Are Email Submits Dying Offers?
Everyone somewhere or another has come across this email subject, “Click Here to receive your Free Macbook Air” or some other latest and greatest product. All you have to do is enter your email and fill out a few specific offers that are listed in small print, and the product is yours. I know I first filled one out years ago when I was looking for new golf clubs. I received an email offering “Free Titleist golf clubs”, and it was such a unique offering I had to enter my email address. I never filled out the required amount of offers that where needed to receive my free gift. However, like many others who entered their email in the opening page I helped promote an email product offering that was a major catalyst to the ever growing affiliate marketing industry.
Email submits as they are referred to in the affiliate world, were everything that email marketers wanted in a product offering. The advertisers, which are the creators of the offerings, could create numerous offers that where advertising all the newest and hottest products in each vertical. This provided list managers with offers that had mass appeal, which could match any list’s demographics. Publishers could generate tons of clicks, because people where not familiar with these offerings and would gladly enter their email to see how they could receive that product for free. These offer’s conversions where in the 45-50% range, and ecpm’s for these products became astronomical. This was all achieved on an offer that was paying $1 to $2 for a simple email address.
Recently, I have seen this trend start to change. Not more than three years ago email submits where as much as 60-70% of the offers that where mailed. As of today, I feel that number has dropped significantly. There are numerous factors that go into this, one of those being that email marketing has become very CAN SPAM compliant and that more and more fortune 500 and well branded companies are seeing the great returns of CPA marketing. Creating more and more affiliate marketing offers to choose from in the industry as well as competition on which offers to send making it harder for email submits to compete. Email marketers now have more opportunities than ever to segment out their list, and pick unique offers to target those segments. Opt-in subscribers who have raised their hand and said “market to me” are now becoming savvier to the email submit and therefore conversions have decreased. On top of this advertiser’s who have created the email submit, are seeing that the users are more afraid to give out their information and not filling out as many offers. As a result they now need to take the opt-in email information they gathered and mail them additional offers to make the ROI on the offering work. All in all this has lead to the decrease in email submits that are being mailed.
The future of email submits and trends in an online direct marketing environment are always changing and unpredictable. For now email submits are far from dead but they are going to have to battle it out with product campaigns and big branding.
