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’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

I was on the phone today with a friend who has a membership site. We occasionally get on the phone and discuss strategies and techniques that are working, along with what’s not working for our sites. I could talk for hours about that stuff and find that just talking about what we are doing brings me new “a-ha” moments and I try to steal as many of his good ideas as I can.

One of the topics that came up was the percentage of our email subscribers that sign up for the email list but never confirm. It’s the curse of the double opt-in. A visitor comes to your site, puts in their email address and then never clicks on the confirmation link in the email that follows. There are a variety of things you can do to make sure that number is as low as possible. I’ll show you what we do in a moment.

It had been a while since I checked that percentage so I thought I’d share it with you for several of our sites. Below are graphics of two of our email lists. One from our membership site Trader Interviews and another from one of our niche sites where we sell e-Books and other online content:

As you can see, in the last 30 days, 17.40% of the subscribers are “unverified”, meaning they never confirmed their email sign up by clicking on the confirmation email link. 5.70% have unsubscribed. Both numbers are surprising to me. The former because I thought that number was actually lower and the later because I thought it was much higher. (See my post, “High Fives For Unsubscribes” for my opinion of unsubscribes.)

I’ve done all kinds of searches to see if those numbers are in line with other services in the industry but have come up short. All I can do at this point is try to lower those numbers and use our own history as the benchmark. Please leave a comment if you know where I might find this information. I’ve found that most site owners don’t share the information, which is understandable. I’m not comfortable showing my actual numbers yet, which is why they are covered – maybe I will be down the road.

For the niche content site that isn’t a membership site but has individual information products for sale, here’s how it looks:

Eerily similar on the “unverified” number, even though the two sites are in two completely different niches. But perhaps not so surprising considering we do the exact same things to try to get them on the list and confirmed.

However, the unsubscribe rate is much lower on this one. My sense is that the “attention span” of this industry is longer than the first one, but that’s just a hunch. I’ll need to dive into that number a bit more to see what may be going on.

Much has been written and debated about the double opt-in vs. single opt-in method. Industry best practices say double-opt in is the more ethical way to run your list. No one is added to your list who has not expressly given permission to be added. I’ve run both types of lists and I can tell you that while double opt-in lists will grow more slowly, the quality is much higher and conversion rates on sales to those lists are much better. Remember, I’m not in this to build huge lists. I want lists of action takers and buyers. If they can be huge too, well, awesome. But in my experience, the larger the list, the less responsive simply because a larger list is less targeted.

More niche = more passion = more action takers.

What we do to increase the opt-in as much as possible is be as clear as possible about what they do next. Tell your potential subscriber EXACTLY what they need to do next every step of the way.

In our case, if they subscribe using a form on a regular page, they get this graphic immediately after they hit submit:

If they enter their email in the lightbox, they see this:

It looks a bit like an error message and requires them to click “OK” to make it go away. I was a little concerned about it at first but our “unverified” percentage went down when we implemented it because the subscriber is told exactly what they need to do to get the carrot we offered for their email address.

Double opt-in is more work – no question. But do a few things to make sure the subscriber knows exactly what to expect, and you’ll grow an action-taking list that performs.

Now we need to figure out how to get that “unverified” number down to 10%. That’s my goal for next month. How low can we get it to go? We’ll see.

Tim email marketing, taking action double opt-in vs single opt-in email marketing

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