Email Marketing

A free tip to minimize unsubscribes

by

A few days ago, Maliha Mannan, who writes dailyish emails over at The Side Blogger, posted something interesting inside my little Daily Email House community.

Apparently, Maliha was trying a HARO-like service – HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out, basically being a service where industry experts can provide answers and quotes for reporters, in exchange for attribution or a link.

On a whim, Maliha decided to ask for a marketing specialist’s thoughts on daily email newsletters. She put her request out into the ether, and like a lightning bolt, an answer crashed upon her:

===

Hi, this is C S Sultan, an experienced marketer for over 14 years and doing email marketing for over 5 years now.

As per our data, the highest you should send in a week are 2 emails. But the best would be to send only 1. Then moment we send more that 2, the unsubscribe rate goes up by 70%.

Our email list consists of marketers, content creators, bloggers, and small-to-medium businesses.

Even so, the highest response we get is when we send a single email every week at a fix time and day (for us, usually that’s Tuesday 8AM EST for one segment, and Thursday 8AM EST for another segment).

===

So there you go. An excellent tip to keep your unsubscribe rates really low. Though I imagine if C S Sultan only emailed his list every month, or maybe not at all, he might do even better with the unsubscribes.

Of course, there are other possible goals in the world than minimizing unsubscribes. For example, maximizing opens, clickthroughs, sales, or better yet, lifetime sales.

Or, something more wooly but still important, such as maximizing the quality of people who are buying from you… maximizing the results you get for customers or clients or even readers who don’t buy from you… or maximizing your own sensation of the influence and respect you get in your niche, and the satisfaction with which you run your business and life.

For all those, here’s another free tip:

Email daily.

Yes, people will unsubscribe. But people will read also, and way more than if you just email once a week or once an ice age.

And more people will buy, more will recommend you, more will look to you for entertainment, guidance, or simply the habit that they’ve formed of taking a few minutes each day (gasp!) to consume something fun or thoughtful you’ve put out into the world. Plus you might even grow to like the process. I know I’ve gotten there.

Like Maliha wrote, maybe C S Sultan should sign up for my Daily Email Habit service. I doubt that he will.

But maybe you are not playing to lose, but are playing to win. In that case, Daily Email Habit might be a fit for you. For more info, before the next puzzle has come and gone:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Another customer I like

by

Yesterday, I wrote about an ex-subscriber of my Daily Email Habit service.

Even though this guy decided to unsubscribe, he’s still the kind of customer I like, simply because he took something I was teaching and actually put it to use.

Of course, I have other customers I like too, including some who keep being subscribed to Daily Email Habit, and keep putting it to use.

A couple days ago, I heard from one such customer, business coach Steph Benedetto, who is subscribed to Daily Email habit.

I want to share Steph’s message with you both because it serves my purpose, and because it might be valuable to you. In Steph’s own words:

===

I wanted to send you a little message to share an unexpected side effect of the daily emails.

Many of these daily emails are prompting me to think about things, like the one that said, “Share the coming attractions. What are you working on? What offers do you have coming up? Share them.”

When I do, I go, “Oh! I guess I have to know what I’m doing next then.” So I look and go, “Ok, this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing.”

And it creates it through the writing.

As I’m writing about something, whatever the prompt is, and then tying it into whatever offer I have, the offers themselves are evolving and becoming clearer.

And new things are showing up. And I had no freaking idea that was available.

===

Most the Daily Email Habit puzzles are not “creative writing” prompts. Many of them are exercises that anyone with an online biz should be doing regularly, like figuring out who you want to work with… or what offers you’re putting out next… or what of business you actually want to run.

Now here’s the possibly valuable part I promised you:

You might not have the time and willpower to sit down and think about those things, and even less time and willpower to think about them regularly, over and over, as things adapt and change.

I know I don’t, not when it’s simply a todo item on my already-infinite todo list.

But like Steph says, with daily emails, you can two things at once. You can create content and make sales, on the one hand, and think about the big picture of your business and the next steps, on the other.

In other words, you can work IN the business… while at the same time working ON the business, just by taking the daily action of writing and sending a daily email.

And if you’d like to do that — to create offers, clarity, a plan — just by writing, then my Daily Email Habit might be a help for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Zero-resistance daily emails for your own business

by

Last week, I got a message from Nick Bandy, who used to be the lead copywriter at an ad agency named Klicker, and who has since last year worked as a freelance marketing strategist. Nick wrote:

===

I’ve known for months that I NEED to start sending emails daily, or at least very frequently. Heard it more times than I can count from Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell, and every other email marketer.

I know HOW to write daily emails. I write the same style of emails for my clients. Yet every time I think about writing them for my business?

Meh. Next month.

I don’t even remember how I found your product (probably stumbled on your site after seeing your name mentioned by Daniel Throssell), but I’m really glad I did.

Literally within 5 minutes of getting your first “prompt” in my inbox, I was cranking out my first email. Zero resistance. It flowed freely from my fingertips like Manekin Pis spraying proudly in the wind.

===

Maybe you’re in a similar situation to Nick. Maybe you know HOW to write daily emails… you’ve done it for clients… you’re sure you need to do it for yourself… and yet maybe it’s still not happening?

If so, I figure you have some options.

Option one is to let more time pass. Maybe something will eventually change.

Another option is to try out my Daily Email Habit service, the way Nick did.

A month’s subscription is a whopping $30, effectively $1 per daily prompt puzzle.

It might be just the thing you need to start writing daily emails for yourself, with zero resistance.

Time is passing either way. if you’d like to saddle up on the daily email horse, before tomorrow sneaks up on you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

You’re one mediocre, unread sales letter away from charging 40x more than the competition

by

Comes a long but interesting question about magic words that bring you riches:

===

Im asking you this for two reasons: A) Your Course on Bullets and B) You’ve been on Ben Settles List, who I’m going to reference.

Long story short I saw a marketer reference a Book and said he was thinking about summarizing and making a Course, that he could probably charge upwards of $300 dollars for.

I have been re-reading ” Ogilvy on Advertising” and was thinking, it’s $25 New on Amazon and is recommended by virtually every top copywriter, marketer etc… Yet Ben Settle and many other sell their info ( and I’m not saying their info is not good and maybe worth every penny they charge ) for MUCH More Money. But on the surface aren’t even in the conversation with the Ogilvy’s, Hopkins’ and many others whose works are supposed to be the Holy Grail.

In your opinion, What’s the difference? Is it Positioning or could it simply be the use of Bullets to create curiosity and build value that allows them to charge So much more?

I mean back to Ben Settle, do his $800 to $1000 products have more useful info in them than ” Ogilvy on Advertising ” or many of the other so-called classics? Im guessing NO

Could the ability to charge so much more just come down to the power of a Good Sales Letter?

===

That last part of the question is a reference to a supposed quote from famed direct marketer Gary Halbert, which goes something like, “You’re one good sales letter away from never worrying about money again.”

I don’t know if that was ever true, even for Gary.

I doubt it’s true for anybody today.

One thing I’m sure of, as sure as that the moon is in fact made of cheese:

There’s no “one good sales letter” that will allow you to sell a book for $1k in any mass-market way.

I’ve bought Ben Settle’s stuff before, including books he charges hundreds of dollars for. I never once read the sales page when I bought, except as much as was unavoidable to locate the “Buy Now” button.

Why did I pay Ben so much? Particularly since he makes a big deal about the fact that none of the stuff he teaches is secret or new? Without me even bothering to get the full details of what I was buying?

Positioning, if that’s what you want to call it. But not positioning of the product itself. That’s secondary or even unimportant here.

Rather, it was the gradual, patient, and strategic positioning of the person selling. As Dan Kennedy writes, “The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

That’s the psychological effect.

The mechanism to get there was daily emails.

Emails that, day after day, month after month, year after year, built Ben up as somebody to listen to and respect… put him in a marketplace of one and gave him a mini-monopoly… and did enough teasing of his product to allow me to ignore the fact that there’s nothing new or secret in there, and probably nothing that a careful reading of Robert Collier’s book couldn’t give me.

Ben sums it up himself:

===

Don’t get me wrong, sales copy is important.

But if I had to choose between having the world’s best copywriting skills or having top notch email skills, I’d choose email every time. It’s made me (and certain clients who hired me for emails, when I had clients) far more money.

===

Email is how you charge 40x more than the competition.

It’s how you can sell at a premium with a mediocre sales page, or even no sales page at all.

Ben’s done it… I’ve done it… maybe you’d like to do it too?

If you would, and if want my help in getting there, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The first time I tried it, I didn’t last very long

by

Dan Kennedy has a joke that goes something like, if we all stopped doing a thing in case the first time didn’t work out well, the human race would soon die out.

Get it? Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

It’s about sex.

I bring this up for two reasons:

Reason one is that the first time I tried it — meaning writing emails, get your mind out of literotica section please — it didn’t work out well. Or actually I just didn’t last very long.

I believe this current newsletter, which has been running for 6+ years day in and day out, is something like my third or fourth attempt to stick to emailing consistently.

Reason two is because I want to share with you a case study I got from a reader named Jakub Červenka.

Jakub runs an online business called Muž 2.0. From what Google tells me, that translates from Czech into into Man 2.0. Because Jakub’s business is teaching men self-development stuff, specifically how to fix various bedroom problems.

Now, I happen to know from having exchanged lots of emails with Jakub over the years that his main thing is running ads on Facebook to a webinar that sells his core program.

But lately, Jakub gave another shot to daily emailing, even though it didn’t work out well the first time around. Jakub reports:

===

I had been sending emails daily and then stopped for a good part of this year mainly due to feeling burnt out and feeling like I was riding on a dead horse, writing emails about the same topic.

With your service, this block is gone. I like to see the puzzle and then read in your email how you personally used it. It’s great over-the-shoulder learning experience.

I also noticed how not wanting to break the streak is motivating me – even more so than I don’t know, say making potentially money from making a sale to my list… that’s crazy. I am ashamed to admit it, as it is completely irrational, but it’s the truth. And probably not so surprising to anyone in the copywriting world, we know we are not rational beings, but still, this surprised me.

Also, I used a few of your prompts in my Black Friday promo. I made crazy good offer to my list, (20 of my flagship courses for 40% of the price) due to some messed up technical stuff ended up selling 23, which with some up/cross/down sells brought home close to $20k in 3 days… my best Black Friday yet.

So it was a good offer, but I was not promoting it in any other way than by e-mails and your inspiration was part of it, so you can say that your service contributed to this result. Which is true and it restored my resolve to write daily.

===

The service Jakub is referring to is my Daily Email Habit. It makes it easier to come up with a daily email topic every day, plus it has an in-email streak counter to keep you accountable.

Like Jakub says, why the streak counter works is not particularly rational… but it can be very effective.

And the results?

Jakub already had a successful business, and he had all the pieces in place. Reintroducing daily emails helped him make another $20k last month that he might not have made otherwise.

Your particular situation? Only you can really answer that question.

One thing I’m sure of, if you’re planning to ever or restart daily emails, the sooner you do, the sooner you will see results. Yes, even if you tried it before and it felt like riding on a dead horse.

For more info on Daily Email Habit, and how it can help you start and stay consistent with daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Build your list by… writing

by

Last Wednesday, I got a message from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategies, and who also happens to subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. Chavy wrote:

===

At least for the beginning, I’m posting my emails on LinkedIn as well (as I have a large following there) and – I got 8 new subscribers from today’s post! This is after neglecting my LinkedIn account and rarely posting for quite a while.

Thank you for this. It feels amazing to have had a concrete result so fast.

===

Yesterday, I wrote that I’ll one day have an official launch for Daily Email Habit, but that day is not today, or any time soon.

I also invited people to reply if they are interested in Daily Email Habit, so I can send them the full details. A good number of people did reply.

I sent the folks the details… and then I asked myself, what exactly am I doing? What is my purpose in creating this extra obstacle for others and work for myself?

And so I’ve decided to open up Daily Email Habit to my entire list, both to stop myself from fielding these one-on-one messages, and to make Daily Email Habit available to people who might benefit from it.

If you’re interested in Daily Email Habit, and how it might possibly help you, the full info is at the link below.

I can tell you that the core promise of Daily Email Habit is a daily nudge to write your own daily email.

The effect of consistent nudging is consistent daily emails. And the effect of consistent daily emails is that they grow your expertise and authority… create or deepen your relationship with your audience… build up a stockpile of interesting content can reuse as you see fit… and make you better at writing, in all formats.

Plus, you can do like Chavy is doing, and simply post your daily email to LinkedIn or wherever and get people to opt in for your list. And yes, it does work — she sent me a screenshot of 8 shiny new subscribers from last Wednesday to prove it.

For full info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Bounced

by

Yesterday I noticed I hadn’t gotten any emails from Jacob Pegs in a while.

As you might know, Jacob runs an online business called Modern Maker, which consists of him, a set of headphones, and I guess an Internet connection.

And yet, as I write this, Jacob and his Modern Maker online business are rolling into the million-dollar revenue mark for 2024, with something like a 95%-98% profit margin.

Jacob asked me to coach him on email copywriting earlier this year, and so I did, and I got on his email list as part of that. But I haven’t been getting his emails lately. I checked. Nothing, since November 20.

I wrote to Jacob yesterday to see if he’s alive and to ask what’s up with the no emails. He replied a few minutes later:

===

What that’s weird!

I’ve been emailing daily. Let me check that for you 😮 really appreciate you letting me know. WTF!

===

It turned out I had been “bounced” off his list. “Bounced,” as far as I understand, is a special mystery status for when an email cannot be delivered, for reasons that are not listed inside services like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign.

I’ve already been bounced a few times off other newsletters. I have a custom domain (bejakovic dot com), and the email address associated with that is more flaky than your typical gmail or yahoo email address. Sometimes, I noticed weeks or months later I had stopped getting emails from somebody.

This affects me the other way around also. Last week, I got an email from marketer Fred Beyer, who wrote:

===

I haven’t gotten a single email from you, since Nov 13th.

But my personal email address is still getting your emails so I KNOW you’re still broadcasting.

I had NameCheap crap out on me and shut down my domain for a few days, did your ESP auto-scrub me because of the temporary bounce?

I have bought products from you, from both of my email addresses so I’m guessing it’s kinda important that I’m a proper part of your system to receive any updates and such.

===

I checked inside ConvertKit. Sure enough, Fred had also been bounced off. I added him back — the only way was to go to my home page and sign him up by hand.

I checked the analytics for my email from last night. 4 bounced subscribers, compared to 3 unsubscribes. Now, I guess not all of those bounced subscribers will be permanently unsubscribed. But some will. Since September, I’ve had 67 subscribers permanently removed because of bounces, and these include long-term readers and customers.

What to do?

I already wrote a while back about “unwilling unsubscribes,” people who got unsubscribed in spite of swearing to me they never meant to do so.

That issue seems largely solved by a two-step unsubscribe process, which more and more email senders now provide.

But this bounced thing is both more tricky and more serious. For one, because it seems more common. For another, because it seems to disproportionately affect people with custom domains.

All that’s to say, I’m just bouncing this bounced problem at you, hoping you can bounce a solution or at least a suggestion back at me.

Is there some tech thing to be done?

Or is the only reliable way around this to have two or five ways to reach your customers and prospects? Email… plus Skool community… plus work phone number… plus SMS… plus bedroom GPS coordinates?

Please bounce back any information or suggestions you can give me. In turn I promise to collate the answers I get and share the most useful-sounding ones.

Industry gossip you shouldn’t care about but probably do

by

Yesterday, I exchanged a couple emails with the “The World’s Most Obsessed Ad Archivist,” Lawrence Bernstein.

Along with a few decades and deep connections in the direct response industry, Lawrence has the distinction of being one of only a handful of people to be called out as a “valued resource” by A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, at the climax of Gary’s legendary Farewell Seminar.

I promoted a little offer of Lawrence’s a couple months back. Lawrence was good enough to tell me yesterday that the 150+ sales of that offer that I helped make were slightly more than he got from his own house file.

That’s gratifying to read. And considering I only have a modest-sized list, it’s proof of the effect of daily emailing done right. But wait. There’s more.

Lawrence then went on to say how this compares to big-marketer results he’s been privvy to recently:

===

By contrast, and I realize this isn’t apples to apples…

There are/”were” some BIG marketers who thrived on the affiliate merry-go-round of ubiquitous as they are shallow $2K courses, usually backed up by webinar selling.

That model hasn’t had much of a pulse — at least as far as I can see — for a year or so. One of my subscribers and friends, who writes for one of the big financial outfits wrote me this last February, regarding those $2K offers:

“Been on a massive downslide ever since the FTC stepped in against Agora Financial – and in general the most recent “home-runs” have been more like inside-the-park home runs. They rarely work externally… and they’re mostly just milking house files with backend launches.

I’ve seen groups repeatedly run promo’s bringing in names at 10% of BE just because they had nothing else…

I’ve seen huge affiliate pushes for webinar launches that resulted in 750,000 names on a hotlist… and the sales were so low the affiliates payouts were ZERO…”

===

Let me repeat that last number because it’s so crazy: 750,000 qualified leads… and effectively ZERO in profits.

I read something similar in an email from Shiv Shetti recently.

Shiv shared stuff he’s heard inside private masterminds, gossip about specific flashy gurus in direct marketing-related niches.

These are guys who are publicly making millions and living a Floyd Mayweather lifestyle… who are in private broke, nearing bankruptcy, or are facing revolt from the customers and clients they have managed to rope in.

Maybe you’re not in the direct response industry. Still, I’m telling you this in case you ever find yourself looking around, and seeing that everyone else is doing so much better than you are… maybe even including people who got going well after you did.

You can’t really know anybody else’s full reality. And if you’re like me, you don’t even want their reality, even if it’s not all rotten.

From what I can tell, the insecurity about how well others are doing is simply a way to focus the general human desire for ANYTHING BUT WHAT I HAVE NOW.

“People are like cats,” says Dan Kennedy, “they always want to be in the other room.”

The trouble is, this kind of “But look where everybody else is!” comparison is such a fundamental part of human nature, or at least my own, that there’s no easy, quick, and permanent fix for it.

But certain things do help. Awareness of it… inquiry about what’s really going on, and if the surrounding thoughts are true or not… focus on your own work, instead of gawking around.

And maybe the following exercise.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and it might just give you a permanent fix, at least a partial one in your business, and maybe even in how you feel about it.

If you have a couple minutes and an open mind:

https://bejakovic.com/things-worthy-of-compliment-in-12-of-my-competitors/

How to prepare for a future in which people can’t think

by

I was talking to a friend today. She has a kid who is 11. The kid has to go through a rigorous set of state-sanctioned exams that will determine his future education, career progression, and I suppose retirement community.

“It’s crazy!” my friend said. “Who even knows what will happen in the future?”

I have no kids and am generally clueless about what’s going on in the world. “Huh? Future? What are you talking about?”

“AI!” she said. “What will kids have to learn? How will that even look?”

I read an article by Paul Graham a couple weeks ago. I’ve written about Graham before in these emails. In a nutshell:

Graham is a kind of modern-day renaissance man — a painter, computer programmer, businessman, and investor. This last one is what he’s best known for.

Graham cofounded Y Combinator, the early-stage investing firm behind companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Twitch, Instacart, Reddit. Thanks to his stake in these companies, Graham is worth north of $2.5 billion.

Along with his many other activities, Graham also writes interesting online essays. He wrote a new one a few weeks ago.

In the future, predicts Graham, not many people will be able to write because AI has made it unnecessary.

Is that bad? In Graham’s words:

===

Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can’t make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.

===

Is Graham right about writing?

I don’t know. I have heard said that 2,500 years ago, smart people were making the same argument AGAINST writing, saying that it weakens critical thought and makes the mind flabby.

I can only report my personal results, today, in 2024.

Writing, at least in my case, causes me to think more and make distinctions I wouldn’t make otherwise. Plus, I even find it kind of enjoyable. And there’s no doubt that thanks to writing, I’ve achieved a level of influence I could never have achieved otherwise.

I am telling you this because I’m finally ready — with two days’ delay — to start rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service.

A key idea behind Daily Email Habit is that there’s value in writing.

And so this service is designed to help you start and stick with the habit of writing a daily email. A big part of how it does this is by giving you a new constraint each day, and narrowing the scope of what to write about.

At the same time, Daily Email Habit is designed NOT to narrow the scope so much that you end up filling out a template. There’s value in writing, and it’s something you cannot get by outsourcing your daily email to a template — or to AI.

I will start rolling out Daily Email Habit tomorrow.

If you’ve already written me to express interest in this new service, there’s nothing more you need to do.

But if you haven’t written me yet, and Daily Email Habit sounds like it might be useful to you, then write me and tell me what you like about this service. I will then add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.

The excessive value of writing into the void

by

In my email yesterday, I asked for reader questions and replies. Well, I got ’em. To start, a reader named Kenneth wrote in to ask:

===

Yeah, at this point you are reading my mind.

I’ve always wanted to ask a question, but wondered whether you respond to emails.

Well, the question “How do you get opt-ins to your list?”

I can’t say I know because I got into your list by a strange way.

I am in a copywriting group and a member of the group shared your sales letter as a way to use reverse psychology, I think it was your MVE product.

He didn’t even share a link, I had to copy the link in the screenshot(I think that’s what happened), got on your homepage and got on your list.

===

… and that’s pretty much how I get people to opt-in to my list:

I write stuff… wait until people share that on the Internet of their own accord… then rub my hands in anticipation as others see those shares, google the clues available, search through the Google results, find my website, figure out that I’m actually the guy they were searching for, and then opt in.

I’ve heard this described as “upstream leads” — as in, people who had to swim upstream to find you. I’ve also heard it said these are the most valuable kinds of leads.

Is that true? I don’t know. I can imagine it is… I can also imagine it’s just an excuse by people who like to do it that way.

But that’s less interesting to me than the following:

I’ve gotten variants of Kenneth’s question before. And maybe I’m reading into it, but my feeling is that when people ask “How do you get subscribers” there’s a hidden assumption there.

That assumption is that, if you got no subscribers, no readers, there’s no sense in writing, particularly an email a day, like I do.

Sounds reasonable. But again, is it true?

The answer is no, at least to my mind. Even if nobody is reading what you write, a daily email:

1. Gets you to think about whatever you’re teaching or selling or doing, sharpens your own opinions on the subject, and builds up your expertise

2. Makes you a better writer and a better communicator, in all formats, not just email, without any pressure

3. Builds up a warchest of interesting content, which you can reuse for paid products, for ads, as book chapters, for SEO, for live presentations and trainings, for client work, or as a portfolio

4. Acts as proof of your authority to anybody who does come across you, whether that’s a potential client, customer, or simply fan

5. Can be enjoyable on its own, much how toast with butter is enjoyable on its own

6. Beats Wordle as a daily habit (though you can do both, as I do)

7. Makes you referable, for all the reasons 1-6 above combined, so that in time you do get people subscribing to read what you have to say

I’m telling you this because:

1) I’m grateful to Kenneth for writing in with his question, and I wanted to answer it thoroughly in a newsletter email, and

2) because starting tomorrow, I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit.

Daily Email Habit is my new service to help you be consistent with daily emails. It will give you a daily email prompt/constraint to take away idling over what to write, to keep you on track, and even to help you be more creative.

I will be rolling out Daily Email Habit gradually. But if you like, reply to this email, tell me what like about this service, why it sounds like it might be valuable to you, and I will add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.