[Libertas]

I've thought about this for a few days, and I wanted to talk to you all about building and best converting an email list.

As we know, it's one of the best things you can do if you're trying to make money online.

Numbers matter of course, and I've figured out how to get a fair amount of new subscribers. Your primary offer should be a sizable give away, such as a free ebook or free chapters of something. Secondary offers can be a VIP publication or the like, but I do stress that those should be secondary.

My lists open and click rates are OK (decently above average in their categories), but I'm trying to improve both. One thing I've noticed is that you definitely don't want to put the link you want your subscribers to open in a prominent place or in prominent lettering. That just feels like spam. You want to finesse your readers into opening, I've found, with varying rates of success for each particular writing.

So share your own ideas here. How do you optimize new subscribers? How do you improve open and click rates with subject lines, email text, etc.?

[jkray_]

@ Libertas

I am in the building email list phase at the moment. What's the best wordpress plugin you can use to manage the process?

[Il Bersagliere]

You need to look into a bit of data extraction or scraping. It's a technique I learned from my friend who did SEO consulting. I have a side gig that I am involved in with relatively low competition (although increasing in recent years). I scrape sites and forums that deal with my competition/product/niche and outsource the work (Fiverr). For example, an old blog that promotes products for health and wellness might not choose to moderate their comment section and thus, you have many (possibly unattended) prospective clients leave their contact details. These may serve as potential leads down the line and the person you decide to hire will obviously include these types of sites in his work.

I then receive the excel/CSV/text file with email addresses/phone #s/etc sorted for me and I blast my message to them. Look online for many services that do this for you. It's also very easy to integrate this within a WordPress landing page.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/mail-subscribe-list/

I have converted a decent amount of cash this way and made recurring sales passively through repeat clients and I highly recommend you try it once or twice. The nature of my product is very simple, so no fancy subscription type messages. Just a few lines of text in the body with an attention capturing subject line and you are good to go. I also have a 'perennial' niche so I could easily send off something with a subject that reads "Summer 2016 hats here" or a variation of that.

Every few months, I will update my list by re-scraping the usual suspects and adding those emails to an updated list. I also delete inactive contact information so that there is some turnover with clients. Incidentally, I used to be able to get away with using the BCC function on Gmail, but their platform has changed and as your list grows, you will want to send multiple (1k+) messages at once. Gmail falls short because it only allows you to send 500 emails at a time. I would recommend getting something like SendBlaster or MailChimp.

I rarely offer incentives, btw, because I'm a cheap piece of shit, but if I do need to meet a milestone, I definitely give out offers.

[TooFineAPoint]

The most effective and immediately actionable tip I have ever used to improve open rates:

resend your emails after one week to all unopens, but use a new subject line

Same message, just a new subject line (try something radically different in tone/style than your original subject).

The extra opens will make a huge difference over time on your overall open rate.

Libertas, in terms of getting readers to click links, I go in the opposite direction of what you are saying. I try to put the link twice, once after some interest has been generated and some value has been demonstrated, and then again at the bottom of the email as a call to action (assuming the message is about one specific thing).

[roid]

Ben Settle.


Google him.

[RichieP]

Hah that scraping technique is smart.

I also second basic followups to people who haven't opened.

[Libertas]

(08-05-2016 07:39 AM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  

The most effective and immediately actionable tip I have ever used to improve open rates:

resend your emails after one week to all unopens, but use a new subject line

Same message, just a new subject line (try something radically different in tone/style than your original subject).

The extra opens will make a huge difference over time on your overall open rate.

Libertas, in terms of getting readers to click links, I go in the opposite direction of what you are saying. I try to put the link twice, once after some interest has been generated and some value has been demonstrated, and then again at the bottom of the email as a call to action (assuming the message is about one specific thing).

Which service do you use? With Mailchimp it's a bit difficult to know which specific person opened which specific email, though you do get star ratings for your best email subs.

Good point about putting the link twice. I haven't been doing a very effective CTA, come to think of it.

@ Il Bersagliere:

What do you sell to those people? I'm not sure that would necessarily work with me, unless I'm promoting a blog post to a related topic they were looking for.

What program do you use to scrape?

[Leo_Decashio]

Il Bersagliere had a great point about scraping.

Only thing for me to add is utilize good, clean UX when you design your CTA inside your user flow. You should test if you want your CTA immediately when the user accesses your site, or maybe right before they leave. This article gives good overview of the different options: http://blog.invisionapp.com/designing-email-list-cta/

[Il Bersagliere]

(08-06-2016 09:35 AM)Libertas Wrote:  

(08-05-2016 07:39 AM)TooFineAPoint Wrote:  

The most effective and immediately actionable tip I have ever used to improve open rates:

resend your emails after one week to all unopens, but use a new subject line

Same message, just a new subject line (try something radically different in tone/style than your original subject).

The extra opens will make a huge difference over time on your overall open rate.

Libertas, in terms of getting readers to click links, I go in the opposite direction of what you are saying. I try to put the link twice, once after some interest has been generated and some value has been demonstrated, and then again at the bottom of the email as a call to action (assuming the message is about one specific thing).

Which service do you use? With Mailchimp it's a bit difficult to know which specific person opened which specific email, though you do get star ratings for your best email subs.

Good point about putting the link twice. I haven't been doing a very effective CTA, come to think of it.

@ Il Bersagliere:

What do you sell to those people? I'm not sure that would necessarily work with me, unless I'm promoting a blog post to a related topic they were looking for.

What program do you use to scrape?

Mostly digital products

Many programs that you will encounter online will only be able to extract emails from text sources, meaning you will already need some form of files (output CSV, webpage, etc.) with emails prepared. The web crawling/scraping process is different and good ones collect all data.

There are desktop clients like VietSpider or Email Extractor Pro. A great one is Atomic Email Hunter which is fairly straighforward to use. Many of these are not free, so it's advised that you search/torrent for a copy so you can try before you buy. There are also web-based programs like import.io, which is a paid solution and a non-specific scraper. Many programs will be like that, so you'd have to take output, which is a CSV file and separate that for only emails. You can then throw the emails into MailChimp or whatever management software you are using.

The scraping/web crawling process will need to target as many sites (or as specific as possible) within your niche or the type of product you are selling. So if you are a steam code reseller, you target gaming forums, blogs, and pseudo-hacker spaces. A lot of these are big sites and may take time, so it's wise to do processes in batches. Personally, I recommend you get your sites and outsource the data extraction process to Fiver and Upwork. Here's a great example of one here. It's not expensive and will save you an awful amount of time instead of tinkering with programs.

Outsourcing is usually a painless process and you can request that the crawling to final output (pure email list) be done so you can just plug them into MailChimp/SendBlaster/Gmail. The concept can also work with phone numbers, skype IDs, etc., which is why people often get so many telemarketing phone calls. I would surmise, however, that their target selection is much wider that the stuff you'd be doing.

To reiterate, Atomic Email hunter is your best bet if you want a fairly straightforward way to test some of this stuff out.

[TooFineAPoint]

Libertas:

when you go to send your reminder email (after a week or two), Mailchimp will ask you to select your list, and then ask if you want to send to a segment.

You choose the segment by "campaign activity", and what you want is "did not open Campaign Name _____".

Then it will only re-send the campaign (with the new subject line you have to write -- that's important) to people who did not open the first time.

If you need more info, PM me. I'll send you screenshots. I'm not sure if this option is included with a free Mailchimp account.

As for CTAs on your emails, and putting links twice, sign up for Brian Dean's "Backlinko" mailing list. He does this; short emails to send people to his blog posts, and the link is always halfway through and again at the end of the email. He has good info for SEO, if you need that. But the example of how he formats emails is what might help you.

Right now, the best mailing list tips I have found are from SumoMe. They did a little free course called Email 1K for building your list as well: http://email1k.com/course/

[Libertas]

One thing I've noticed about sending emails about blog posts as opposed to an ebook or the like is that you need to write it a little bit longer and provide some value rather than just want people to click the link to your post. The email should be able to provide value on its own without even clicking through to the post. Otherwise it just feels like spam. For instance, my post about Harry Truman's work ethic in 1948 got a much higher click rate than my recent post about Alex Rodriguez's retirement which felt like an ad, looking back on it.

[TooFineAPoint]

Agreed.

Dean does something like that.

What I've noticed is that his blog posts are heavy with info and usually very actionable. But he tends to get right down to it. Whereas the emails are actually pitching the benefits of reading the blog post, with very little of the info that is in the post.

They are teasers, but they tell you how and why you'll benefit from reading them instead of just being coy.

[TooFineAPoint]

Question about A/B test results for the more experienced guys:

What are your requirements to identify something as "true in most cases"? Something that you can now call a marketing law and use forever.

I'll explain.

I've been A/B testing email subject lines. I've moved on from element-based stuff (lower case vs capitalizing the first or all of the words, etc). Now I am testing concepts.

My latest concept was to see if opens would increase if I highlighted an extra benefit right in the subject line. So 1 email went out as (paraphrase) "latest blog articles -- summarized for you", and another went out as just "latest blog articles".

On our list of 16000, the "summarized for you" opened more. But only 1.2% more.

So my questions are:

1. Is that even significant?
2. And if it is significant, then do I now make this a "law" of my marketing, assume that (if possible) I should always put a benefit right in the subject line, and move on to test something else?

[Valentine]

^ A t-test is usually the most suitable statistical analysis if you're doing A/B testing with that number of samples.

If using under 50 data points then alternative tests should be used https://www.quora.com/What-statistical-t...sion-rates