Time for a summary of my tiny email marketing campaign. Some people will say that it is amoral, but I think it was all right, because the app is good, and because discovering new ways of matching merchants and developers with prospective users is of benefit to the whole bitcoin community. In the light of recent hundreds-of-dollars hacks, sending a few messages is harmless in my opinion.
I hope that the concept of email marketing will evolve into a mailing list with voluntary opt-in, sending weekly news about bitcoin websites and software.
So let's get down to the numbers. I sent an one-time information about the
Bitcoin Tool opensource browser extension to around 2000 e-mails of prospective users, published on the Internet (I assumed publishing indicates consent). I do not plan to do it again, but overally I am satisfied of the results. With small effort put in:
- Around 20-30 people subscribed to my app. The overall number of installs increased in the recent days from 123 to 157.
- There were no complaints about the app, and no negative reviews. Everyone who installed the app seems satisfied.
- Only around 40 people (2%) clicked the unsubscribe link (which I had to include to get the emails delivered).
- Only 5 people (0.25%) reported the email as abuse.
Lessons learned. The main difficulty while making an email campaign is to not send to people who will likely report your email. Anticipating difficulties, I have not sent to gmail and yahoo. Some other rules discovered:
- do not send to hotmail and aol,
- do not send to .de domains,
- guess looking at the username and domain if the user will report your email.
And those blackhatforums someone recommended to me here were incredibly useful.
Now it's time to call me names.
