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

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

We started using webinars to generate buzz and interest in premium content about six months ago. They are a terrific way to deliver helpful information to a worldwide audience and talk about the benefit of joining our membership sites or purchasing premium content. At $99 a month for an account with GoToWebinar.com it is cost effective as well.

There are two business models that have worked nicely for us with webinars:

1. Do a free one-hour webinar with a partner that has a product to offer. 45-minutes is pure education on a specific topic, 10 minutes of questions and answers, then 5 minutes of pitch for the guest presenters product. We take 50% of everything sold through the webinar.

2. A free one-hour webinar with a partner who then does a follow-up webinar that is paid. The one-hour webinar is education on a subject and at the end is a pitch for the paid webinar. One we did recently was a free one-hour webinar and a 3-hour paid webinar the following week. (three evenings with one hour each). We split the revenue 50/50.

While we’ve found that 7:30 pm EST / 4:30 pm PST works best for our US-based audience, we have a large international audience for that site as well. We record the video webinar using Camtasia and post it about 18 hours after the live webinar.

Offering the video recording made sense – especially when our international audience would have to get up in the middle of the night to view the live recording. The intent is, of course, that anyone who isn’t able to attend the live webinar will watch it later. This would fine if I actually thought people were watching the recording when we sent them the link. Some certainly do, but my sense is that many don’t.

The more webinars we do and as our list gets used to the fact that the recording will be available later, the lower our attendance at the live webinars have become. It’s a trend I am becoming increasingly concerned with. The stats show that not even half of the people who didn’t attend the live webinar (but registered so they would get access to the recording) are watching it. I know everyone says the media world is transitioning to an “on demand” culture and that consumers of the media are demanding media be on their terms. I get it.

The trouble is, the media never gets consumed if it is available “on demand” forever. As with everything else when it comes to getting people to take action, when the recording is available forever, there is no urgency to watch it and therefore it doesn’t happen.

There are a few solutions we’re considering:

1. Do the live webinar and then replay the webinar recording at a specific time that would be late afternoon / early evening for Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

2. Offer the recording for only 48 hours after the live webinar, after which time it will be taken down. It would create the urgency to get more people to watch the recording.

I think #2 is the best solution, but I’m interested in hearing the feedback of others who know the webinar space well like Paul Colligan and Ken Molay of the Webinar Blog. What do you think, guys?

If anyone else has ideas or has experienced this trend as well, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Tim creating content, site marketing how to record a webinar, record webinar

If you’ve watched “How To Start a Membership Site” Parts 1 and 2, you know I’m a proponent of emailing your list at the very minimum, every other day. And in my post about “10 Things I Learned…” I said this:

4. The more you email your list, the more money you will make
Now before you gag on your donut, I’m not talking about spamming your list every hour with junk. But I am saying that when we started emailing our list every day, membership sales increased dramatically. Every email doesn’t have to be a pitch for something. It can be your thoughts and a link to an interesting article or blog post without any offer at all. But there is something about getting a regular email every day that garners familiarity with your membership product and site. When you don’t send regular emails, your subscribers are less likely to become members because they don’t feel like they know you. I wouldn’t send more often than daily but don’t ever send less than every other day to your list.

It’s hard work emailing your list with quality content every day. No one said this would ever be easy. Well, plenty of people say it but they have no idea what they are talking about.

I received this email today from a reader:

Hi Tim,
I’m loving MemberCon.com but I have one question. I took your advice and started sending one email per day to my list. Since I started doing that, my unsubscribes have gone way up. So much so that I decided to go back to once per week. Any advice?”

Sure, if all you want is numbers, stop emailing your list altogether. Then no one will unsubscribe…

OK, sarcasm is done. Here’s my advice: It was working – don’t stop!. Yes, of course your unsubscribes are going to increase when you are emailing daily. In fact you want your unsubs to go up – it means the non-buyers and non-action-takers who are dead weight on your list are removing themselves from the process. It is exactly the behavior you want to see.

If you are providing quality information, mixed with a healthy dose of requests for action (take a survey, buy a product, download a white paper, watch a video) you are going to quickly rid your list of people who are not passionate about what you offer. But your conversions on every action you are asking your list to take will also rise. Soon, your list of 2,000 or 3,000 subscribers will literally blow away far larger lists from websites that send soft, feel-good “newsletters” with tons of links that no one ever clicks on. Sure, they have huge numbers, but their lists are lethargic and make them very little money if any at all.

Do you want to make money or do you want to be popular with thousands of Twitter followers and an email list of 100K? I’ll take the money, but the choice is yours.

Tim email marketing, site marketing how often should I email my list?

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