Stock Promotion, Investor Relations and Email Marketing

Over the last couple of months, I have been doing my own private research thing on email marketing in stock promotion and investor relations. I have also been looking at ways and means for entities that have websites to gain more visitors to their site. Some of this stuff has already been mentioned recently. So, let me get started with some new observations based on my years of experience in the stock promotion and IR business and how social networks and other things are beginning to change how business is getting done.

Nearly all stock promotional entities have websites; however, my research has indicated there are very few stock promo sites that get any appreciable amount of traffic. The reason there is no traffic is because once a visitor enters the site and sees that there is nothing more than micro cap stocks being pumped, they have no reason to come back again. There is no way for them to participate. What does this mean for the owners of the sites? How do they promote stocks if there are no visitors coming to their site?

The answer is one of two things:

• They are ineffective and completely impotent
• They use an email list

It is a fact that there is only one way of marketing a company’s stock (notice I did not say “marketing a company”) according to 99% of promoters=> email, email, email, EMAIL. Every email they send out has nothing but promotion of a stock in it. Bear with me; I am going to come back to this in a paragraph or two.

I have three different business email addresses. I receive something in excess of 2,000 emails a day, many of them stock promo emails along with the male enhancement pills, other drugs, junk products, porn and what-have-you. Most of the spam is arrested at the server level; the rest is captured by my computer’s email client which cuts the amount of email I actually get in my inbox down to about 20-30 a day. That means only 1.5% of the emails directed toward me are actually seen by me. Anti-spam software and systems have become very efficient.

There are three basic ways to acquire an email list:

1. Organic- this means you have a site whereby people find your site’s content useful and sign up.
2. Set up multiple sites and give away something free but require registration (including the email address) before they can download the freebie.
3. Buy email lists.

Item number one is the best way but takes time. It requires good site content be developed which is something generally beyond the very short term objectives of most promotional entities. Item number two is hard too because it also requires something worthwhile to give away and… a lot of people will not sign up or register to receive freebies because they believe their email address will be sold or used otherwise and will lead to a lot of spam. Item number three is a no-brainer. It is the quickest and easiest way to run an email campaign; very expensive however! People I have talked to in the last couple of months who are running large promo campaigns via email are telling me they spend $10-30K for lists. It’s part of the “budget” for running a campaign. If you are paid $100K to run a week-long program and do 2 email campaigns, you outsource $50K to other emailers and promoters, and buy two $20K lists and you still pocket $10K… not bad for a week’s worth of work.

The Moldering Corpse

However, at the same time, a number of other things are happening to email marketing when it comes to stock promotion according to the same high-level promoters. They also tell me email lists are getting more expensive. Email lists are becoming less and less effective overall. They tell me that most email lists ROI is average at best and the list is only effective once. Not to mention that a lot of the recipients probably consider this is spam. I know I am on just about every promoter’s email list and I did not sign up or subscribe to 95% of the emails I receive. Bottom line is: With regard to stock promotion email promotion is by in large, a sloppy way to do business. But, for now it still works albeit an expensive way to do business. But more than anything, it is all that most promotional entities know. Very few have ventured outside the email world, and many are doomed to starve to death and be found as a moldering corpse with their bony hand on the “send button”. A few others think they are one-up on everyone else by taking their email and copy/pasting into a Facebook message and sending it to all their “friends”. Well, all their “friends” delete it just like I do. I have somewhere around 500 friends on Facebook and the bulk of what I find in my “inbox” at Facebook are stock promotions.

Community and Content Driven Sites

While it is not a stock promotional site, the site that stands out from most of the rest is StockHideOut.com. This is one of the very few stock related sites offering so many options for users that it truly is all things to all people when it comes to stocks. They have so many ways to ENGAGE visitors that they likely have a very high conversion rate. What is conversion rate? Answer: the number of visitors coming to your site and actually register or sign up to be a member and not just look around and leave, never to return. If you want to determine one really good measure of your site, sign up for Google Analytics and look at your “Bounce Rate”- this is the percent of visitors that never go past your home page and look at anything else. Those are the ones who will never come back. If your bounce rate is high, your site sucks. At HotStockChat.com, our bounce rate is less than ONE PERCENT. This means more than 99 percent of visitors to the site go past the first page to look at content, read articles etc.

StockHideOut.com is a community based site which is one of two types of sites which is working these days; the other being content-driven sites. OK, so what is a content driven site? Answer: a site that has fresh, new articles or videos, slide presentations etc updated and posted on a regular basis. If the content is good or even “remarkable” then you will see visitors come back again and again. You can also convert these visitors to members or subscribers in a number of different ways. If your site has the same stuff on it week after week and month after month, why would anyone have a reason to return? As far as promotional sites are concerned, if all you are featuring is “Our Featured Companies”, I bet you have a high bounce rate.

We are still Waiting…

Finally, I will tell you this: I have been talking to a lot of people about what I have written here. Most of them think I am crazier than a two-legged bar stool. But, I am seeing more and more people who are seeing the value of communities and content. The static sites which rely on email only for marketing and owners who don’t have big budgets to keep buying bigger and more expensive lists (which are becoming less and less effective anyhow) are dying on the vine. The world has changed forever and that CEO who told me over a year ago “they were going to wait for things to go back to the way they were before they do any promotion of their company” is still waiting and will continue to wait…

Tagged as: email, email marketing, investor relations, social media, social networks, stock promotion