E-mail opportunities

The Goal

The Austin American-Statesman, located in Texas (180,689; 228,635) experimented with e-mail marketing. The objective of the e-mail marketing campaign was to target non-subscribers who were registered on the Austin American-Statesman Web site and try to convert them to subscribers.

The Story

The first step to this program was finding the e-mail addresses to target. “We did this by using the e-mail addresses of non-subscribers who have opted in to receive e-mails from us. Once we had the addresses, we created the e-mail message we wanted to send out. The message we used was one that we were also using in radio at the time. After the design was complete we sent out test e-mails internally to ensure that the e-mail had no technical problems,” said Special Projects Coordinator Nicole Taylor.

The Austin American-Statesman discovered that it is very important to send a test e-mail out first. This procedure helped the paper find some errors that would have otherwise been overlooked. 

It was decided that for future e-mail sales initiatives, the paper will take a closer look at the demographic information available and choose a more specific group to send a more targeted message to the ones that are most likely to subscribe.

“We based the results on how many subscriptions we received from e-mail. We started out with 30,000 registered users who had opted in to receive e-mail messages from us, out of these, 21,812 of them were non-subscribers to whom the message was sent. However, 20,959 of the e-mails were successfully delivered, 7,861 of the e-mails were opened, 268 clicked on the link in the e-mail, and 16 subscribed from the e-mail,” said Taylor.

The Moral of the Story

E-mail has many limitations, but still can achieve sales.