Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Selling Online Content

I’ve had a hunch for a long time that people who use certain web-based email accounts convert better into paying members than others. I also sensed, just from watching subscriptions to the email list and new daily members, that those folks that didn’t use web-based accounts when signing up for the email list, converted better into paying members.

The hypothesis was that people who signed up for our email list with their primary ISP or work email had a “trust starting point” that was higher than a web-based account and therefore were easier to convert into paying members in a shorter time.

Bear with me on this. I know that more and more people are using web-based email accounts as their primary email these days, but humor me. (But please tell me where I’m wrong about the following in the comments as always!)

So on my hundredth visit to AWeber.com today to check on our email list sign ups for our membership site lists, I saw an email from the domain trashmail.net had signed up for our email list – but not yet confirmed with the click on the double-opt-in confirmation link. Interesting, I thought. Immediately I concluded that I had about a 0.002% chance of ever converting that person to a paying member. I might as well delete them right now from our email list and save us both the heartache.

Trashmail.net is one of a number of services where you can get temporary junk email address and delete and add them quickly to avoid spam. I get it. A worthy service that serves a purpose for the un-trusting email newsletter subscriber. (Special thanks to the jerk spammers of the world for making such a service necessary. I hope to meet you at fight club someday so I can beat you up with all my other legitimate online business friends.)

Anyway, if someone begins our relationship using a junk email address and what I can only assume is an obvious low level of trust, do I really have a chance of converting them into a paying member down the road? Perhaps, but gut tells me it’s a long shot. Like one in a thousand? More like one in a million. (“So you’re saying there’s a chance….” for you Dumb and Dumber fans).

It got me thinking that it was time to finally run the numbers and see which types of email accounts converted best to paying members. This is very raw data and there are countless ways to look at this, but across all our membership sites, here’s what I found.

In terms of paying members at our sites:

- 25% are Gmail accounts
- 16% are Yahoo accounts
- 8% are Hotmail accounts
- 51% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email and other

That alone is interesting, but doesn’t really tell the whole story. Perhaps Gmail is just the most popular so that’s why more people have those email addresses. So I went a step further and calculated the number of members as a percentage of the number of those email accounts on our email lists (where 95% of our members come from).

- 14% for Gmail
- 7.6% for Hotmail
- 7.5% for Yahoo
- 70.9% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email, and other

The conclusion: non-web-based emails convert the best to paying members, but for web-based emails, Gmail account holders convert best to paying members by nearly double Hotmail and Yahoo.

Now, this is just a preliminary look. I need to dig deeper to find out which ISP emails convert best. Or perhaps there is a small number of some other type of web-based account that although smaller in number have an awesome conversion rate.

But overall, it’s clear that a Gmail email list sign up is ultimately worth more to us as membership site owners than any other web-based email.

P.S. I was a political science major in college so if a mathematician out there sees I’ve interpreted my rough data incorrectly, let me know.

And by the way, that TrashMail.net address has yet to confirm their opt-in. I’m not holding my breath…

Tim building your list, email marketing, site marketing which email account converts best

Over the past few months we’ve been testing various ways to sell individual pieces of content vs. making everything available only to members.

Several times a week we receive emails from people who want to download individual interviews rather than become members. Initially we simply said it wasn’t possible, hoping the content would be valuable enough to them to become regular members of the site. Some did, but many did not and we left money on the table.

My concern has always been that if we offered individual pieces of content for sale, our membership revenue would decline. That didn’t happen. Actually our membership revenue on a monthly basis increased AND we opened a new revenue stream by allowing the purchase of individual interviews.

Our monthly membership is $39 per month and we priced the individual interviews at $25 each. For people who wanted a single interview, it was a good solution. And for people who wanted more than one, it was a natural next step to become a member and save money.

We did, however, see a small decline in Annual Pass and Lifetime Memberships. It appears that having the ability to download new individual interviews increased sales of the monthly memberships but decreased the longer term memberships.

So, we made the decision about a week ago to make only older interview available for individual purchase for about 50% of the website visitors. Bingo! For those people that did not have the ability to buy the newer interviews and only had them available for older interviews, Lifetime Memberships popped back up to normal. (The older interviews in the archives are only available to longer-term members.)

It seems that having individual pieces of content available for sale only in the archives made the price of the longer-term membership more attractive when compared to how much it would cost to get the same content individually. In fact it makes the Lifetime Membership seem downright cheap.

I think we’ve finally settled on the balance of membership vs. individual sales that creates the greatest amount of revenue and offers the best choices for the site visitors and members. The conclusion has been to make individual pieces of content available for sale in whatever membership category you want to sell the most of. That’s counter-intuitive. I would have expected the opposite – but that’s not what the data showed. Since monthly members don’t have access to the archives (they only get access to the latest content), the expense of downloading the archives individually makes the higher-priced memberships more valuable. We sold more of them because of this.

The one downside to all of this – we may have tested everything too quickly. We did get a few emails from people who wondered what the heck we would offer next and asking if they should wait until we were done to purchase their membership. Not a lot, but enough to make us realize that we’d better keep the site as is for a while.

Tim membership pricing, selling content online, subscription pricing membership content, selling online content

I’m surprised actually that the socialists haven’t been more vocal in the comments yet, but someone did say I was an “arrogant ass” so I judge that as a success!

Andrew also put my interview behind the membership wall, which makes total sense since I egged him on to do so and because we were talking about membership sites.

But here are a few clips of the interview if you haven’t seen them yet. Was I over the top? Perhaps. But in the moment, I wanted to get the point across strongly that content creators deserve to be paid for their work and that it’s their choice – not the Internet’s choice – of whether to take that route or not.

Tim email marketing, membership site software, starting a membership site Andrew Warner, membership interview, Mixergy

Explaining how your membership site will help prospective members, quickly and effectively, is an important step.

I’ve written in the past about how selling with a story is the best way to do this.

We just updated our “selling story” for our main membership site and posted it below. I’d love your feedback in the comments. It feels like it might need some background music.

Let me know what you think. If you were interested in online trading and investing, does it make you want to join our site?

(If you are reading this post in an RSS reader, you may need to come over to the site to see the video below.)

Do you have a “selling story?” I’ll bet you do, even if you haven’t made a video yet. More on coming up with your “selling story” in another post.

Tim selling content online, site marketing selling with a story

A dude standing next to a Ferrari that may or may not be his. The guy on a lounge chair with a laptop on his lap and the beach in the background.

There’s a “line” somewhere that everyone has in their mind. It’s a line in your head that, when crossed, feels like you’ve done something unethical or dishonest. The line is different for everyone. For some people, the line stops just short of outright fraud. (“As long as I give them something for their money, no matter how pathetic, I feel OK.”)

For some bloggers, the line is crossed the moment something is sold. That’s fine for them – to each his own. But we’re not willing to have our “line” be the poverty line either.

People begin discussing “the line” right about the time they decide to put a lightbox on their site to capture email addresses to grow their list. 5 years ago that might have been where our line started. Except we weren’t making money with our content sites.

I admit that our “line” has moved a little over the years. We don’t know where where it will be 5 years from now, but one thing is for sure – “the line” will never be moved beyond the point where we feel uncomfortable giving out our website address to friends or family.

I also know that trapping people on our sites so that they can’t figure out how to leave is crossing our line. Some internet marketers have become so desperate that confusing their visitors when they try to leave is their only option. Do people really say to themselves, “Damn, I can’t figure out how to leave this website! I guess I’ll buy something…” That seems a stretch.

Then again, I can never figure out who’s buying the percocet and viagra from the spammers – but someone must be since they keep spamming away.

I visited a site this morning selling some Google AdWords “secret” that I literally couldn’t leave. I’m a pretty web-savvy guy so when even I get fooled into clicking a “Cancel” button, I’m surprised. I had to close the entire browser to get away.

These types of pop-up box tactics or sites that refresh to a different page with a different product for sale are well beyond my “line”:

Where’s your line? Let us know in the comments…

Tim legal issues, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site integrity in internet marketing, internet marketing ethics