By I love co-registration leads.
Yes, most folk hate them because autoresponder companies have been telling you to hate them for years.
But the truth is… if you use the right companies and generate leads in the right way, then they’re decent quality and you can get them in volume.
I explain all about how to use them, and one of the best places to get them on the planet, inside Business Ignition.
Today I want to talk about Digital Box. This is a company who I have tried in the past for co-registration leads (with middling effect).
Anyhoo… a lot of these companies also do email blasts on a CPM deal.
And… I NEVER DO THEM.
Why?
Because they inveitably always perform poorly and you, as the buyer, shoulder all the risk because you’re paying based on the number of emails they’re sending too.
In fact, I’ve never had one of these perform better than horrendously, which means anything more than a handful of leads even when they’re emailing hundreds of thousands of people.
And I don’t know anybody who’s had one of these campaigns perform better than horrendously.
So.. when the rep at Digital Box managed to persuade me to run an email campaign to 112,278 on a CPM basis, I knew deep down I would regret it.
The results?
We received 76 visitor sessions from that email send according to Google Analytics.
I could send to 200 emails and get the same results.
That worked out at £8.68 per visit.
Possibly the worst deal yet.
Since I felt like I’d been persuaded to take the campaign, against my better judgement (yes I know it was still my fault), I decided to argue the point.
Here’s a summary of the ensuing conversation with the rep…
They couldn’t do anything because it was a CPM deal.
What a bunch of horse shit.
I ended up asking for complete mail logs of every email sent proving that the emails were actually accepted by the email service providers (ESP’s).
I received… a screenshot of their email sender saying it’s been delivered.
The point is… that’s irrelevant. I asked for the logs because that’s the real evidence, any email sender can say it was delivered even if it wasn’t.
I won’t bore you with the details, but the most beautiful response I received from them was this:
“To give you more information on the breakdown of the sends, the 2 smaller sends were to our users who have opened an email in the last 0-6 months. I would always include these as a way to increase performance. The remainder of the emails were sent to users that have signed up and had their email validated within the last 12 months.”
As we all know, if you do proper data cleaning on your mailing lists, then you’d be removing everybody who hasn’t performed an action (open, click, purchase) in the last six months as inactive.
What they’re saying is that they ‘generously’ added these active leads who had opened (not clicked or purchased) an email in the last six months to increase performance. The rest of the list was made up of people who had opened an email in the last twelve months, but… by definition… not in the last six.
In other words, they sent the majority of my campaign to an inactive list.
Of course, I called them out on this because, lets be honest, any of us could buy a list of 100k or more inactive emails and send an email to them. Probably for less than fifty bucks.
What did I get for my complaining… a threat from the managing director saying my bill would be past to a debt collectio agency if I didn’t pay.
Okay, fair enough, I signed a contract saying I would pay on a CPM basis.
There was nothing in the contract saying the leads had to be active, which is my own stoopid fault.
So I paid.
But it would be wrong of me not to let you know about my experience with Digital Box.
If you choose to share this experience with others, then that would be your choice.
All the best,
Michael
What do you think?