AppSumo is an online website which offers daily deals in essentially “business optimization” solutions. These are often technologically-based, for example “Bring your iPhone app idea to life!” and “Boost your social media presence by leveraging your promotions”, and “35 email templates that've been tested and proven to work the best”. I inadvertently signed up for their emails a couple of months ago when I entered a website promotion/drawing to win a free LinkedIn Premium account for a year. Since then, I receive multiple daily emails about all of their latest deals. Here are screenshots of the latest email they sent out this morning:
They always have an attention-grabbing email subject line to grab users’ attention to what they consider to be the best deal of the day. When you open the email, the top part of the email usually details the offer mentioned in the subject line further. For example, this email in its subject line advertised someone explaining to users how he developed an online course for the AppSumo website that generated a good sum of money. When I opened the email, there was a picture of the man who supposedly developed the online course, with testimonial about how what he did helped him create three successful courses and how the offer will provide users templates and step-by-step instructions so users will know exactly what to do to generate money like he did. The email also showed how much time was remaining to buy the offer and how much it cost. When I clicked the story from the email, I was brought to AppSumo’s page where I could find even more information about the course.
The target audiences for these emails are definitely business owners/entrepreneurs or management. All of the emails sell methods and courses that can help someone create or improve something, which in turn can generate more revenue. They are interested in technology-based solutions as it is becoming the frontrunner media channel for companies to connect with consumers. These types may also not be excessively savvy with the computer science behind many of the things AppSumo offers, like how to build an app or make a website. They also may be new to the online marketing industry and are trying to figure out things like how to optimize social media reach or how to best use Google Analytics. AppSumo provides user-friendly ways to do these things so that they can add value to their company, organization or personal brand.
AppSumo does an okay job with their email marketing techniques. I think they do well with drawing in users with their subject lines because I frequently find myself clicking to open the email that I would have otherwise skipped over. Their copy within the email is also effective because it creates a sense of confidence in how awesome the offer is and why there aren’t any reasons not to buy it. The main offer always displays the amount of time allotted for the deal to create a sense of urgency for the buyer to purchase immediately and the price so that users can judge the value of the deal before they decide to click on the email link to learn more. The email offers are also varied by subject so there is usually something for everyone interested in some part of the internet business realm.
I feel there are some things that AppSumo could improve on to make its own email campaigns more effective. For one, a key principle of marketing is to try to personalize the message as much as you can to the receiver. I don’t open every single email they send right away, nor do I spend a ton of time on the site, but I figure they should at least be able to address me by my name when I open the email since I gave that information to them when I signed up for the drawing. The only time I bought something was a $1.00 basic Google Analytics course, but I don’t see a ton of offers involving Google Analytics, or offers in such a low price range. I understand that not everything can be so inexpensive, but maybe the site would use that piece of key data to try to optimize the offers made available to me.
Probably the thing that annoys me the most about the emails is the amount of them. I am always sent at least 2-3 emails from them every day, including weekends. I get so annoyed that I want to unsubscribe, but at the same time I don’t want to miss out on something that I may really be interested in buying. As I mentioned before, there is a good variety of deals offered through the emails, but when you’re counting at least seven deals per email, and two emails per day, it’s almost too many deals to look at and think about purchasing.
AppSumo certainly has a lot to offer its customer base and have been successful with creating email campaigns to market to their customers. I think personalizing the emails and better email management will help to optimize their own email campaigns.
