Traffic plus Click Through Rate Plus Actions Plus Response Score = Best Overall Mailers.

I continue to refine my list mailer/safelist rankings and have now hit upon what I consider to be getting close to the perfect ranking system.

I rank mailers in 4 key criteria.

These are

Traffic delivered

This is relatively self-explanatory and has to be the first standard met. Traffic not only has to be delivered, it has to be real and bot-free. I use the Leads Leap tracking system which identifies bot traffic and gives figures for real human visitors. Membership numbers mean very little on most sites. This is demonstrated by the fact that the smallest mailer surveyed delivered more traffic than over 100 other mailers that I tracked.

The top 5 mailers that delivered traffic were

• Viral Mailer For You (Diamond member)
• Express Train Mail (Middle Class lifetime member)
• Free Advertising For You (Platinum member)
• Digi Products (Silver member) most traffic came from various solo ad packages that came with the membership
• Wifi Mailer (CEO WIfi member)

I’m sure that some of these results may surprise but it probably indicates the prudence of making the most of what you’ve got.

Click through rate

Click-through rate is one determinant of mailer effectiveness. Many get fooled into believing that it is the sole determinant. It is one statistic that viewed in isolation can be a trifle misleading. 98% of mailer traffic is incentivised to some degree. Click-through rates are always higher at mailers that require people to view a set number of mails prior to mailing. Inevitably these mailers have a lower response rate than other mailers because their audience is not engaged. Nevertheless, click-through rate is a helpful measure when viewed together with these other criteria.

The top 5 click through rate mailers are

• Elite Team Ads
• Viral Mailer For You
• List Nerds
• Free Advertising For You
• Viral Nugget

Actions taken

85% of my advertising concentrates on building my list. Leads Leap counts all opt-ins as well as click-throughs to other sites.

Actions taken are a good indicator of an engaged audience. I find the same websites always feature heavily when I do my reviews of traffic campaigns, The top 5 sites in terms of actions taken for the past week were

• European safelist
• Viral Mailer For You
• Express Train Mail
• Wifi Mailer
• Free Advertising For You

Response Score

This is a formula I’ve come up with which multiplies the actions per 100 clicks by the click-through rate to give an arbitrary number. The results again are a little surprising., with Elite team Ads coming out on top. Elite Team Ads is a small mailer that launched with little fanfare maybe a month ago. I joined on a whim, and took a monthly upgrade for $3.95. At the start of the month it had 72 members. It now has 117. Remarkably, it has delivered 369 visitors with a click through rate of 11.69 and 7 actions taken over the month. I’m not sure that it can keep that response rate up, but it has made me rethink my attitude to small mailers.

The top 5 response scores were

• Elite team ads
• Viral Nugget
• Free Advertising For You
• Mailer Gold
• Viral Mailer For You

Overall rankings

Mailer	Traffic Ranking	CTR Ranking	Actions Ranking	Response Score Ranking	Overall score
Viral Mailer For You	1	2	2	5	2.5
Free Advertising For You	3	4	5	3	3.75
Express Train Mail	2	14	3	9	7
List Surfing	7	8	13	10	9.5
Elite Team Ads	28	1	10	1	10
Adchiever	18	11	11	7	11.75
Wifi Mailer	5	26	4	13	12
Viral Nugget	33	5	9	2	12.25
Website Traffic Games	12	12	21	17	15.5
State of the Art Mailer	9	18	16	24	16.75
100 Percent Clicks	24	19	17	11	17.75
Instant Ad Power	16	30	12	19	19.25

The table demonstrates that there is little correlation between click-through rates and visitor engagement (actions).