Marketing Email Experiment
My Email Experiment
I had an idea back in February and decided to try it out. The results surprised even me, I suspect they will shock you.
I noticed that I had been getting what seemed to be an ever increasing number of emails from different email marketers. I wanted to gauge just how bad this problem was. I setup a new email address and subscribed to one dozen (12) marketers. I didn't touch this email for a month. Thirty one days later I checked this email. This is when I got one of the biggest shocks of my life.
Email Results Are In
In my Spam folder there were 37 emails. Less than I would have expected since I knowingly subscribed to people that market things for a living. Between my inbox and spam folders there was mail from 19 different senders (not including different names at the same address). Again, not too surprising here.
What DID surprise me was that in my inbox I had 4,263 emails from signing up for 12 lists! That means that on average I got 137.5 emails per day every single day. It didn't really work out that way though. Friday and Saturday were hands down the heaviest days of email receipt.
I guess the marketers thought that most people would have the weekend off to study their email offers. I also never opened these emails, so some may have been (probably were) automatic remails by an autoresponder service.
I then decided to run the test for a second month. In the second month the number of unique senders went way up. There were over 50 senders. The total number of emails also went way up. I got over 7,500 emails in month 2. The interesting part was that the number of emails that showed up in spam went down to 16 for the month.
Maybe my email provider thought that I enjoyed getting all of this email. Sorry, I'm not that lonely, nor do I have the time to even think about looking at all of this. Now, I am going to see what happens as I try to unsubscribe from all of this and see just how long it takes me to get back to a clean email account.
My purpose in doing this was to see just how difficult email marketing might be for someone to try to get their message read by any given recipient. I very briefly glanced at all of the headlines/subject lines that were visible to me and there were only 4 or 5 out of two months worth that even made me feel like they weren't all written by the same person.
Many were get rich quick type of emails. Some were crypto currency, some were investing, some were stocks/futures/forex. There seemed to be a good mix of types. The only things that this experiment really convinced me of was 1) I'm not going to spend much (if any) time with email marketing. 2) Your info is shared among others no matter what they say.
So, if you wonder why your email inbox always seems to be filled up this might well be the reason. My advice would be to always use a "throw away" type of email for ALL signups until you see just what they will be sending you and then (and only then) move it to a regular email address where you might actually read what is coming in.
Almost TWELVE THOUSAND EMAILS (12,000) in just two months. That is unbelieveable.
Recent Comments
39
Very interesting experiment, Bryan. Giving us a lot of food for thought on email marketing. Thank you. Colette and Philip
I was utterly amazed. I thought I might get 4-500 emails in a month. This wasn't even a remote possibility in my thinking. Email has become a curse rather than a help. Imagine if I had interacted with some of them!
Exactly! This is really important to think about. We so much appreciate you doing this study. C and P
It sure was. I don't know how you could possibly hope to use something like that to your advantage just because of the sheer quantity of mail.
I was just thinking about a country song. Maybe by the Judd's, but not sure..... One of the lines was, "They call it progress, but I just don't know." Kinda sums this up. If that's progress I'm really out of step!
I just can't imagine Wal Mart saying, "Oh, he didn't buy product X, let's follow him out to his car and offer it to him 10 more times. Maybe he'll buy it then." Even the Girl Scouts don't do that with cookie sales.
I realize that it's a different game, but the same principle I believe. One or two emails, sure, but a hundred (or more)? A bit much I think.
Yes indeed. You apparently don't have personal rights anymore. The right of people to intrude on something that you pay for, such as phone or cellphone, is hard to believe. You pay for the airtime, but they can use it. I really fail to see the logic.
Yikes! That's a scary number! What a shocker. Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment. Hope you are well.
Doing great Sachi! Hope you are as well. It was scary. Now I want to see how long it takes to stop all of it!
I figured that by using a new email if I can't get it back to zero, I'll just never use it for anything except where I have to sign up! ;-)
I get a lot of emails, but are auto-generated by this site to direct to your posts, followings, etc.
If what you mean is that most are auto generated I agree 100%. The volume that I got though, from someone that I had NO connection with, is what surprised me. Just because you can, does NOT mean that you should.
My whole point here was some people advise you to use email marketing. After seeing the above numbers I believe that you'd have a better chance of getting a snow cone in hell than getting somebody to read an unsolicited email.
: ) Awesome experiment Bryan. We could become rich by coming up with an App that would screen and delete emails like we do as humans. Come to think of it , that app might be now in existence.
Googled: email screening and deleting app... and there is a ton out there. Will not bother for now. ha ha ha.
Joe
I'll have to take a look. Never really thought about it until after I saw these numbers. I knew that it seemed my email was taking longer each day, now I see why.
Well you tried your experiment and it was successful in a way. You have to watch what you ask for.
Jerry
Just think if you had responded to 10 percent of them how much more you would have received.
Jerry
Wow. Really? That's unbelievable, but true! No
Person can read all those
Emails
Lol! Marita
That's why I wanted to start with a clean email address. My inbox was literally being overrun!
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That's huge!
And very intrusive!