How I Get My Data

Firstly, it’s important to note that when I started out in 2005 my first successful product was targeted to the Malaysian market, resulting in a list that was safe to say, 100% Malaysian. From this list I eventually branched out to a more international market and now I estimate that my email list is only 25% Malaysian although the only was I can track this is by the IP addresses captured by Aweber, my email marketing service. Not fully reliable, but it’s the only tool I have to segregate my list, any not all Internet marketers seem to be able to do this.

I also have several Malaysia-only email list including the one I am trying to build here at InternetMillionaires.com.my. However I cannot say for sure that they are all Malaysians as even subscribers from other countries can be included as long as they find this site, and enter their details using the optin form.

The Data I Analyzed

My Aweber account is fully capable of producing advanced reports on my mailing list data, but the only data I was concerned about was the double-optin rate and the open-rate. When someone enters an email address they are sent a verification email with a confirmation link. If they clicked on that link, it means they performed a double opt-in. This process is crucial to ensure that you build a quality list instead and stops people from abusing your service.

I compared these 2 figures, between my Malaysia-only list and my overall international list from BlogProfit, for the same 30-day period.

Diagram 1: Malaysia-only Email Marketing Subscriber Stats

Diagram 2: International Subscribers Email Marketing Stats

As you can read:

GREEN indicates total number of subscribed (and verified), BLUE indicates total number unsubscribed, and YELLOW indicates total number of subscribed but unverified.

As you can see, a vast majority of Malaysians who subscribe did not click on the confirmation email sent by Aweber.As a result, they are never really added into my system. Compare this with the international list (who may also contain Malaysians) and you’ll see the yellow bar is much, much shorter.

In fact, more than 50% of Malaysians who entered their email and name on this site did not confirm using the double optin email.

So although I am getting about 40-60 people opting-in, I get less than half those people finally, since Aweber does not add them to my list if they do not confirm. As a matter of fact I prefer not to add people to my list who did not double confirm, as I hate spamming.

But why does this happen? I attribute the situation to the following 4 factors:

1. Low Email Literacy – I suspect most of them do not know that they have to look out for a confirmation email. By the time they get to their mail box again it may already be full with other stuff.
2. Low Email Usage – Some Malaysians surf the web only during office hours. I know when I worked in TM that a lot of my colleagues surf the web instead of doing work, but at home and especially on weekends they are not on their computers.
3. Email Blocking – Some email address are work emails, not personal emails.
4. Service Providers – Many Malaysians use unknown email service providers, which I suspect either routes my emails straight to the spam folder and makes it difficult for people to find it. Even common service providers like TM Net mail and Jaring web mail is crap in my opinion. Please use Gmail.
5. Privacy Concerns – Privacy rights is a new phenomenon in Malaysia. I just need to look at how many times my Maxis mobile provider is spamming me and my friends to understand why a lot of Malaysians have irrational fears about divulging their personal information. I see a lot of them using fake names and email address to get access to content.

Do Malaysians Get Your Email Messages?

Another concern of mine is the open rate for email messages that I send out. For this however, I see no significant difference in the percentage of my emails that get opened. However, I did notice that the response time for Malaysians is much slower that for the overall international list. It takes a longer time for Malaysians to read their emails, probably also due to the factors above.

Improving Your Email Marketing Campaigns

I think with a few changes you can easily improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns:

• Provide Opt-in Instructions – Give better instructions to people on the sign-up page, what to do after putting in their names and email addresses, as well as where to look for the confirmation email they will receive.
• Prevent Bad Emails – Send the download / offer to the email instead of on a web page. That way they won’t be putting in fake emails.
• Be Choosy – Clearly indicated that you will not accept emails from certain providers that handle email very badly (MSN for example) as well as work / corporate emails

Overall, if you’re planning on doing email marketing in the long term, you need a good system like GetResponse or Aweber to handle your email management, because these services constantly monitor which ISPs are blocking emails aggressively, and try to cater to their requirements. In some cases, representatives from these companies are also involved in discussions with email providers to improve their deliverability rate.

If you need a better understanding on how email marketing works, read my older blog post here:

• Aweber Introduces FeedBurner-Like Chicklet
• Paid List Building with GetSubscribers.com
• How to Test Your Email Marketing Campaigns
• Adding Offline Contacts to Your Mailing List

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I love my Aweber account. Ever since I switched over to Aweber from 1ShoppingCart and GetResponse autoresponders, I’ve seen the service improve both in terms of usability (a lot of AJAX-based features), deliverability and most importantly in terms of reporting.

It gives me total control of my mailing list and allows me to do things my friends on GetResponse seem to have a hard time doing; stuff like sending out emails based on country (or even city), RSS broadcasting features, integration with FeedBurner and split-testing emails.

From the screenshot above you can see how just 4 different statistics can give you a complete picture of my mailing list health:

• Bounces – How many emails didn’t reach the subscriber’s inbox, probably due to fake email addresses, space limitations, or other reasons.
• Complaints – How many people report the email as SPAM. I hate those guys.
• Opens – How many people who received your email, actually opens them
• Clicks – How many people clicked on links in your email message (I found using HTML works best for this)

In fact the only thing I regret about Aweber is that I didn’t use it earlier. When I made the switch I had about 500+ subscribers in GetResponse and 8,000+ in 1ShoppingCart. I estimate that only 25% of these made it into my Aweber account when I imported their names. The rest will probably never be recovered.

As per standard procedure, Aweber will send a opt-in confirmation email to everyone you add using the “import” feature. GetResponse and 1ShoppingCart, as well as any other reputable email marketing service, have similar terms as they seek to avoid their service being abused by spammers.

This is why I always tell every one I coach to get the best autoresponder service when getting started, and stick to it. If you try to cut costs, you end up losing out in the long run when you switch services. If you cannot afford Aweber, then at least use GetResponse.

A good email marketing management service is perhaps THE most important investment you can make to ensure success in your home based Internet business, so don’t shoot yourself in the foot by succumbing to the illusion of false economics.

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This is actually a backend service for anyone using GetResponse autoresponders. If you have a GR account, then you can buy leads from this site (also owned by Implix, the parent company) and the leads are added directly to your autoresponders without having to double-optin. If you’re using another service like Aweber for example, you can still get new subscribers from here but you don’t have the ability to bypass double-optin confirmation.

Needless to say something like this comes at a price:

I’ve previously tried a few packages, and the most affordable is to buy 200 leads at $0.45 each.

Is it worth your money? Of course!

Consider offering a free report / download and using a squeeze page to build your list, advertising in Google Adwords at 20 cents per click. No matter how deadly your optin page is, at 20 cents per click it’s going to cost you more than some spare change to get a single subscriber.

Now the next question – does it work?

To answer that, lets look at HOW it works first:

Every top name autoresponder service has a default “Thank You” page. In Aweber this is usually a blank page that says “Your Subscription is Confirmed” or something like that. On GetResponse however, the default confirmation page looks like the image above, where you’re presented with an offer to subscribe to other newsletters.

According to them:

We display your ad on many websites on the Internet, along with the fields where visitors may leave their name and e-mail address if they are interested in receiving more information about the product/service that is described in the ad. The information they submit is instantly delivered to your GetSubscribers account.

You get to write a title and description for your newsletter, which is then displayed randomly on the confirmation page until your leads quota has been filled up. Then you an buy more leads.

In my experience, this service works to a certain extent but don’t put all your money here. I estimate about 40% of the leads you get from here never click on the double-optin confirmation link and are therefore never added to your autoresponder account. Of course if you’re actually using GetResponse they are added automatically so your actual subscribers received will be true to the number.

One reason for the low subscriber optin is the amount of “Make money online” ads shown. Understandably, these group of people will represent the majority in any type of generic advertising service since we marketers are an aggressive bunch with cash to burn unwisely

Any one could subscribe to more than one newsletter at a time and as a result they would be getting 3-5 confirmation requests and later even dozens of “Buy this now” emails from all the people they subscribed to.

Still, if you want to build a bigger list GetSubscribers.com is an option, and you may want to give it a shot yourself to see your results. It goes without saying that this service works best if you’re using GetResponse.

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