Posted by Tom Allinder on Tue, Nov 17, 2009
Over the
last couple of months, I have been doing my own private research thing on email
marketing in stock promotion. I have also been looking at ways and means for
entities that have websites to gain more visitors to their site. Some of this
stuff has already been mentioned
recently. So, let me get started with some new observations based on my years
of experience in the stock promotion and IR business and how social
networks and other things
are beginning to change how business is getting done.
Nearly all
stock promotional entities have websites; however, my research has indicated
there are very few stock promo sites that get any appreciable amount of traffic.
The reason there is no traffic is because once a visitor enters the site and
sees that there is nothing more than micro cap stocks being pumped, they have
no reason to come back again. There is no way for them to participate. What
does this mean for the owners of the sites? How do they promote stocks if there
are no visitors coming to their site?
The answer is one of two things:
-
They
are ineffective and completely impotent
-
They
use an email list
It is a
fact that there is only one way of marketing a company's stock (notice I did
not say "marketing a company") according to 99% of
promoters=> email, email, email,
EMAIL. Every email they send out has nothing but promotion of a stock in it. Bear with me; I am going to come back
to this in a paragraph or two.
I have
three different business email addresses. I receive something in excess of
2,000 emails a day, many of them stock promo emails along with the male
enhancement pills, other drugs, junk products, porn and what-have-you. Most of
the spam is arrested at the server level; the rest is captured by my computer's
email client which cuts the amount of email I actually get in my inbox down to
about 20-30 a day. That means only 1.5% of the emails directed toward me are
actually seen by me. Anti-spam software and systems have become very efficient.
There are three basic ways to
acquire an email list:
1. Organic- this means you have a site
whereby people find your site's content useful and sign up.
2. Set up multiple sites and give away
something free but require registration (including the email address) before
they can download the freebie.
3. Buy email lists.
Item number one is the best way but
takes time. It requires good site content be developed which is something
generally beyond the very short term objectives of most promotional entities.
Item number two is hard too
because it also requires something worthwhile to give away and... a lot of people
will not sign up or register to
receive freebies because they believe their email address will be sold or used
otherwise and will lead to a lot of spam. Item number three is a no-brainer. It is the quickest and easiest
way to run an email campaign; very expensive however! People I have talked to
in the last couple of months who are running large promo campaigns via email
are telling me they spend $10-30K for lists. It's part of the "budget" for
running a campaign. If you are paid $100K to run a week-long program and do 2
email campaigns, you outsource $50K to other emailers and promoters, and buy
two $20K lists and you still pocket $10K... not bad for a week's worth of work.
The Moldering Corpse
However, at
the same time, a number of other things are happening to email marketing when
it comes to stock promotion according to the same high-level promoters. They
also tell me email lists are getting more expensive. Email lists are becoming
less and less effective overall. They tell me that most email lists ROI is average at best and the list is only
effective once. Not to mention that a lot of the recipients probably
consider this is spam. I know I am on just about every promoter's email list and
I did not sign up or subscribe to 95% of the emails I receive. Bottom line is:
With regard to stock promotion email promotion is by in large, a sloppy way to
do business. But, for now it still works albeit an expensive way to do
business. But more than anything, it is all that most promotional entities
know. Very few have ventured outside the email world, and many are doomed to
starve to death and be found as a moldering corpse with their bony hand on the
"send button". A few others think they are one-up on everyone else by taking
their email and copy/pasting into a Facebook message and sending it to all
their "friends". Well, all their "friends" delete it just like I do. I have
somewhere around 500 friends on Facebook and the bulk of what I find in my
"inbox" at Facebook are stock promotions.
Community and Content Driven Sites
While it is
not a stock promotional site, the site that stands out from most of the rest is
StockHideOut.com. This is one of the very few stock
related sites offering so many options for users that it truly is all things to
all people when it comes to stocks. They have so many ways to ENGAGE visitors
that they likely have a very high
conversion rate. What is conversion rate? Answer: the number of visitors
coming to your site and actually register
or sign up to be a member and not just look around and leave, never to
return. If you want to determine one really good measure of your site, sign up
for Google Analytics and look at your "Bounce Rate"- this is the percent of visitors
that never go past your home page and look at anything else. Those are the ones
who will never come back. If your bounce rate is high, your site sucks. At
HotStockChat.com, our bounce rate is less
than ONE PERCENT. This means more
than 99 percent of visitors to the site go past the first page to look at
content, read articles etc.
StockHideOut.com
is a community based site which is one
of two types of sites which is working these days; the other being content-driven sites. OK, so what is a
content driven site? Answer: a site that has fresh, new articles or videos,
slide presentations etc updated and posted on a regular basis. If the content
is good or even "remarkable" then you will see visitors come back again and
again. You can also convert these visitors to members or subscribers in a
number of different ways. If your site has the same stuff on it week after week
and month after month, why would anyone have a reason to return? As far as promotional
sites are concerned, if all you are featuring is "Our Featured Companies", I bet you have a high bounce rate.
We are still Waiting...
Finally, I
will tell you this: I have been talking to a lot of people about what I have
written here. Most of them think I am crazier than a two-legged bar stool. But,
I am seeing more and more people who are seeing the value of communities and content. The static sites which rely on email only for marketing
and owners who don't have big budgets to keep buying bigger and more expensive
lists (which are becoming less and less effective anyhow) are dying on the
vine. The world has changed forever and that CEO who told me over a year ago "they
were going to wait for things to go back
to the way they were before they do any promotion of their company" is
still waiting and will continue to wait...