After sending mass mailing, for how long the newsletter will be effective?
For how long the campaign will help us to get visits and conversions? One day? Two? A week?
Indeed, the real answer may surprise you and make you change your mind, you may even stop thinking about email marketing as a short action, for an immediate campaign.
In fact, a mass mailing campaign can become a source of traffic, even months after it was sent, it is clear that in the early days the volume will be higher, but your campaign can continue to generate traffic over time.
If you don’t see a campaign as something “separate” from other strategies, when you consider all the volume, you will see your campaigns as much more interesting.
How to analyze a mass mailing campaign?
For this analysis, we will use Google Analytics, so will access it and click on Acquisition -> all traffic -> source / medium
In this screen we can use the “Advanced Filter” to show only The email source:
This displays a list of newsletters you sent and the related values (we talked about how to use Google Analytics with Mailrelay some time ago).
In this list we can click on the newsletter to see the campaign details, for example, we will see the first campaign of the Previous image:
If you set conversion funnels you can also see the information on other charts.
In the image we can see that this newsletter was sent around the 6 of July, we can see the peak of traffic in the report.
In the next days, it also generated a good amount of traffic to our website, and after that it started to generate less visits.
The number of visits and conversions will decrease with time, but we can see that it was getting results until August.
A month
For a month, this newsletter generated visits and conversions.
We often think that when we send a newsletter, the campaign will be effective for a few days or a week, but we rarely stop to think that the effect can last up to a month.
It is also interesting to think about another aspect, if this newsletter has generated visits and conversions, the message must have been in the inbox of subscribers during that time, so of course it was an interesting email for these users, otherwise they would not save it to read the message later.
What are the other interesting aspects of this mass mailing campaign?
It is not common that a mass mailing campaign will generate visits a month after the message was sent, (or maybe it is?) So perhaps you may wonder why this email is special?
If you look at the image you will see in the column Source / Medium the name mailing1714 / email.
1714 is the Mailrelay ID of this campaign, which can be found when you click the Sent newsletters menu:
We can search by date or id. After we find the newsletter, we can see the subject and the message, we can click on the newsletter ID to view the email:
In this case, it is a monthly newsletter that is sent to the Mailrelay subscribers with a few articles.
It makes sense that some subscribers will keep this email to read it later, as it includes several links and subscribers can read the tutorials when they need to find more information about one of the topics.
Therefore, only the emails that include a lot of content will be effective for a long time?
The truth is that this is not a rule.
Another example of a mass mailing campaign which generated visits for a long time
For example, this campaign:
We can see conversions from late April to June.
It is almost unbelievable, who would have thought a newsletter sent on April 28 would generate visits on June 11?
After all this time, we would not even remember that this campaign was sent.
Before continuing
What do you think was this newsletter talking about?
Let’s see if you can guess [:)]
As before, we will click on the Sent newsletters menu to find more information about the email:
Well, it is our newsletter with the template for Mother’s Day:
This also makes sense because Mother’s Day falls on different dates depending on the country, therefore our subscribers saved the email to use the template later.
When they have to prepare the campaign, the subscriber will remember this email and download the template, i think that was the case in this situation, because this mass mailing campaign was offering something important, a free template.
But if the fact that a newsletter continues to lead traffic to your website a month after being sent seems to be normal, please see the following example:
More than two months generating traffic, very good indeed.
It may not be a spectacular amount of traffic, but it is important.
It is a normal newsletter:
Talking about how to create good templates, with tips.
Not a great article, but it is offering good information for users who are thinking about creating a template (we could call it an Evergreen campaign) subscribers can use this information when they need it.
So, is a newsletter effective for months?
Well, I’m not trying to reach such a categorical conclusion, although some newsletters seem to be able to have a more lasting effect:
- Newsletters with several articles
- Newsletters with “evergreen” content
- Newsletters with tips and resources for events
Most of the time, the largest peak will be after sending the campaign, as time goes by, the amount of generated visits will start to decrease.
But remember also that, although the effect is smaller after a while, if you sent several newsletters, the total number of visits can be interesting.
At least that’s my experience
Would you like to share your opinion with us?