Do You Email Members That Don't Renew?

[Bec]

I'm seeing a drop in renewals and wondering: Have you, do you, or don't you bother to email members that don't renew?

If so, do you ask why they didn't renew and invite them to email you back, or do you have any sort of anonymous poll page online where they can check off some items and a comment box?

Do you offer a discount to come back to the site? If so .... Is this proving profitable? And is that set up with a link to a special signup page that gives them access for whatever offer you made to them?

If you did email ex-members at one time, then stopped, why did you stop?

Would appreciate any other feedback on membership retention that any of you care to share.

[nickbaer]

I e-mail my DVD, clip and eBook customers. After a period of time, an e-mail address eventually bounces.

For my Yahoo Groups, after 7 years, 25% bounce rate.

[nickbaer]

CCBill sends me $_POST data for each sale made on my two member subscription sites, and tangible and digital goods sites.

Since tangible and digital goods need to be delivered, CCBill sends $_Post data to a designated notification page on my site. The customer receives a "Thank You" page: "Thank You, your DVD will be shipped in 1-2 days", or "the download link for your eBook or Clip will be e-mailed in a few minutes".

The notification PHP script then explodes the $_POST data into an Array, and saves it to corresponding fields in my SQL table. And for back up, I save the $_POST string to a human readable text file.

It also does a @mail routine that sends an e-mail to me, and the customer, with additional "receipt" details.

E_mail is one $_POST fields. I can send 1:1 e-mails from my desktop, or through a mailer script, or saved as .csv or .xls and use with on-line e-mail services.

Street address is another (series of) fields. I have mailed letters as well - with stamps! Especially to customers whose e-mails have bounced.

And IP address, so I can compare my log of hits (IPs), to purchases.

I also use street address to make my own Google Maps, so I can see, geographically, where customers are, and what the house looks like that I am mailing a DVD to! (And the bots that comprise upwards of 50% of my traffic.)

Similar for member site weekly/monthly subscriptions.

When I started doing this with CCBill, I found the manual to be a pain in the eye. So I just did a print_r($_POST,true) and looked over the received $_POST data, and quickly determined the names of the fields I wanted to use for my statistics.

i also use that data to produce a report that predicts the dollar amount, and week, of my next payout (check or Wire),
* deducting the processing fee
* deducting the 5% holdback,
* as well as adding back the return of the 5% holdback from the 26th week prior,

And the date, the week, based on the minimum threshold for the selected payout method ($25 check/ $250 Wire). Since CCBill pays out weekly, Wires by Tuesdays and checks by Thursdays, my report tells me if I will receive a payout "this" week, or not.

[nickbaer]

As an Affiliate on CCBIll, I have not worked through the possibilities to receive $_POST data for purchases made by customers on Sponsor sites, who clicked-through from my links with linking codes, on my sites and blogs.

As an Affiliate of other Sponsor sites, including all of the VOD partners and Amazon, I assume that that customer info is held close to their chests.

That's wrong in a way, because I find that those sites are too big and too busy to do customer retention.

All of us who send traffic to Sponsor sites, will lose members and credit for members, over time. Customers love to change e-mail addresses every few months to few years, to reduce spam, and/or to avail themselves of new "free minute deals" for new members!

Over the past 8 years, I have signed up 530 members to one popular Sponsor site. Monday, they gave me a report, that I specifically asked for, showing that I had *seven* remaining/surviving members with cash on hand, or unused free promotion minutes!

Seven members with the same e-mail address and account, that they originally signed up under!

What about the other 520? Besides the percentage who actually died, and a percent of the population do every day, there's 300-400 who changed e-mail address, and are now members of other Affiliates, or of the Sponsor itself.

I assume the latter, because the customer knew the URL of the Sponsor. He changed e-mail, and got new free minutes or whatever promotion of the week.

As an Affiliate, as I do as a Sponsor myself, would send e-mail, and am not above sending letters with stamps, to try to retain a customer.

[Bec]

as a Sponsor myself, would send e-mail, and am not above sending letters with stamps, to try to retain a customer

Short of doing illegal spamming, I don't think sending letters with stamps is a demeaning posture, and shows you're willing to explore every possibility in retaining and/or regaining members. Thank you for your in depth responses!

[Bec]

I like to track down every possible response to something I want to know more about, so I posted this same question on several forums. On GFY one guy directed me to his Email 101 - part 1 tutorial. If you run a program, this is, IMHO, a must read.

Here is Email 102

And Email 103

[nickbaer]

There's an ISP in Australia that likes to block my e-mails to customers who had ordered DVDs in the past. One letter with a 90c stamp, produced an new order!

I plan to go to my mailbox next week to pick up the undeliverable!

[SeeMyBucks]

Hello, yes you must. And also email these 'never joined - attempts' too.
The best is to send some pretty cool promo with cool discounts.

You must use a company like mailChimp for this. Never use your own servers.

Paul K

[nickbaer]

When you make a sale, the processor sends $_POST data to your designated php page to receive that data.

When you print_r($_POST,true), that data looks like: (customer info redacted using **********)

Array
(
[customer_fname] => **********
[customer_lname] => **********
[email] => **********
[username] =>
[password] =>
[productDesc] =>
[price] => $61.52 for mail order DVDs
[subscription_id] => 0213299601000009310
[denialId] =>
[clientAccnum] => **********
[clientSubacc] => **********
[address1] => **********
[city] => **********
[state] => **********
[country] => US
[phone_number] =>
[zipcode] => **********
[start_date] => 2013-10-26 14:13:29
[referer] =>
[ccbill_referer] =>
[affiliate] =>
[reservationId] =>
[referringUrl] => http://www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com/checkout.php
[reasonForDecline] =>
[reasonForDeclineCode] =>
[formName] => **********
[cardType] => VISA
[responseDigest] => **********
[productPrice] => **********
[product_code] => **********
[typeId] => 0
[initialPrice] => 61.52
[initialPeriod] => 2
[recurringPrice] => 0
[recurringPeriod] => 0
[rebills] => 0
[initialFormattedPrice] => $61.52
[recurringFormattedPrice] => $0.00
[ip_address] => **********
)

You can save $_POST to a text file, and read it later, or save any or all fields to your SQL table, and read it later.

If you're not quite understanding $_POST, $_POST is a reserved name variable in HTTP.

When you create a form in HTML to send data to analyze by another PHP or Javascript page, in the opening <form…> statement, you indicate method=GET or method=POST. $_POST is the data received as of the result of method=POST. just as $_GET is the data as a result of method=GET.

[nickbaer]

Just as $_GET and $_POST are reserved name variables used by HTTP, and sent by HTTP?

There are several $_SERVER fields, that can be saved and read later for your traffic analysis.

Three common are $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], and $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"], as well as $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], which is the name of the web page itself!

I use these 10 lines of PHP, to save to a text file, individual customer hits received by (each of) my pages:

$date=date("YmdHis"); <= 4-digit Year, month, day, 24-hour, min, sec 20131031175500
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; <= what web page URL sent the traffic!!
$qry = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$ThisPage=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$Users_IP_address = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$Users_Browser = $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]; <= Bots usually have the word 'bot' in them
$fp = fopen('ips.txt', 'a');
$FWwritethis = $date.', '. $ThisPage.', '.$Users_IP_address.', '.$ref.', '.$qry.'^ '.$Users_Browser.PHP_EOL;
fwrite($fp, $FWwritethis);
fclose($fp);


In the "fopen('0ip.txt', 'a')" statement, the 'a' means "append". So the text file created becomes like a calculator paper-tape record of all web traffic data from all hits to your page(s)! You can save all data from all pages to one file, or individual pages to specific file names.

When the file gets big, manually rename it (like add today's date to it). If fopen() doesn't find the file (in this case 'ips.txt'), it makes a new one on its own! And starts anew!

During your testing, you can put in: print_r($_HTTP,true) and print_r($_SERVER,true) and look at ALL of the $_HTTP and $_SERVER fields your pages are being sent, by the web browser and ISP of your customer(s).

if you find some $_HTTP and $_SERVER variables you would like to save and analyze later, you can add them to the "$FWwritethis =" statement above. I comma-sepperated the variables in my example. You can delimit using characters of your choice, but commas are quite common. As are pipes '|'. Don't use any common keyboard characters, or you will have a headache.

(Check the user reference manual for the flavor and age of LINUX, and especially ASP, your page(s) run on, for exact names and spellings. names have evolved over time.)


A couple of months ago, when a character came on here using a variation of my screen name, the above 10 lines of code (plus the "screen name" variable) could have been added to any footer script, and the "ips.txt' file could have been looked at to spot a individual coming on here under multiple screen names.

It is now almost 2014. These fields, these techniques, have been in use for 10, 15, even 20 years by companies making more money than all of us put together, selling services like traffic analysis and affiliate tracking. That's all well and good, but you can also do it yourself, to compare.

Like how much of your traffic that you are paying to Ad services to send to you - is bots!

[nickbaer]

As an example of a customer visit to my site www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com

I put in the following lines of PHP code:

$date=date("YmdHis"); YEAR month day hour minute second
$dateL=date("D M d Y H:i:s"); DAY MONTH day YEAR HOUR:minute:second
$info= '$_SERVER'.PHP_EOL.print_r($_SERVER,true);
$info2= '$_POST'.PHP_EOL.print_r($_POST,true);
$fp = fopen('https.txt', 'a');
$FWwritethis = $date.PHP_EOL.$dateL.PHP_EOL.$info.PHP_EOL.$info2. PHP_EOL.'++++++++++++++'.PHP_EOL;

fwrite($fp, $FWwritethis);
fclose($fp);


When the first customer viewed my page (me), the code produced this text listing in the file https.txt:
Sensitive info redacted with *************



Notice now I now have TWO versions of the date, 1) UNIX and 2) something more business like:

20131031195723
Thu Oct 31 2013 19:57:23 <= My Server is in Europe, it is 19:57:23, or 7:57pm there. 12:57pm here in Las Vegas.
It is always best to save data in its purest form. Convert time zones later.
$_SERVER
Array
(
[HOME] => *************
[HTTP_HOST] => www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.71 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.1 Safari/537.71
[CONTENT_LENGTH] => 53
[HTTP_ACCEPT] => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
[HTTP_REFERER] => http://www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com/
[HTTP_ORIGIN] => http://www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com
[CONTENT_TYPE] => application/x-www-form-urlencoded
[HTTP_DNT] => 1
[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-us
[HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip, deflate
[HTTP_COOKIE] => PHPSESSID=7aa322caa2a76ba555df6162a96c40e5; __utma=72180613.1669661938.1332502546.1381599986.1 383159436.181; __utmz=72180613.1383159436.181.49.utmcsr=dudelodge .com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/indexMobile.php
[HTTP_CONNECTION] => keep-alive
[PATH] => /usr/bin:/bin
[SERVER_SIGNATURE] => <address>Apache Server at www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com Port 80</address>

[SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache
[SERVER_NAME] => www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com
[SERVER_ADDR] => *************
[SERVER_PORT] => 80
[REMOTE_ADDR] => ************* <= MY DHCP IP
[DOCUMENT_ROOT] => *************
[SERVER_ADMIN] => [no address given]
[SCRIPT_FILENAME] => *************
[REMOTE_PORT] => 57247
[GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1
[SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1
[REQUEST_METHOD] => POST
[QUERY_STRING] =>
[REQUEST_URI] => /index.php
[SCRIPT_NAME] => /index.php
[PHP_SELF] => /index.php
[REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT] => 1383249442.11
[REQUEST_TIME] => 1383249442
)

$_POST
Array
(
[NICHE] => 1
[form_niche] => asian
[MyEmail] =>
[MyZIP] =>
[submit] => Asian
)

++++++++++++++



Again, this data comes with each customer hit to any of your pages. There is useful info for you. (There was nothing in the $_HTTP variable, because I have nothing in my code that uses $_HTTP apparently!)

The Customer's IP addr is $_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]
Where did the Customer come from? What Affiliate? $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]

Depends on your flavor and age of LINUX/ASP.

[nickbaer]

And then I had some bot visits

[HTTP_FROM] => googlebot(at)googlebot.com
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)


[HTTP_FROM] => bingbot(at)microsoft.com
[HTTP_HOST] => www.gay-dvds-for-women-and-men.com
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)


[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; linkdexbot/2.0; +http://www.linkdex.com/about/bots/)

[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ezooms/1.0; ezooms.bot@gmail.com)

[Bec]

Hello, yes you must. And also email these 'never joined - attempts' too.
The best is to send some pretty cool promo with cool discounts.

You must use a company like mailChimp for this. Never use your own servers.

Paul K

It would not of occurred to me to use a mail service ... thanks for that tip! ... and welcome to the forum!

[nickbaer]

I didn't want to mention mail services by name, in my message above.

There's Campaigner They inspect your lists and will ask for proof as to how each signed up on your site. Not sure if Credit Card sale counts as "signing up" for e-mail - to them. It *IS* to us, because Visa requires us to communicate with the customer regarding the transaction, but not sure how that might apply to retention efforts 30-days later.

There's MailChimp. Supposedly, no adult. But then again, whatever you can get away with, for as long as you can get away with it. The point being, here, that every e-mail address that you send from eventually gets spam blocked or filtered by customers and ISPs, whether it is "compliant with CAN SOAM" or not. Having an account with a mailer that doesn't do adult, for how many ever mailings you do, is just one more cat's life in the e-mail game.

MailChimp keeps a log of bounces and complaints. We have no control over bounces. As I wrote above, customers like to change e-mail addresses, so they can get new freebies and promotions. That can create a bounce, and MailChimp has a low threshold for bounces.

Some of the on-line Business Card printing services offer "Business" mail and e-mail services. Obviously, sending post cards to customers about our adult products and services is not going to work, but their e-mail services have perks over Campaigner and MainChimp, in terms of pre-designed e-mail designs and artwork.

Some ISPs are on spam black-lists. Someone here promoted a ISP a couple of years ago. I called them, and their info e-mail to me got put in my @gmail spam folder! Keep that in mind as you shop for ISPs! You could pay money for a hosting package with e-mail, and wind up not really being able to use the e-mail, because the whole range of IP addresses assigned to the ISP is black listed.