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

I’ve mentioned several times at MemberCon about the fact that when we turned our attention to growing an email list of buyers and action-takers rather than just subscribers, our revenue increased dramatically. The day we stopped worrying about every unsubscribe and decided that it was a good thing that people were taking themselves off our list because it kept our conversions high, was quite liberating.

I watch our email signups very closely, obsessively charting the rise and fall of our list numbers on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis. The faster we can clean the list of freebie-hounds, email accounts people never check and general dead-weight, the better off we are. It means our list may not grow as quickly as others, but I know the people that do stay subscribed are passionate and hungry for the information we provide.

Watching the list is also a good reminder of that fact that sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to keep everyone subscribed. I saw a perfect example today in the logs.

The very first email we send out on all of our membership or content sites is pure content – no pitch, no call to action and not even a hint that we’re going to try to sell them something down the road. It’s simply a high-value chunk of information as a thanks for checking us out.

The screenshot is below, followed by the explanation:

The subscriber:

1. Signed up to receive the free piece of content at 12:33 pm
2. Clicked the double opt-in confirm link at: 12:36 pm
3. Unsubscribed at 12:43 pm

Exactly 10 minutes from sign-up to unsubscribe (6 minutes really – from the confirm click is a better guage). The piece of content was an audio file, 45 minutes in length.

Now, this isn’t usual. It’s extraordinarily quick in terms of deciding that we weren’t worth his/her time. But it’s a good lesson that:

a) people can decide very quickly whether or not they value what you have – so what you send them even for free better be great
b) there are a million other reasons that they unsubscribe and it’s not always about the quality of your content

So don’t take it personally. I don’t (anymore). I simply am thankful for the fact that I can spend more time catering to those who truly want the content and less time (preferably NO time) on those that don’t.

Tim building your list, email marketing email marketing, online marketing

I’ve had a few emails asking what we use to track clicks on links. In our emails, Aweber.com has built in link tracking which helps us determine open and click-throughs.

But we also track the links in emails people send to their lists promoting our content sites. We also track clicks on links in emails we send on behalf of our trade partners. I suggest you do both so that you can determine the success of email trades – on both sides.

We know exactly how many people clicked on links our email trade partners send to their lists and we can tell them exactly how many of our subscribers clicked on their link. Both pieces of information are critical to make sure the trade is equitable. Most people don’t believe me when I tell them the average click-through rate our emails deliver. Tracking proves it.

You can certainly use a free service like bit.ly. But we prefer to use a piece of software that allows us to use our own domain in the tracking link. So instead of a bit.ly link that looks like this:

http://bit.ly/6zTiNY

our tracking links look like this:

http://www.Membercon.com/links/partner

a tad longer, but more professional and the software doubles as a URL shortener too.

The software we use as a link shortener and link tracking is: Z.ips.me/. Simple interface and works like a charm. Free.

It’s not web-based and you install it on your own server or hosting account.

Tim building your list, creating content, email marketing click tracking, url shortener, website tools

One of the best ways we’ve found to build traffic and an email list is to partner with websites that have the audience you want to capture. The larger we grow, the more people approach us to do the same thing. It is a fantastic way to grow your list with the right type of people (buyers) and get a spike in traffic at the same time.

But (there’s always a “but”), trades or barters are fraught with danger. You want to make sure the partnership is fair and you get a similar amount of new subscribers and traffic. Your email list is your money-maker and should never be traded lightly.

Follow this short checklist with every marketing barter and you’ll stay out of trouble. Our policy is that my partners have to agree to all of these points or no deal.

1. NEVER actually send your list to anyone else. Besides being a major breach of your subscribers’ trust, your list is sure to get out into the wild and lose value immediately as it gets passed around to all your competitors. Instead, you will be sending a message to your own list on their behalf through your own email system. They never actually get to see the list.

2. Write the email yourself in your own voice. Sometimes the partner site will want to provide specific html code for their email. That’s a deal-breaker for me – and it won’t work for them anyway. “We’ve tested this email and it works great!” they’ll say. Well they haven’t tested it with my list and I know what works. If you’ve been sending emails written in your own voice for months and then hit them with some big block of graphics, two things will happen. It will get very little response and you’ll get lots of unsubscribes. Neither is a happy thing.

Instead, offer to take a list of bullet points they provide and work it into your own email that matches the voice, relevancy and length your list is accustomed to getting. Your partner will get a much better response rate and your unsubs will remain at the normal rate.

3. Match dedicated email for dedicated email. This means if I send a dedicated message to my list, my partner will do the same. We don’t send newsletters with lots of links to lots of different pages so we’re not able to do newsletter mentions for newsletter mentions. Newsletter mentions are crap anyway and never result in traffic.

I’m still kicking myself for not following this rule early on. We were offered a mention in a newsletter that supposedly went to 129,000 subscribers in exchange for two dedicated emails to our list of 5,000. Surely, I thought, 129,000 subscribers would result in some clicks! Our two dedicated emails to our list resulted in 624 clicks to their site. Our newsletter mention in their email resulted in exactly 26 clicks. We got ripped off.

4. Check out the landing page your subscribers will be sent to. We’ve turned down several trades simply because I didn’t like the page they were sending my subscribers to. It’s not that they were offensive or irrelevant. It’s that they didn’t have a strong call to action. I want my partner to get a great response rate, but actually, that’s not my biggest concern. As we’ve mentioned many times, we train our list to take action when they receive an email. If they are taken to a page that doesn’t get them to take action, they are less likely to take action the next time I email them even though it is an email about something completely unrelated to the previous email. It’s a scientific fact. OK, well not scientific, but I know it to be true. We’ve monitored response rates from email to email and those with unexciting landing pages previously had lower response rates for the next message. Meaning, we’ve had to re-train the list again to take action.

This leads us to the most important consideration…

4. Trade on quality of list – not pure numbers. Our lists, because of the way we develop them, grow them, train them and get rid of non-action-takers quickly, are AWESOME. Sorry to brag, but it’s true. I would put the responsiveness of my 5,000 against most lists of 50,000 or more any day. But most people don’t work their lists like we do. We have lists of buyers, not subscribers. So rarely will I trade lists on straight numbers. This ruffles feathers occasionally but tough donuts.

Our lists are GOLD and if we do a trade with you, you’re going to get some unbelievable response rates and I want the same from my partner lists. Unless I know how a partner site has developed their list and has the same philosophy as we do about it, we’ll normally need them to mail to at least 25,000 people to get similar conversion percentages.

Sometimes its hard to discuss this one without sounding like, “Your list sucks and ours rules!” but it has to be done. In the end, they are believers and are more than happy to trade again (usually sooner than we are).

Tim building your list, site marketing email marketing, email newsletters

A quick update on our changeover to a $1 trial period for 7 days. As you may remember, I posted a few weeks ago about our change from offering only a one-year or lifetime membership to a $1 teaser rate for the first 7 days and then $39 per month thereafter.

I’m pleased with the numbers so far. 26.6% of the $1 subscribers are “sticking” and converting to the $39 monthly membership. I honestly have no idea if that is above or below the norm for sites in our industry – that’s something I need to research a bit more.

I do know that our conversion on the upsell (the offer we make to them on the thank you page immediately after they sign up for the $1 membership) is very low – only about 6%. I think it has to do with the way we are selling the product. I currently do so with a short video of me explaining what they can buy, but I’m not pleased yet with they way I’m explaining it. My poor brother is having to deal with a new video almost daily that I am making in order to perfect the pitch.

But overall, I’m pleased with the conversion numbers.

Next interesting thing to watch is how long we keep those members at $39 per month.

One thing we are still battling, though, is momentum. We get a nice spike in traffic whenever someone sends an email promoting our site, only to have it come right back down to our daily average. We never seem to keep that traffic. I know why – I’m just not sure of the solution.

We don’t have a blog on the site and so there is nothing there on a daily basis to bring them back. Yet if we offer some new form of content each day, it may decrease our $1 signups because we’ll be giving too much away for free.

Our mailing list, however, is growing as we capture those people who come in. So we’ve been monetizing our list in other ways with affiliate offers. In that sense, the revenue IS growing, albeit not nearly as quickly as I would like.

I’ll keep you updated!

Tim building your list, selling content online, site marketing free trial conversions, membership attrition rate, membership stick rate