Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

I’ve addressed this issue in a previous post here, but wanted to give you an update.

First, a few definitions for those new to the subject:

Single Opt-In Email Form: the subscriber enters their email address, clicks submit and is then taken straight to the free content or thank you page. They are now subscribers and no further action is needed on their part.

Double Opt-In Email form: the subscriber enters their email address, clicks submit, and is then taken to a page that tells them they need to check the email box they just entered. The email service then sends that email address a confirmation email containing a link that must be clicked in order to join the list. If they don’t click the link, they never get subscribed and never get the free content.

Double opt-ins, while growing your list more slowly (because a certain percentage of subscribers will never click on the confirmation link) result in a cleaner, more responsive list because you don’t acquire bogus email addresses or 3rd or 4th tier web-based email addresses the owner never checks. It also ensures someone isn’t getting subscribed to a list without their permission.

There is a compromise though and it’s the behavior we’ve settled on that works well for our lists.

All of our lists are double-opt in, but the confirmation link in the first email takes the new subscriber directly to the promised content. It’s the most “friction-free” way we know to both confirm the subscriber’s address AND take them to the content in one click.

The trouble with most standard double opt-in strategies is that it adds one unnecessary step to the process and it truly hurts their ability to grow a great email list. The standard Aweber double opt-in process goes like this:

1) User subscribes
2) User gets sent a confirmation email that must be clicked
3) User clicks that confirmation email link and then is told they have to wait again to get content in another email
4) User finally gets email with the link to the content or the content attached (which is email #1 in your auto-responder chain)

That step 4 is what can really kill your list building efforts - eliminate it! Why should your subscriber have to take action and then wait AGAIN to get yet one more email before they get your content?

In my opinion, that’s simply asking too much patience and effort from your subscriber.

Thankfully, the fix is simple. In Aweber, you can specify the page that your user gets taken to once they click the confirmation link. Instead of taking them to a “thank you, now you have to wait again” page, make that URL the link to a page on your website that contains the promised free content.

They will still get your first email in the follow-up series (that likely takes them to that same page) but that’s OK. The user gets to your content one step faster and you get the full benefit of a clean, responsive and double opt-in email list.

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I received an email question today about our follow-up emails in our auto-responder series at Aweber. One of our awesome readers here at MemberCon joined several of our email lists on our membership sites just to see how we do things.

She immediately noticed that we don’t personalize our emails with the subscriber’s first name like many of the “gurus” do. Why not?

Good question and there are several reasons:

1) We don’t ask for the subscriber’s first name on our opt-in pages because the conversion rate for people who actually sign up is lower when you do (or I should say, when we do – others may have different stats but from what I hear it’s common across the board). The more information you ask for on your opt-in page, the lower your conversion rate will be for that page. In order to achieve the highest conversion rates (views vs. actual completion of the form), we ask for one thing and one thing only: their email address. Even one more field – something as simple as asking for a first name will decrease your conversion rate significantly.

2) Personalization was awesome and cool and unique when the technology was first available, but in the years that have passed since it was the cool thing to do, everyone knows the email wasn’t written just to them. Initially, conversions and clicks and opens on emails that included the subscriber name went through the roof. That just isn’t the case anymore. And since it doesn’t help conversions (see #1) we simply don’t see the need anymore.

3) There are too many chances for it to get screwed up. How many times have you received an email that started exactly like this:

Dear {first name},

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah (Where the sender somehow mistyped the fill-in code that was suppose to insert your first name but instead the raw code is the only thing that was inserted.)

——or——

Dear Chris

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah (when your name isn’t Chris)

——or——

,

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah. (where the first name area was blank where the software was suppose to insert it)

I’ve received emails just this week with all 3 of these mistakes. Anyone on the planet who still thought the guru was emailing them personally now knows that isn’t the case. Bottom line, there are just too many chances for error in inserting the first name and when you or the software screws up, it’s embarrassing.

So there you have it. All the reasons we no longer personalize our autoresponder emails. If there was a minor reason #4, it would be that it’s simply one more line of text to read before they get to the “meat” of the message and the link we want them to click.

Anything we can do to get them to that “take action” link faster is a good thing.

Of course, I welcome your opinion on the matter!

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The awkward post title aside, I want to quickly let you know about a way we’ve produced a nice increase in our mailing lists for our membership sites over the past few days.

One of the nice things about using AWeber for our email marketing is that they make it very easy to cut and paste an email opt-in form anywhere that accepts html code. Facebook is one of those pages.

I came across a video on DailyConversions.com (subscribe to the RSS feed – great stuff) that shows you step-by step how to put an opt-in form on a facebook fan page.

We followed the directions and created one for TraderInterviews.com here and have seen a nice uptick in sign-ups for our mailing list.

We are spending money to do so – about $20 per day – by running facebook ads that link to the facebook opt-in page. We haven’t had a lot of luck running facebook ads that link to outside sites, but linking within facebook seems to be working really well.

Opt-in conversions are running about 30% and we’re testing a few things to see if we can get it even higher. I think the fact that the ad keeps them in the “facebook house” and doesn’t take them to a separate website goes a long way to making the ad work and conversions work.

Side bonus: we’ve never spent much time trying to get “fans” for the facebook page, but those numbers have increased over the past few days as well.

I’m excited about this as a new way to grow our lists with targeted traffic at relatively low cost.

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We’ve only tested two officially. But I’ve informally tested about 6 over the past few months.

Winner: Arial font at 11 pt.

The official and most scientific test was Arial font against Courier font.

Speaking with my colleagues from another site who do subscription newsletters, they swore Courier worked best for an older generation who grew up on newsprint. However, I had a feeling that my audience liked the clear, clean lines of Arial.

But does it really matter? In our test we sent 20,000 emails over a 7 day period with the exact same subject lines and content. Only the font was different in the A/B test:

Email messages in Arial font:
Open rate: 34.2%
Click rate: 9.6%

Email messages in Courier font:
Open rate: 31.8%
Click rate: 7.9%

Arial wins – but not by a huge margin. Enough that we’ll be using Arial for all our messages going forward.

One question I’m still not sure about: Why would open rate be affected if they haven’t seen the font yet? My guess is that email programs like Gmail show a snippet of the message and so they do see the font before actually opening the message. Let me know if you have any insight on that.

Interesting side note: Spam complaints with Arial: .02%. Spam complaints with Courier .09%. For whatever reason, Courier messages occasionally got people to click the “Spam” button in their email program more than Arial. That sample size is small enough to be an error either way, but my sense is that people just didn’t like the Courier format and it smelled more like spam to them.

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In the days of direct mail, the “P.S.” text was the big money-maker secret. Add a P.S. at the bottom of your letter underneath the signature and readers will immediately jump to the bottom to read it and order whatever you were selling. That was the thought, anyway. And for years it worked with sales letter delivered by your friendly postal worker.

When the long online sales page came along, for some reason that rationale stuck and all internet marketers were told the P.S. and P.P.S and even the P.P.P.S. were the money-makers.

I didn’t believe it. And we’ve been testing that notion ever since.

A few years ago we tried long sales pages to sell everything from E-books to physical books and we tried all kinds of versions of postscripts. The trouble is, people don’t handle a physical letter the same way they read an online sales page. When you open a physical letter, it’s easy to drop your eyes down to the bottom. But on a web page (or in an email), when was the last time you went to a page and quickly scrolled down so you could read the postscripts? I don’t, and it turns neither does anyone else. When we put separate tracking links for every link in the email or web page, the postscript consistently rank at the bottom for click-through. As in, 2% or less for all clicks in the message.

The internet marketing urban legend of the P.S. is, well, BS.

BUT, we have found a new job for the poor P.S. We started using the P.S. to simply tell the reader what was coming next. For example, in an email where we talked about a series of upcoming interviews that were available for pre-order, a simple P.S. at the bottom that said, “Stay tuned – we’re putting the finishing touches on a new video entitled, “The 20 Habits of Wealthy Traders.” You’ll see it in your inbox in the next day or two.”

It was a bit of a fluke actually. It was late at night, I was tired, and couldn’t think of anything more to say about the paid interview series. I was behind on the video that I had promised and decided to mention it there.

It was the lowest number of unsubscribes in a pitch email we’d had in a long time. No links, no “last chance” pitch – just a promo for what was coming next.

So, after that, every email in our auto-responder chain got a P.S. makeover that included a mention of what was to come in the next email. Our unsubscribes continue to trend lower. It works well on all of the emails, but has done an especially great job of reducing unsubscribes on emails where we are “pitching to sell” more than normal free content emails.

It makes perfect sense, of course. Radio and TV have been doing it forever to keep us watching through the commercials. Tease them about the value of what’s to come and people stick around.

A simple and effective use of the email postscript. Welcome to your new job postscript – email subscriber retention – and thanks for all your years of service. We’re not ready to retire you yet.

P.S. There are some awesome blog posts coming this week. We’re going to reveal some of the best content sales tricks we learned in the past few months.

Do you have any tips or tricks for email subscriber retention? Let us know in the comments.

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