SB Survey 2009

Introduction
In November 2009, we conducted a survey to analyze how our customers were using SendBlaster. The survey was carried out through an online questionnaire presented to the SendBlaster PRO users in both Italian and English, at the first launch of the software.
The questionnaire, made with Google Docs, comprises of 9 questions, aimed at identifying the different users’ profiles, the satisfaction level, and collecting suggestions for improving SendBlaster. The first group of questions (1-5) were mandatory, the second group (6-9) were optional so some respondents did not reply to every question. 1000 respondents responded to the survey. The following report highlights the results.

Results
Q01. How many mailings do you send each month?

A little more than half of the respondents (56%) declared they use SendBlaster to handle up to 4 mailing per month. 21% of the respondents affirmed they send between 5 and 10 mailing a month, while almost 1 out of 4 uses SendBlaster more intensely, sending over 10 mailings a month (23%).

Q02. How many subscribers do you have in your opt-in lists?

Almost 7 SendBlaster users out of 10 send their emails to small lists with less than 5.000 contacts. 15% of the respondents have distribution lists of 5.000 to 10.000 users, whereas we can rate as “big mailers” only the 5% of the users, who handle lists with over 50.000 addresses.

Q03. How many emails do you send each month?

39% of the respondents declared they send less than 1.000 emails per month. The percentage drops to 25% for those who send up to 5.000 emails and to 12% for those who send up to 10.000 emails. It is important to note that almost 10% of the respondents uses SendBlaster “massively” with a monthly average of 50.000 emails sent.

Q04. You are sending email campaigns with SendBlaster…

The number of users who use SendBlaster by themselves (for their businesses, or for their blogs) clearly surpass the number of users who send emails for third parties with a very high percentage: 76% vs. 8%. The remaining responders affirm to send emails for their own business and for their clients.

Q05. In SendBlaster, you set up an SMTP given by…

This is a multiple choice question, hence the sum is greater than 100% as many respondents use more than one SMTP service. The SMTP services chosen by most users are those offered by their own ISP (25%), by their hosting provider (20%) and by specialized service providers (22%). Those who choose the SMTP service provided by the email provider are a clear minority (7%). 13% of the respondents uses the direct feature instead of the one through SMTP.

Q06. Which is the primary person that uses SendBlaster in your company?

The 21% of the users expresses the highest rate of satisfaction (5), while the majority of the assessments, 46%, is just below (4). It is important to notice the low number of negative assessments, the 5% of the respondents. Altogether, the average rate of satisfaction equals 3.81.

Q07. Before you started using SendBlaster, how were you doing email marketing?

The 21% of the users expresses the highest rate of satisfaction (5), while the majority of the assessments, 46%, is just below (4). It is important to notice the low number of negative assessments, the 5% of the respondents. Altogether, the average rate of satisfaction equals 3.81.

Q08. How satisfied are you with SendBlaster? (From a scale of 1 to 5)

The 21% of the users expresses the highest rate of satisfaction (5), while the majority of the assessments, 46%, is just below (4). It is important to notice the low number of negative assessments, the 5% of the respondents. Altogether, the average rate of satisfaction equals 3.81.

Q09. Use the space below to offer any comments or suggestions that you may have on how we can improve SendBlaster.

More than 300 users have left comments on their experience with SendBlaster.
A high percentage of users request features that are already included in the current version of SendBlaster or will be incorporated in the upcoming version 2.0 (e.g. scheduling, tracking, saving different configurations, ..)
Some critical elements mentioned relate to templates, internal editor message and the lack of recent updates.

Here you can find a selection of comments from our users:

I like it because I dont have you give you my contacts list. I keep those on my computer.

Best and easiest program to use.

I have found sendblaster to do what i need and find it very good.

It would be nice to have an easy way to track who opens emails and links, an easier interface to create rich graphic emails (wysiwyg), reports to analyze and follow up campaigns and means to grow our lists.

More options for designing would be useful e.g. more fonts, clip art, tools etc… Also a spell check would be very handy.

offer more templates that are generic (without the photographs) and professional looking.