Well, a percentage will go into Spam and sometimes it is unavoidable given how some of my website names contain 'spam keywords' (according to YNOT). But basically I am taking the newbie stance here and saying I do not know Jack Shit about constructing an effective email marketing campaign. LOL I am a kick-ass writer (ahem) but effective emails may not be about 'good writing' but more about effective calls to action.

Ah DamianJ, where are you when I needs ya? haha!!

Well, I have much bigger lists than a lot of people on here.

I have an email background.

Porners can tell stories all they want, CANN Spam compliant email is not a valuable revenue stream. It's supplemental income at best, but I've found it to be more of a branding exercise these days if you don't want to spend 10 - 20 k per month on mailing, and have it be a giant pain in the ass to make your money back.

I don't care who it is, they all spam box on every one of my email addys, Brazzers, RK, Twistys, Vivid, Wicked, you name it, spam box.

A few will get through here and there, but for the most part the big three are VERY VERY good at identifying adult mail in many different ways and they all bounce it or spam box it.

To get through, you have to be very, very tricky, AND have keys to all the big free email providers, which is what people use when they sign up to porn sites for the most part.


That's why I said it's a nice brand supporting activity that you can do with cancelled members.

:)

Great post thank you! This was actually my feeling as well. I know many will offer discounts via emails, and I have tried that with little success. From a branding perspective I would think tubes with their millions of views would be better than emails.

I wasn't looking afor new revenue stream per se, just that additional bump to boost a shitty sales week. LOL But that did not happen, and what you said about spending 10-20k...well, total agreement here. :)

And yet on Black Friday I get fifty thousand spam emails from PC Richard, Eddie Bauer and Macys. LOL!

Holy Crap! No lie. You know who we got blown up by this year? Rosetta Stone! For 8 solid days I got 3 emails a day. I literally found their marketing guy on LinkedIn and sent him an inMail saying "Really dude? 3 emails a day for 8 solid days?" hahaha.

So which language did you end up buying? Haha!!

Viva la Spamola! :D

Haha. None. Was a good deal though. 199 for the whole language courses 1-5 and it was all the best ones. Huge discounts.

Maybe I will buy the French online version at some point. Ehhhhhh.

For my own site: I send a weekly email that consistently gets 20% "open" rates. It gets 4-8% "click" rates. Obviously that's not a huge money maker, but it keeps my brand front-of-mind for expired members and members-to-be, so I find the 30 minutes it takes to write it as time well spent. I don't think the value of email can be quantified only with sales numbers. Just my :2 cents:

Working harder. Working smarter. 2014 was very good. 2015 will be great.

Something went terribly wrong there. Were they not opened, went to spam, or perhaps your offer wasn't good? I would be interested in seeing the mailing stats on that and your offer.

Yep.

You are the whole brand, the whole product. Very highly targeted.

For what most of us are referencing is general porn surfers, qualified to porn.

If I had an 1 million fresh email list of people that are just seeking Tranny BDSM with big tits, then well you're still going to be able to make great money.

We're talking about lists that are more or less people who join normal general pay sites.

You are the exact person that email marketing does benefit.

Your experience does not translate to every application, that I can assure. :)

:thumbsup

I'd be more than happy to share this info with you. :)

Maybe send me an email (or PM me here?): porn nerd cash AT gmail.

ANY help is appreciated. :)

Man, that is horrible.

I collect emails first before I present any packages. Collecting about 150 or so new each day. I send an automated email every 2 weeks, from my server (shows latest updates).

Cost to do so = $0. And works very well.

I tried some pay services and nothing but problems. If my IP get's blacklisted, I just will get a new one :thumbsup

Excellent point. :) I didn't know you were talking about more general lists. Rather, I didn't want someone with less experience reading the thread and thinking email was a complete waste of time. I was just adding some balance. :)

Also, this thread is about paysites. Is that what you were sending emails on or was it AFF? Because if it's Adult Friend Finder then that's a completely different thing. :)

Emails are not a total waste of time I am learning, rather just another (important?) tool in your marketing toolbox. Of course, I do not even know how to use a hammer so I am fucked. :)

Hey Porn Nerd... work with Rochard on improvement. Chances are possible your message needs to be fixed and freshened up.

We have a similar list to you, 35k from ex members the past few years. I don't use Ynot, I use phplist on my server so the setup is different but the situation is the same and I was in the same boat.

I have had a few shocking mailouts where we have had 1 sale per 10,000, but i've also had them as good as 1 sale for 250. When I first started, straight up 'click for a discount' emails did the trick, over time they just stopped working and cost us to send. So we went back to the drawing board and after a few hours of brainstorming me and my team had a list of ideas, some worked better than others, for example, our most successful mailout this year was a benefits and how to get the most out of the site guide email - listing all the download / stream options formats, how vids can be played on smart tvs, what interaction etc.

Other ideas included snippets of good reviews with links to the full review site so they can see it is honest. We also did a 'way back when' campaign and showed the progression of the material and quality across the years. We still do discounts, last week was black friday and was very successful but discounts are now much rarer.

It's not easy thinking of new ideas over and over, in fact its bloody hard but with a good idea we do find the rewards are still there.

In response to the original post, 2014 has been ok, we have far less affiliate sales now than we ever had (40% of total sales down to around 15% now over the past 2 years), so total sales revenue is down around $100k, but direct 100% sales are way up so net total is almost on par with last year, hopefully more direct sales next year will give our net profit a boost.

Yes, I was referring to my own site, which is a solo amateur paysite. :)

It works. Every year the same. Could be better.

Some great points here thank you!!


This situation I see a lot as well - less affiliate sales, more direct sales. That's a sad situation when it comes to affiliates but, at the end of the day, if the profits are steady and revenue steady then this bodes well for your company's future. NOT for the future of affiliates tho. :(

Ah ok! Well, as stated, individual paysites with unique amateur models is still a good way to go with emails etc. :)

What are you using to do this?

I use Phplist and SMTP.com. A bit of a hassle, but I found email much more effective some time back, so I'm unconvinced it is still worth the hassle.

This is my thinking as well but I am open to some expert tweaking.

Yes, I also find that email is very effective.

What do you like to use for this?

I'm using PHPList as well as did the compliance, DNS, bulk mail guidelines, etc. stuff to ensure delivery. I can't say enough about email marketing. The message gets to the customer when I want it to rather than waiting for them to visit.

Yes but many in this thread and elsewhere are less high on email lists. So I think AmeliaG was asking for the secret(s) of your "success" and obvious satisfaction.

Maybe it all comes down to niches and which ones do the best with email marketing.

The more niche we get the more sales we make. That's a pattern I've noticed.

this year for me was better than ever since the crisis 2008

Slow growth..painfully slow. But I will take growth, and am optimistic about signs of life from recent changes we put in play. Here's to a prosperous New Year for all!

I use PhpList and play with the settings quite a bit. I manually groom my bounces almost daily to make sure I'm not sending to ISPs that think I'm spammy and I play with the delay between messages a lot until I find what works. A few months ago I rewrote the template to be more mobile friendly, and just doing that increased my open rate by 4%.

With this said I saw a NatGeo's show recently where they hunt tunas down, a crew makes up to 200k for the season, assume it pays McDoalds rate after expenses, boat and equipment lease, insurance and so on... so just an alternative for the bravest here.

No secret at all, someone previously mentioned test, test and test.

Yes, for me, I find that niches/interest works best. My lists are segmented by niche/interest as well as by gender. My buy rate is much higher by niche.

Not a paysite owner but I would say competition definitely got stronger which I think is a good thing as everyone is working hard to make their service and product better. :)

I see a lot of sites cutting costs and not updating, rather than improving with fewer resources. Tons of companies and sites went out of business, so I'd think of that as a decrease in competition for those left standing. How are you thinking competition could be increasing?

Happy new year everyone! Goodluck on your sales nexr year :)

Number of competitors is definitely decreasing. However, the number of asshats without a clue trying to make a go of it is decreasing even faster. So in a way, competition is actually increasing, because the smaller group of people who are still in the pool are all pretty damn good swimmers. That gets back to Yanks Todd's point... turning competitors into your strategic partners will be an even more valuable move in 2015. :2 cents:

Happy New Year all...

:thumbsup

....

Oh and 2014 was a great year. Sales and revenue are both up to the level of where we were January 2012. At the beginning of 2014 I made a projection for the year and I am happy to see that we made the predictions in terms of numbers.

2015 will be an intersting year for sure.

Happy new year all!

Making deals with the most unlikely people for sure.

This year's going to be on fire... I can't remember yesterday... let alone an entire year. 2015 is going to be my fucking year though... Cheers all... hope the best for your biz as well.

I'm not a program owner but a lot of them haggling service providers for a few bucks so it's not a good sign ...

This seems like an interesting thread to revisit. How was 2018?