Difference in response % mailing to email address vs contact form

Question to all email marketers: what is your experience in responses when emailing offers directly to an email address vs posting to their website contact form?

Which one has the better result and does this result differ between different methods like a CPA or selling products in your offer?

If you are spamming both, it will make little difference, both will be poor.

But if your email list is opt-in and offer relevant it will be significantly higher.

@GringoMonkey, technically I am spamming as these are not opt-in.

Anyone doing "something with cold sales letters/emails" knows it boils down to matching the offer to the prospect and HOW WELL you craft your email message. Fortunately I do the latter pretty well if I say so myself, because the response percentage is MUCH higher than is considered "okay" for this scenario.

However, I am curious if one method (send to email address vs contact form) has consistently better results than the other, from first hand experience from other email marketers on this forum?

I'm an outreacher and I find emails have a better response rate if you are hitting the inbox at a decent rate. Most of the contact form submissions probably never get seen.

Maybe @loopline has something to say about this

It depends is the correct answer.

Email can be b2b or b2c. Contact forms are really b2b only. I mean you can sell b2c products, but it doesn't work that well.

I can't imagine a cpa offer doing that great on either email or contact forms, not without some funnel to sell it as more then just a direct promo, but you could try it.

When I did cold email vs contact form contact form crushed it compared to cold email, but there are SOOOO many factors at play with email that its just hard. I frankly would rather build quality youtube videos and scale in other ways then fight email, so I do contact forms because it does work and its just easier.

@loopline, thank you very much for that insight, that is very much appreciated!

definitely email address, as contact form submissions usually go through a filter first, that is in addition to the mail server spam filter.

It depends on what are you trying to promote.

Using the contact form can be useful if you're targeting a B2B audience.

Here is just some feedback after some more fine tuning. Its interesting that some say "definitely email address" and some say "contact form will work also".
As for our results, the contact form works fine, actually better then emailing directly to email address.
HOWEVER, as usual, you need to know the recipe of the hot sauce.

I read another post from about 2 weeks ago with a good example of how NOT to write an email sales pitch and bad subject line.
People are people, if you know how to grab their attention in the subject line or first line of the message with a great sales pitch, then your response percentage will be great!

The same with the "extra spam rules" in contact forms is not an issue actually as long as you know HOW to write your message. A business is NOT going to make it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to reach them, think about it. That would be plain stupid. So this extra spam step is NOT an obstacle at all......some people just want to make up hurdles for themselves.....or for others ;-)

Cold pitches to contact forms don't work that well because when someone gets a message from their site it will ususally come through with some kind of subject heading like "message from your website" so they get excited thinking it's a potential customer. That same excitement is what leads to them smashing the delete key passionately when they discover it's a sales pitch. Emailing on the other hand doesn't make them have false expectations like that so a cold pitch definitely falls on better eyes in that respect. However, that's not to say that contact form marketing doesn't work. It works very well and is easier to do than emailing, the only thing is that you have to be a bit more creative and more passive with your sales pitches because the let down from "oh boy, a customer messaged me!!" to "damn it's just spam!!!!" is a long way for them to fall.

dooku said:

Question to all email marketers: what is your experience in responses when emailing offers directly to an email address vs posting to their website contact form?

Which one has the better result and does this result differ between different methods like a CPA or selling products in your offer?

Click to expand...

Emailing offers directly to an email address is an efficient way of communicating with a client and leads to a better communication rather then posting on their website.