Case Study: Test Emailing & E-Mail Click-Through Response Rate

First Class Bears is an online retailer that makes hand-crafted, quality, collectible teddy bears that you can send to friends and family as gifts for special occasions. The bears have a unique feature that separates them from run-of-mill teddy bears: they can replay taped messages. Specifically, when a person receiving the teddy bear squeezes it, they hear a personalized message in your voice. Your message is recorded in high quality digital sound directly from your telephone to the teddy bear of your choice.

These bears are perfect for Valentine's Day. With that in mind, First Class Bears [http://www.firstclassbears.com] wanted to conduct a marketing campaign to maximize the potential profits from selling the bears for the romantic holiday. The company turned to Key Promotions [http://www.keypromotions.com], an online marketing firm.

Key Promotions decided on direct e-mail marketing and turned to NetCreations' PostMaster Direct service that allows to "opt-in" to receive sales and promotions via e-mail in topics of interest they specify beforehand.

On the Monday preceding Valentine's Day, Key Promotions did a test mailing to about 2,000 out of 4,000 names on an appropriate list. By Wednesday, the company decided to complete the mailing to the remaining 2,000 names on the list.

First Class Bears received a 10.6 percent click-through response rate on the first mailing and a more than 9 percent click-through rate on the second. More importantly, almost all click throughs were converted into sales and inquiries for brochures. At the time, First Class Bears' Web site was going through a redesign and the company was concerned about how the old design would effect the response to the mailing. However, PostMaster Direct's targeted e-mail lists still had a tremendous response rate.