Emails to Geocachers

After I got back from my fishing trip on September 8th and we wanted to send emails to geocachers that weekend of the 13th.  Somehow, we didn't get around to it, but we did try one new promotion that weekend.  We put up a poster at Kansas Coffee Company in Olathe that had a picture of a Cyclops Bunny and said "There is a Cyclops Bunny here", with a short description of the game and some QR codes for download links.  Very nice of our friends there to put the poster up.  It has its own referral code, but I haven't seen anyone sign up with it yet.

Anyway, we thought about sending the emails on the Sunday of the next weekend, the 22nd, but realized we'd rather send them out on a Thursday so that people might use right away on the weekend without forgetting about it.  So finally, we started sending out emails on the 26th.  Kathleen had a list of 230 or so emails she got from web sites.  We sent them in batches of about 30 at a time and sent all 230!

Soon, we got rejection notices from Google saying that all of the email but one had been rejected as potential junk mail, i.e. spam.  I guess technically you could say they were spam, in that they were unsolicited emails trying to promote something to a large number of people we don't know.  But on the other hand, they were very specifically targeted to people who put their emails online because they weer interested in geocaching.  We do think they'll like it and they can try it for free to decide for themselves, so we don't feel too bad about sending the emails.

Since only 30 got out that first night, Kathleen tried sending more the next day and only got another 10 or so out before getting the message again.  And then maybe 10 more the next day.  That resulted in about 8 sign-ups, and 2 more people on the leader board, consistent with our ratio of about 75% of signups never finding a monster.  And interestingly, one Like of Monster Cache on Facebook, so that was nice.  But still not quite yet the impact we were hoping for.

There were 111 on the Legends board last week, and 113 now after the first 50 emails.