Is anyone of you building a list?
- Thread starter Jenna Hagen
- Start date
Lists are great if you can get past the mindset that lists are time sensitive.
For sure you'll lose a few emails here and there, but I've got people who joined my list 5 years ago looking for a free laptop still clicking the links in my newsletter.
For sure you'll lose a few emails here and there, but I've got people who joined my list 5 years ago looking for a free laptop still clicking the links in my newsletter.
Okay here's my experience with lists...
Basically I've been trying a few different formats and have always failed to make it as profitable as a direct sale on the lander.
Usually I get 10-20% opt in rate and after that just can't make it work.
My latest test was with a traffic source that works great with lander and instant sale. SO I decided to create a simple opt in and run it for a day or two to see what happens. After about 5-10k opt ins and several email blasts I concluded yet again it's simply not worth it.
Those few k people got about 5 blasts after that and almost zero sales - no one was even opening those emails.
It could be argued I'm a bad copywriter or that I haven't invested enough time to build relationship with them etc and I do think those are valid points, but at the same time I find it a bit weird I'm getting that good results with a LP and about 20x worse conversions with opt in and email blasts...
I mean, of course I know some are making it work but I've done quite some tests and it never ever worked.
Basically I've been trying a few different formats and have always failed to make it as profitable as a direct sale on the lander.
Usually I get 10-20% opt in rate and after that just can't make it work.
My latest test was with a traffic source that works great with lander and instant sale. SO I decided to create a simple opt in and run it for a day or two to see what happens. After about 5-10k opt ins and several email blasts I concluded yet again it's simply not worth it.
Those few k people got about 5 blasts after that and almost zero sales - no one was even opening those emails.
It could be argued I'm a bad copywriter or that I haven't invested enough time to build relationship with them etc and I do think those are valid points, but at the same time I find it a bit weird I'm getting that good results with a LP and about 20x worse conversions with opt in and email blasts...
I mean, of course I know some are making it work but I've done quite some tests and it never ever worked.
What type of niche / offer did you do this with? What were you open/click rates?
I have had similar experience on some campaigns... Seems to me a possible solution would be to have your traditional presell lander as a thank-you page and use daily follow-up emails to recover / remind them what they are missing out on.
After a week they would turn into cold leads and you can just send them whatever comes along and hope it sticks, unless you are really looking to invest in building a relationship, regularly providing valuable content and so on...
Interested in hearing how others are designing their opt-in page / presell path / autoresponder sequence / broadcast content.
Open rates sucked big time, I don't really want to go into getresponse to check it now but I remember they were painfully low.
How I was doing it was offer them a free report in exchange for their email and instant access to the free trial of the offer.
So about 1% converted after the opt in on the offer lander.
The biggest problem was unresponsiveness of the people on the list. With each blast only a few people clicked on the links.
Niche can't be the problem because I've had this exact same thing happen a few times across several niches.
IMO there are a few points that need to be considered:
1.) what is LIFETIME value of the opt in
This one is a bit tricky because you need at least a few months worth of data to get a fair estimate. And the problem I see with this is that there's opportunity cost of running the lander and getting huge conversions for that big of a test. My tests lasted 1 week tops and I sent about 5 emails. Differences between 1 week and 1 year in terms of value of your opt in are probably huge.
2.) proper monetization: testing
With opt ins there's SO MUCH MORE to test it's insane.
- different opt-in types: a) small one page opt in b) sales letter type with a lot of pre-selling c) video on the opt in
- different incentives for their email: You simply can't know what incentive will give you the best opt in rate... It's kinda like creating a whole new offer because you need to find exactly what your traffic responds to - what are their emotional triggers and what makes them go "whoa I better grab this"): it could be pdf, it could be vid, it could be some specific secret tips...
- different landers after opt in (this is the only thing we are testing if we're just having the lander to get direct sales)
- sequence of emails: are we sending them an email every single day for the first 10 days? Are we sending one every 3 days? etc
- offers in those emails: Are we sequencing our list regards whom clicked on the offer and who bought the item so that we aren't pushing offers to those that already bought. When do we introduce new offers to get the highest response?
- are we sending emails that are aggressive or are we building trust: how long does it take to get aggressive? This probably depends on the type of presell and the type of creatives your traffic responded to, but sometimes you can get direct down to business and go for the sale and sometimes you need to build trust etc
3.) additional value in the list
Problem with small tests is that we aren't considering future "launches" we might do to the list. Gurus actually do know what they're doing and their type of launches can be easily ported to any other niche and pull massive $$ from lists.
So I think I'll just stop with my ramblings here because this is getting a bit long.