Email Marketing

How to 3x your readership and give the right people an excuse to say hi

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A couple weeks ago I sent out an unusual email using my Most Valuable Email trick.

I got a response to that from a former client/partner, the owner of a successful direct marketing agency, somebody who had at one point paid me a sizable monthly retainer to advise on emails and advertorials. He wrote:

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At first, I thought the [censored] was just a gimmick and part of your email strategy.

But then I wasn’t sure (new CK account and all that).

Finally, on my 3rd read I figured this was actually you being clever and not an issue with your CK setup.

What it DID do is make me pay attention. (Been a loooooong time since I read anyone’s email THREE times).

So I’m voting for “brilliant” vs “haha mistake!”

Also, using this as an excuse to say hi. Hope all is good.

You still doing the coaching gig?

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The [censored] bit above was my use of the MVE trick in that email.

It’s a new form of Most Valuable Email, one I have started playing with from time to time.

It’s still the same old Most Valuable Email trick, but applied in a new way, one I wasn’t comfortable doing before.

It’s getting results like the above:

People paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

If all this sounds abstract, it’s probably because you don’t know what my Most Valuable Email trick is.

You can get it below and find out.

I also have a disappearing bonus to motivate you to act now. The disappearing bonus is simply an explanation of my new way of using the MVE trick, like in the email that drew the response from the agency owner above, and how you can do this too.

If you’d like this disappearing bonus, here’s what to do:

1. Get my Most Valuable Email training at the link below

2. Send me an email by tomorrow, Wednesday Sep 25, by 8:31pm CET, saying you want the disappearing bonus. (After that, no bonus.)

And if you already have Most Valuable Email?

This disappearing bonus is of course open to you too – but the same deadline applies.

Here’s the link to get Most Valuable Email:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

P.S. You might say, “Oh but I want my copy to be crystal-clear like glass, and not to require rereading three times.”

There is something to that.

At the same time, I personally don’t ever want to make what I write scrollable, skippable, and disposable.

If what I write makes people stop, scratch their head, read all the way to the end, reread, I’m good with that.

And in terms of results generated:

Six months ago, the agency owner above and I were talking about working together again.

At that time, I had just started as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, and I didn’t have the time to take on a new project.

The new-style MVE email above got the agency owner to reach out and pick up the thread of that conversation… a win in my book, particularly since, as of last week, I am no longer working with Shiv’s PCM mastermind.

How to stop being seen as a milquetoast

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Today is the last day to sign up for MyPEEPS and get my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus. You can expect me to send many more emails about this offer today. And on that note, I wanna tell you a quick story of rejection:

I first discovered marketer Travis Sago thanks to a podcast interview back in 2019. I was super impressed by everything Travis said, and so I got on his email list right away.

Travis had an automated welcome email that ended with, “I’m curious… What business are you in?”

I wrote back. I told Travis that I loved his interview, I gave some specifics of what I loved, and I said my business was copywriting.

And what I got back was… nothing. No smiley face, no “good on ya,” not a single word.

I figured then and in all these intervening years that either Travis didn’t check the reply email regularly, or he simply didn’t think me important enough to reply to.

Then this very morning, Sunday September 15 2024, I was listening to a short recording that Travis did for the people in his community.

Travis was talking about how persistent he is in following up with his prospects, particularly the “movers and shakers.” And he said the following:

“In fact, in my business, if a copywriter reaches out to me, my typical M.O. is not to respond back. I wanna get rid of all the milquetoasts, because I’m looking for people who want to get things done in the face of a challenge.”

Point being:

You might know that followup can get the attention of those who forgot about you or never even noticed you.

You might also know followup can build more desire.

But I imagine you never thought of followup as a kind of proof element.

And yet it is. Because who follows up?

People who believe in what they are doing and selling, including themselves.

The milquetoasts drop away.

So send regular emails, preferably daily… and if you got a deadline coming up, send a bunch.

You’ll catch people’s attention… you’ll remind them of what they want and how you can help… and you will convince them you have something worthwhile, just because you keep following up about it. And now, since you’ve read this email, you are a few minutes closer to the deadline for my MyPEEPS offer. The deadline will come in a flash, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a nutshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build up your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15 and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read your emails and buy from you.

And the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

[firstname], here’s what’s working in email NOW

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Hey [firstname]!

Last week, I switched my email software from ActiveCampaign to ConvertKit. It’s largely been a smooth transition. The only thing I have to gripe about is ConvertKit’s overly enthusiastic UX, which greets me like a robot cheerleader each time I send a new email, and shows me a drawing of confetti and tells me congratulations. It makes me feel a bit like an imbecil.

I have this theory that, today more than ever, we all want something that feels real.

Or at least I do, and I notice how quickly I dismiss anything that gives off subtle hints that it’s not real:

Stale weeks-long autoresponders…

Merge fields…

Or just a fake emotional tone or connection, where there clearly cannot be any, like with a piece of email software that pretends to be my friend. You know what I mean, [firstname]?

A few days ago, I talked to a very smart and enterprising young marketer named Shakoor. He asked me if I think the email business model — build an email list, send emails, make money — will ever disappear.

I’m personally bullish on the email business model. But if it does ever disappear in its current form, I figure it will be replaced by something that works in basically the same way. Relationships with other humans will keep having value, as long as anything humans do still has any value.

And on that note:

Let me remind you that tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8pm CET/2PM EST/11am PST, I will host a “fireside council” with Travis Speegle.

Travis been selling online since 1996, and has been working as media buyer for 7- and 8-figure direct response brands for a good amount of time. He has seen things come and go.

Tomorrow, Travis and I will talk about paid traffic to grow an email list.

I imagine that nothing we discuss will be stuff that’s working NOW, in the sense that it wasn’t also working yesterday and won’t also work tomorrow, or next week, or next year.

But maybe that’s exacly the kind of information you’re looking for.

If you’d like to join Travis and me on the call tomorrow, you’ll have to be on my list first. Click here to make that happen.

The final straw that broke this email camel’s hump

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Yesterday, when I got ready to schedule my daily email in ActiveCampaign, I got hit with an ugly yellow banner that read:

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You are approaching the limit of emails sent per month.

You currently have sent 87.45% of your available emails to send per month. You may want to upgrade your plan to allow sending more emails.

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I had no idea what this is about, so I looked it up. It turns out ActiveCampaign doesn’t just have subscriber limits to its various pricing plans. There are also monthly email send limits, set at 10x the limit of subscribers.

I don’t know if this is a new invention, or if I simply never noticed it before.

In any case, it’s the final straw that broke this email camel’s hump, and that will force said camel to move off ActiveCampaign for good, some time in the next month, even though I expect the move to be a mess.

But that’s not what this email is about. This email is simply to highlight how crazy, stupid, or simply out of touch the ActiveCampaign policy is.

10 emails per subscriber each month?

It reminded me of Bill Gates’s infamous statement, back in 1981, about how nobody will need more than 640Kb of computer memory. (Gates denies he ever said this, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here. But the more often you email your list, the more money you make. It’s a very simple calculus.

I’ve never personally sent 10 emails to my newsletter subscribers in one day. But I could imagine it could be lucrative, particularly if I have an offer that’s doing well, and a deadline is nearing, and people need a push.

Short of that, sending an email each day of the month, and sometimes multiple times a day when there’s reason for it, is the smart thing to do.

It’s not a matter of burning out your list for the sake of short-term profit. It’s a matter of staying visible, of continuing to nurture a relationship, and yes, of making sales when sales are there to be made, because it’s in both sides’ interest to make the exchange.

Again, you probably know all this. But if you don’t yet send daily emails because don’t have time or energy, hit reply and get in touch.

I might be able to find an email copywriter for you who will write daily emails for you on commission only.

​​Just make sure you’re not using ActiveCampaign if it does happen.

My Prime Directive for writing this email newsletter

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A few weeks ago, marketer Matt Giaro interviewed me for his podcast.

Maybe because Matt also writes daily emails, or maybe because he’s into direct marketing, but he asked me questions I actually enjoyed answering and had something to say about.

The result is that this podcast appearance is one of my less horrific ones.

At one point, Matt asked me how I think about tying up my emails into the offers I’m making.

I told Matt how I think about that. But then I told him something that I think is much more important.

​​In fact, it’s my Prime Directive for writing this email newsletter.

It has never been to make money.

Maybe you think I’m signaling how good of a guy I am by telling you that. That’s not it. Consider this:

My Prime Directive also hasn’t been to provide value for my readers, or even to entertain them.

Nope.

My Prime Directive for this newsletter is very unsexy, very uninspiring, and a bit inhuman, almost Borg-like.

It’s simply… to keep this newsletter going day after day.

I’m writing this email from the Athens airport, waiting for my flight to Barcelona.

I’ve been in Greece for the past 5 days. It’s a kind of vacation, though each day I found a break in my “vacation time” to write this daily email.

Perhaps that’s because I’m a bit of a obsessive-compulsive beaver.

Or perhaps it’s a perfectly logical, rational decision. In the words of Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money:

“What I want to have is endurance. I want to be so unbreakable financially in the short run to increase the odds that I will be able to stick around as an investor for the stocks that I do own to compound for the longest period of time. If you understand the math of compounding, you know that the big gains come at the end of the period.”

… and I’d add, it’s not just stocks. This is also true for other assets, such as skills you’re building, knowledge you’re stacking up, content you’re creating, or email subscribers you’re attracting.

That said, just because my Prime Directive is rather inhuman — “resistance is futile, another email will follow tomorrow” — doesn’t mean I can’t on occasion try to make these emails valuable to you.

So let me take this moment to remind you of the old chestnut, which is no less true because it’s preached so often:

The best time to finally start something you have been putting off for an eternity — is today.

It doesn’t have to be an email list you write to daily.

There are plenty of other good investments out there, which you can start investing a nickel’s worth of time, energy, or money into right now.

But if you don’t hate writing… and if you happen to like flexibility and independence… then an email list of engaged readers is a good investment to start today.

And if you want some practical tips about how to do that in a way that meshes with your sense of self, assuming you’re not a natural-born salesman, then the podcast I did with Matt might be worth listening to.

The topic for that podcast was “How to send daily emails that make money without selling.”

The topic came up because I heard from a few people that it never seems I’m selling in these emails.

Of course, that can be because there are times I’m not actually selling anything, like today. (The Borg can subsist for months without food.)

On the other hand, there were also unbroken periods — stretching for years at a time — when each email I sent ended with a CTA to buy a paid product I was selling.

And yet, people somehow didn’t find it salesy… and they wanted to know how I do that.

If you’re curious too, I break it down in the interview with Matt. The link is here:

Where did Justin Goff go?

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On Sunday, May 26, marketer Justin Goff sent a confessional email to his list, in which he said he will only be writing weekly newsletters from now on.

For 5+ years, Justin had been writing a daily email about marketing and copywriting.

He had been using these emails to sell new offers, like clockwork, each month.

By writing daily emails and selling new offers each month, Justin had become one of the more successful and authoritative bros in the space.

But Justin had had enough. This didn’t jazz him any more.

So he announced he was going to write fewer emails, create fewer offers, and take more time to hang out with dogs and play pickleball by the pool.

Fair enough.

I checked, though. And what I found is that Justin hasn’t been writing regular weekly emails since then.

There have been five Sundays since May 26. Justin has only sent 3 emails since. In other words, he missed 40% of his planned newsletters, even just writing an email a week.

Point #1: ​It’s easy to slip up with weekly emails.

​​In theory, weekly sounds easier than daily. And it should be. But in practice, weekly emails can end up being harder, at least in your perception and as a matter of consistency.

Point #2: In a business like creating courses, coaching, or content, or selling yourself as a guide or a guru, regular posting really is the only way to stay relevant.

If you are reading this right now, there’s a fair chance that you were on Justin’s list as well. Both he and I talk about similar stuff, and to the same circles of people.

Assuming you were on Justin’s list, ask yourself, have you missed Justin or his emails?

I can tell you I used to at least skim his stuff most days. But after he went weekly, it never crossed my mind he had been skipping emails until today, when I made up my mind to talk some industry gossip.

By the way, that’s not any kind of special dig at Justin.

I’m sure the result would be the same if I were to stop writing regular daily emails. Some people might notice the first day or two. A couple might even write in to ask what’s going on. But even they would forget by next week.

It’s not that the world is cruel or heartless.

It’s just that when it comes to easy, free attention, the Internet giveth and it taketh away. It’s part of the deal.

All that’s to say:

Write for yourself. Write for your business and your goals. Write because it makes it easier to write again tomorrow, and benefit from the inevitable compounding.

Find ways to make this acceptable and even enjoyable long-term.

Do this, and sooner than you think, you can become one of the more successful and authoritative bros or babes in your space.

And it doesn’t even have to eat too much into your pool time or pickleball with the dog.

I’ve written lots of effective 15-20 minute emails, which sold everything from coaching to courses to cat training guides, and which kept me in the audience’s mind for tomorrow.

If you’d like to find out how you can do the same, and right quick and easy, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Inadequate performance

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Yesterday, my friend Sam wrote me that he had downloaded the presidential debates so he could watch the bloodshed.

This morning, my friend Peter forwarded me a New York Times editorial that’s calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his “inadequate performance in the debate.”

And then this afternoon, I met my friend Olga, who spent much of the day in bed, and who said the only thing she has done today is to watch the presidential debate.

Olga told me her impressions of the debate. And then she said, “Maybe the debate’s something you could write about in your newsletter.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, the following will not be any kind of shock:

I am completely out of the loop. Permanently. Always.

I didn’t even know there was a presidential debate until friends started chattering to me about it via text and in real life.

I most definitely have not watched it.

And as for writing about the top news of the day in this newsletter… as I told Olga, I would never do that.

Well, obviously I’ve broken that vow with this email. But I didn’t know how else to get the following point across.

My theory is that you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

If you decide to talk about the immediately available stuff, the stuff that hundreds of millions of people are talking about right now on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, among your friends and family, then you gotta try really really hard to have something unique and clever and hot-takey to say.

And even if you try really hard, and even if you expose yourself to looking like a tryhard, odds are good that most days you will fail to say something that hasn’t already been said, better, by a hundred other people, just a few minutes ahead of you.

That to me is an inadequate performance.

On the other hand, if you choose to spend your time and effort reading and watching less available stuff, stuff that’s not being talked about today, or yesterday, or last week, then you have a green, untrammeled field to play in.

For example:

Did you know that the problem of bloody, hateful, two-party elections was solved 2,500 years ago?

Two opposed tribes lived together inside one city’s walls.

They were highly suspicious of each other.

​​Each had a strong us vs. them mentality.

The city was ruled by a king from one tribe, who favored his own and harmed those from the other tribe.

​​Then the king died, or more correctly, he was made to disappear after he showed signs of serious cognitive decline.

How to choose a new king without devolving into civil war?

It didn’t look promising.

Each of the two parties was horrified by the leader of the other side.

Each party absolutely refused to accept the other side’s leader as the new king.

Tensions were rising. Weapons were starting to jangle.

​​So what to do?

Simple. It was the old, “you cut, I choose.”

Specifically, it was decided that the Romans, the party that had just lost its king, would choose a new king from the other tribe, the Sabines. The Sabines could not veto or influence the Romans’ choice.

The Romans chose a quiet, reserved man from the Sabine tribe, named Numa Pompilius.

At first, Numa refused to take command of the city. He liked his quiet life. But after being persuaded that Rome would devolve into civil war without him, he agreed to become king.

Numa reigned for 43 years in peace and prosperity. He founded some of Rome’s most important institutions, such as the pontifex maximus, the 12 month calendar, and the cult of the Vestal Virgins.

Two thousand years later, a clever politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, said Rome owed a greater debt to its second king, Numa, then it did to its first king, Romulus.

Good Lord this has turned into a long email.

​​Don’t write emails like this. Or do. It’s up to you.

If you do choose to write emails like this, I have something that might help. It’s my Insight Exposed course, about my notetaking, journaling, and media-consumption process.

I don’t normally sell this course, for reasons of my own.

But since I’ve already broken one law today, I might as well break two?

If you want Insight Exposed, the order form is below. I will close it down in exactly 24 hours, tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:31pm.

And if you have questions or doubts if this course is right for you, write me before you buy.

​​Here’s how to read stuff others are not reading, and make it useful for your marketing and your life:

https://bejakovic.com/ie/

4 lessons from my 9-day promo for Daily Email Fastlane

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Last night, I concluded the promo for for Daily Email Fastlane. That’s the workshop I’m hosting tonight, right now, as this email goes out.

Good news: I sold more tickets to Daily Email Fastlane than I was expecting.

Bad news: At $100 per sale, it’s still not enough to buy a Rolls-Royce.

But that’s okay. This workshop was most of all an experiment, in a few ways.

I’ve collected the data. It’s now time to analyze it.

Some of what my analysis shows is standard daily email propaganda. What I mean is, the data supports the basic idea I was plugging all week long, about the value of writing daily emails for your personal brand. For example:

#1. 87% of people who signed up for Daily Email Fastlane have bought other courses or trainings from me before. Many have been on my list for 3+ years.

Would they have stuck around and been willing to buy from me now if I failed to stay in touch with them during that time?

#2. There was also a handful of first-time buyers. Most of them have been on my list for weeks, months, or in one case, closing in on a year.

In other words, it took dozens or hundreds of daily email “touches” to close this first sale… but it wasn’t very hard to do.

In fact, I even had fun writing some of those dozens or hundreds of emails over the past weeks, months, and year.

#3. I made sales with every email I sent out during this promo. This tells me I probably could have sent out still more emails and made still more sales.

All these conclusions are probably obvious to you. And they are only really useful in case you too send daily emails, as validation, or want to start sending daily emails, as inspiration.

But I do have one extra tip for you.

It’s relevant whether or not you choose to send daily emails.

In fact, it might be more relevant if you don’t send daily emails.

This tip doesn’t come from the sales data. It comes from the replies and comments of the people who ended up signing up for the workshop.

It’s this:

Many of those who joined told me they were sold by the core idea I had for this training. The core idea was to share the common elements among 3 daily emailers I’ve coached, each of whom is uniquely successful in his own way.

The way I came up with that core idea wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t a unique moment of inspiration, either.

It was routine, and something you can do too.

It’s simply an application of my #1 strategy for creating offers of any kind, in any niche.

You can use this strategy to create offers that sell… even if you don’t have your own coaching program for authority, even if you don’t sell marketing advice, even if, like me, you don’t bother to set up a sales page.

You can find this strategy described in detail towards the end of chapter 1 of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Daily Email Fastlane

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Next Thursday, I’m putting on a workshop which until now did not have a proper name. I’m sure you were on pins and needles because of the uncertainty. I am writing now to set you at ease.

I’ve settled on a name. That name is Daily Email Fastlane.

Hear me out:

Over the past year or so, I’ve coached a dozen or so people who write daily emails as a central part of their business strategy.

Out of that dozen or so people, three stand out in my mind — based on the money they make, the stability of their income, and simply in how much they seem to enjoy their business and their life.

I won’t name these people. But I’ll tell you this:

These three daily emailers all move fast. They write emails fast. They spin up offers fast. They go from “good idea” to “let’s see if it works” fast.

“Yeah that’s swell for them,” you might say. “But what about me?”

Well, that’s actually why I’m calling this workshop Daily Email Fastlane.

I can’t motivate you to move any faster than you normally do. That’s up to you.

What I can do, in fact what I’ve done, is to look at what else these three daily emailers have in common, such as:

– how they write their emails and make those emails good, even when they are not feeling creative

– how they structure their offers in a way that makes those offers 17.4x more likely to succeed (that’s my inexact estimate, but it’s in the ballpark)

– how they get their leads and how they think about leads

– plus what I advised them to do to take their already successful daily email businesses and make them even more successful

So that’s why this training is called Daily Email Fastlane. ​​Not because you have to move fast. But because I’ll show you the commonalities of three very different, and yet very successful daily email business owners, so you can take what has worked for them and have it work for you.

Do this, and you will get to success with daily email for your personal brand, in the fast lane, regardless of your natural speed.

Daily Email Fastlane will happen next Thursday, May 23, at 8pm CET, 2pm EST, 11am PST. It will be recorded if you cannot make it live. Though if you can be there and I can see your handsome mug live on Zoom, that’s even better.

In case you’d like to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

Are you writing daily emails for your personal brand? Or no?

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I’ve been writing daily emails for myself for the past 5+ years. ​​For about 5 of those 5+ years, I’ve been regularly writing daily emails about how great daily emails are.

You know, the usual arguments. How daily emails help you:

… make sales… turn yourself into an authority… make price a secondary or tertiary issue… sort out your own head trash… build up your real and perceived expertise… yadda yadda.

You prolly know all that.

And yet, odds are fantastic or better that you’re not writing daily emails for yourself right now.

Or you’re not doing it regularly.

Or it’s a struggle. Or it’s taking way too much time. Or you’re not getting the kinds of results you’ve been promised.

Why is that?

I don’t know. ​​But I’m willing to put in time and mental energy to figure it out, and figure out a simpler, superior system for you to write daily emails and get results fast.

So here’s the nothing-down deal I have for you:

I’m gonna put on a workshop next Thursday, May 23rd. The tentative title is “Daily Emails For Your Personal Brand.” The tentative topic is daily emails for your personal brand.

I’ll have an order form set up by tomorrow. But today, I have a different offer for you, one that doesn’t cost anything.

For today, if you’re interested in this workshop based on the little I’ve said about it so far, hit reply and tell me so. But beware.

If you do express interest, I will follow up with you. One on one. Via email.

​​I want to find out your situation in regard to daily emails, where it’s aching or itching or burning, what you’ve tried before to get it to stop, how that’s working out or not for you.

I will use what you tell me to actually guide the content for this workshop, so that it’s as superhumanly useful as I can make it.

Plus I have a bit of a contest with a prize right now:

I will pick one person at random and give away a free ticket to this workshop.

The only requirement to be entered for this free ticket is that you reply to this email and express your interest by 8:31pm CET tomorrow, Tuesday, and that you engage with me when I follow up with my questions.

So there’s literally one thing to do right now. Ask yourself:

Are you writing daily emails for your personal brand? Or no?

​​And if no, could you potentially use some help or guidance or advice?

If so, then hit reply and tell me so. It doesn’t oblige you in any way. You might win a free ticket. And best of all, you may actually help me create something that makes the itching and burning stop.