Case study: Site Impact email marketing

Client: TeachBeach.com 

Initiative: Email marketing live local lessons

Technology Involved: Site impact 

Media company: LocalMediaInsider

Challenge: Teachbeach, a marketplace for live local and online lessons, needed to create a local email campaign in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. Teachbeach had three goals: 

• To create a recognized local brand in the next six months by reaching 50% of the 280,000 population market, or about 140,000 people.

• To establish metrics to resell local email marketing 

• To provide a scalable model for national marketing of virtual lessons on the site. 

There were also three choices for email lists to test: 

• Owned email lists

• Data purchased outright from a third party

• Use of “per send” targeted opt-in emails purchased through  Site Impact.

Full disclosure: Site Impact is also one of LocalMediaInsider’s clients. However, as a white label provider, they were unable to supply case studies using the real client names. This was a chance to see just how well the targeted emails actually performed. 

Strategy: To create the test during the pandemic, the team focused on recently opened outdoor classes in the local area where social distancing would not be a problem. Seven driveable cities in the peninsula typically referred to as St. Petersburg, Florida, were selected.  The same creative was sent to the three lists at the same time and day of the week. 

Results

1. Purchased data

The local data purchased outright fared worst. 

• 69% bounce rate

• 2% open rate 

• .002 click-through rate

• 4 complaints 

• 16 unsubscribes  

Besides losing the investment in the list, the impact of a bad list was even worse. The IP address was blacklisted by two providers and the bounce rate of sends to other clients went up.

There was also an opportunity cost: With the limited number of opens, the purchased data would never gain enough traction for the goals to be achieved. 

2. Owned list

The owned list performed a bit better. 

• 10% bounce rate 

• 9% open rate 

• .09 click-through rate 

• 0 complains 

• 0 unsubscribes 

The owned list, while performing at a reasonable level, did not achieve a 1 to 2% click-through rate needed to drive sales, one of the campaign objectives. It was also too small a list to build a recognizable local brand. 

3. Site Impact

The Site Impact target buy performed best by far. The targets not only included the 7 local cities, but even narrowed by high-income zip codes and interest in outdoor sports. The list was larger than the owned list. 

• 0 bounces 

• 12.58% open rate 

• 1.5% clickthrough rate 

• 0 unsubscribes 

The 20,000 send yielded useful information on metrics: Teachbeach would be able to resell email targeting campaign at a healthy margin and still achieve $1 a click to the conversion page. Four small businesses a month shared send of $200 per business would allow them to share 500 to 1000 clicks to the conversion page. 

The Site Impact customer service rep assigned to the account also went over the numbers and gave some helpful advice on how to improve the open rate by shortening the subject line. To increase the clicks, she advised splashes of color, such as brightly colored buttons and the use of video. 

Conclusions and lessons learned

• The data purchased outright failed to perform in every category. These are high-risk purchases and should only be attempted with very small tests and a data cleaning tool before sending them. 

• While the owned-list had an acceptable open-rate, the CTR under .1% was not enough for resale purposes. That is, clients - in this case, local arts schools and other teaching organizations - would need more traffic to their sites to pay for email. 

• Site Impact’s targeted list on the other hand, at 1 to 2% generated more than 10x the traffic, it’s a great ratio for creating a reseller strategy.