be around 150 subscribers less than the total number of people in my email list.
My open rate for the email was 27.48%. I had 556 opens and 73 clicks.
Yesterday, my total number of newsletter subscribers was 2,345. Only 2,171 people had my newsletter sent to them. I am not sure why less people are actually emailed (it’s not bounce rate).
My open rate for the newsletter sent yesterday was only 6.83%. I had 143 opens and 44 clicks.
Although the click through rate was much higher yesterday, it is concerning that my open rate has dropped to a quarter of its former rate. Hopefully, that is not the case.
My suspicion is that after receiving so many blank newsletter emails, many subscribers have marked my newsletter as spam.
I sent out an email blast today. So far it has been opened by 8.71% of subscribers. It should be a little higher by the end of the day, but I expect the open rate of this email blast to be significantly lower than previous email blasts.
I have only sent one successful newsletter since GetResponse fixed the error with their RSS to Email tool. However, historically my open rate varies between 21% and 28%. Therefore, there is something clearly wrong if my open rate has dropped by such a huge factor.
During the last two months I have spent a lot of time and a lot of energy trying to get GetResponse to get off their asses and make their service usable. Today, the damage that GetResponse has done to my list really hit home.
It is now up to me to review my email marketing solution, undo the damage GetResponse have done, and make my email list more responsive again.
Wish me luck :)
Kevin