We recently sent an email to our customers telling them about some of the great new images that we added to our subscription products. To make our promotion a bit more interesting, we gave an example of a new image to match each of the 26 letters in the alphabet.
We emailed this promotion first to our Photos To Go Unlimited users. These subscribers get access to 85,000 professional images at a 2MB size. Most of our Photos To Go Unlimited customers are Web designers, small businesspeople, or "road warriors."
We then emailed our Index Open users. These subscribers use high resolution versions of the same images that our Photos To Go Unlimited users see, to create advertisements, brochures, and editorial pieces.
The result was a great open rate (the number of people who saw our email an opened it / the total number of people we emails)--about double the normal for both products. We also saw a high level of click through on the links to the new images. I was interested to see both which links were most popular and if there was any difference between the behavior of the lower end and higher end users.
Here are the raw click through rankings for the two products (1 = the most click throughs, 2 = second highest, etc.):
The top entry is the letter "A." I don't attribute this to intense interest in "Anatomy." Rather, I think it is human nature to start a list like this at the top, just as we start reading a newpaper or magazine at the front. Of course, we generally decide to skip ahead to the "good stuff," as did the viewers of these emails.
Note that both sets of viewers had "kiss" as their second-most-clicked on link. I have always felt that words like this, that incorporate both action and concept values, are very compelling. "Young Adult' as number three for both products reflects the heavy use of young people in all types of creative materials (they are such a desireable market to appeal to) and the fact that many of the users of our products are young (and interested in "themselves"). "Nature" is also a common choice, at number four. I think that subscription buyers are particularly comfortable with looking to these products as a source of backgrounds and "rest images" for their work.
We diverge suddenly and sharply between entries 5 and 7 (although both groups had a "bird" selection in here, that probably was due to the "read from the front" syndrome, I mentioned above). Our Index Open users were more interested in "jewelry" and "computers." These are business subjects and include images that are handy for illustrating sell sheets, retail brochures, and office-related marketing materials. Our Photos To Go Unlimited users wanted to look at "question mark" and "laughing." Both are quirkier subjects, with less practical use. They support the idea that these lower end users have more time and interest in experimentation and brainstorming, than their more project-focused high end counterparts.
At the bottom of the list for both groups were the animals. "Giraffes," "zebras," and "ostriches" may be cute or exotic, but they don't fit easily into many projects. Note though, that every word in the alphabet got some click through interest. It seems our subscription customers want to see new images as soon as they are available. This hunger for new material is a good sign for those images suppliers who participate in the subscription market.
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