Email Marketing

Why I won’t use BerserkerMail

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Yesterday I wrote about an “unwilling unsubscribe” issue that’s been haunting me for a few years. I asked readers for suggestions on how I can keep good subscribers from getting accidentally kicked off ActiveCampaign.

Lots of people replied with lots of good ideas.

But a fair number of people also pitched me on switching from ActiveCampaign to Ben Settle’s BerserkerMail service.

From what I can tell, many of those people don’t actually use BerserkerMail themselves. Instead, they just berserk on behalf of Ben about how great BerserkerMail is.

I’ve never used BerserkerMail and have no plans to switch. I thought somebody out there might want to know why. Three reasons:

#1. Switching would be a pain in the ass.

One reader wrote me yesterday to say how easy it is to switch over to BerserkerMail “in just a few clicks.” That sounded like a kid trying to sell his parents on a weeklong trip to Disneyland by saying “it’s only a 4-hour flight away.”

Looking at the flight time only ignores all the packing… the booking of the hotel… the taking of the dog to the dog kennel and watching his big eyes as he accuses you of abandoning him… and the fallout at work after a week away and a few thousand accumulated small fires that have gone untended.

In less Disneylandy terms:

I have a few dozen automations set up in ActiveCampaign that run a large part of my product delivery.

I have a few dozen integrations with my website membership software… with optin forms in various places… with my cart software.

And I suspect that, in spite of the “just a few clicks” to switch my contact list to BerserkerMail, I would still be left with days of prep work and weeks or months of things breaking and me having to fix them.

​​And if that’s not enough…

#2. BerserkerMail has the same problems I want to run away from.

A couple people tried to sell me on how “simple” BerskerMail is to use. But I’ve never had a problem with ActiveCampaign because it’s complex.

I have had a problem with ActiveCampaign when it crashed right when I ran a classified ad and got hundreds of new subscribers in a matter of hours.

I’ve had a problem with it when I scheduled an email that never got sent out — still my one missed day of emailing in the past 5+ years.

In other words, I’ve had a problem with ActiveCampaign because of occasional reliability and tech issues.

But BerserkerMail has its own reliability and tech issues. I know, because people who use BerserkerMail have told me so, and because Ben has written about BerserkerMail’s tech issues in his own emails.

It’s kind of like that famous Disneyland commercial on TV:

“Are you tired of your kids screaming at home? Take them for a weeklong vacation to Disneyland and have them scream here! It’s only a 4-hour flight away and buying the tickets is super simple.”

(By the way, as for unsub issue I wrote about yesterday, it seems the most likely culprit is simply Gmail and Apple Mail unsubscribe features. If that’s the case, it would affect BerserkerMail emails the same as those sent from any other service.)

#3. I already have an easy-to-use, technically reliable alternative to ActiveCampaign.

It’s not BerserkerMail.

​​Instead, it’s Beehiiv, which I used for my health newsletter.

I loved everything about Beehiiv so much that I actually thought about switching this newsletter to use Beehiiv. I decided against it because of point 1 above.

However, if I do ever start any new newsletters, they will go on Beehiiv by default.

If you want to start a new newsletter, you can try out Beehiiv at the link below.

I won’t try to sell you on Beehiiv, beyond saying it’s free — not just during a 30-day trial period like BerserkerMail, but forever — as long as you’re below 2,500 subscribers, and you don’t start coveting advanced features like the referral program and the ad network.

If you want to try out just how simple it is to sign up to Beehiiv, and how pleasant, and how short of a flight it is:

https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

Please help me staunch the unsubscribes

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Over the past 5+ years of daily emailing, I’ve trained myself to shrug as my default reaction when people unsubscribe from my list.

Most of the time, people who unsub have never bought anything from me, weren’t a good fit for what I sell in the first place, weren’t even reading my daily emails very often.

If those kinds of subscribers go, that’s ok. The world is packed full of people, and my email list is not the right fit for most of them.

But!

It sometimes happens that the people who unsubscribe from my list have bought stuff from me, did read my emails, even seemed to be fans.

Sometimes, these unsubscribes are the result of a fermentation process — people move on, their circumstances change, or perhaps they just get sick and tired of me.

Other times though… take for example what happened yesterday.

I got a message from a reader who had bought my Copy Riddles program, my Most Valuable Email program, and my Horror Advertorial Swipe File. A reader who had replied often to my emails. A reader who had given me glowing testimonials for a few of my offers.

And yet…

ActiveCampaign has this reader marked as having unsubbed 8 days ago. Last night, this same reader wrote me to say:

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John, I’m somehow kicked off your list again. Hah! I have no idea how this keeps happening. This is the last email I got from you.

I signed back up via your opt-in form just now, but thought I’d let you know in case this is happening with other subs.

===

Normally, this would be an opportunity to say something like, “and that’s what happens when you write emails every day… it becomes like appointment TV and people seek you out if you don’t show up on time. This is why you should buy my courses on writing daily emails blah blah…”

Actually, that’s exactly what I did write the first time the reader above wrote me to say he got kicked off my list, a couple years ago.

But now, I’m actually a little anxious to root out this phantom unsubscribe problem once and for all.

Because the reader above is not the only one who has told me he was unsubbed from my list for no good reason.

I have a few real-life friends who are also subscribed to get my emails.

A couple of them have also told me they stopped getting my emails at various points. I checked, and ActiveCampaign says they unsubscribed. My friends deny it. I trust them over ActiveCampaign.

And I figure that if I already know of a handful of cases where people got unsubbed from my list without willing it, there might be more cases where it happened and I don’t know about it.

So I’m appealing to you for any help or advice you can give me.

Again, I use ActiveCampaign. That seems to be the only technical thing I can point to.

Have you had something similar happen to you? Or to one of your clients? Or do you have any advice for me on how I could start debugging this “unwilling unsub” feature?

Write in and tell me what comes to mind. I’ll be grateful for any advice or pointers. Thanks in advance.

The allure of ecom

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Today, I’m preparing a hot seat for one of the copywriters inside Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

So far, the dozen or so hot seats I have done were all for info products — high-ticket coaching, courses, a live event.

This hot seat is not for an info product. Instead, it’s for an ecom product, a strange $1,200 metal contraption that’s apparently selling well to an audience of middle-aged men.

As so often happens, this ecom business has a list of tens of thousands of past buyers and prospects.

And yet these guys never, ever, ever get an email from this business.

It makes me think I should go back to what I was doing a few years ago, and simply seek out such businesses, and write their emails on commission only.

It’s an alluring thought, but one to pursue another day.

Anyways, in situations like this, when a business has not been emailing their list for a while or at all, it’s common practice to send out a few warmup emails before a full-blown sales promo.

Those warmup emails typically deliver “value” — as in, they make it impossible for the prospect to buy anything.

It’s not my favorite approach. But in the case of info products, I am willing to run with it.

However, in the case of these ecom buyers, my recommendation as the resident promo expert will be to sell something even in those warmup emails, even in the very first email after a silence of who knows how many months or years.

My reasoning:

Unlike with info product lists, where the intent is often vague and shadowy, the intent for this ecom list is hard and concrete.

The only thing we know for sure about these guys is that they are in the market to buy this physical gadget or something like it. And so I will recommend to give them opportunity to buy something physical in every single email.

Of course, this won’t go out in a typical ecom email, with a big red coupon or even a picture of the product.

I’ve written and sent hundreds of ecom emails.

​​They’ve all looked and sounded very much like the email you’re reading now. And those emails have sold a few million dollars of physical stuff, from shoe insoles to weight loss pills to dog harnesses.

Do you have have an ecom business?

If you do, and you want to see how I wrote such emails, including a few dozen examples of the ecom emails that brought in the most sales, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The oddest info product creators on my list

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Last night, I sent an email asking my readers if they sell their own info products. That email got a LOT of response.

Of course, most people on my list sell familiar info products — ebooks and courses on marketing, writing, bizopp.

But some people wrote in and managed to surprise me. A few standouts:

#1: “My wife and I are developing theatre training courses, mainly to sell to school teachers who are not drama teachers by trade, but have been ‘elected’ to teach the courses and put on the productions.”

#2: “Am currently writing some digital reports requested by our specialist cancer research audience although I have no real idea how to do this!”

#3: “I sell Numerology info products, such as relationship forecasts, life forecasts, name adviser, lucky numbers and in depth reports. I sell to business owners, individuals and women looking for alternative angle to motivate and advise on current situation.”

This morning, I sat down to reply to these folks and to everyone else who had written me. But before I did so, I asked myself:

“What do I want out of this interaction? Why did I even ask this question?”

The following reasons poured out of me. Maybe they will be of some interest or value to you:

1. Find out who’s doing well

2. Connect with more people

3. Find out what problems people are having

4. Find out what problems their customers are having

5. Find out if they have [CENSORED but keep reading, trust me]

6. Find out what’s currently working for them, what’s not working

7. Maintain or rather enhance my reputation

8. See if any opportunities [CENSORED again, but still keep reading, I promise I won’t keep doing this much more]

9. Get possible ideas for new offers to create

10. See if there are any good offers that [CENSORED, last censored thing, keep reading to find out how to uncensor]

11. See if there are people I could connect with each other, either as some kind of broker or just to help out

I’m not sure whether the list above can be useful to you in any way.

Whatever the case may be, my offer from yesterday still stands.

So if you sell your own info products:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you a genuine secret way to sell more of what you’ve created.

I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

If you watch this free training, the CENSORED bits above will become clear as day.

And who knows. If you just reply to this email, maybe we can connect or exchange some ideas along the way.

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.

Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

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Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

I just wanted to help

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Today, I found myself watching a YouTube underwater livestream from the bottom of a murky river. 993 other viewers were watching along with me.

The YouTube livestream showed impenetrable green water, with the only change being the digital clock in the upper right corner, which counted away:

2024-03-26 12:52:28… 12:52:29… 12:52:30…

I was on the fish doorbell site.

Apparently, every spring, fish migrate upstream through the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

But there’s a river lock in the city. The fish cannot swim past it.

For reasons of their own, the Utrecht city government created this YouTube livestream, and allowed people to press a digital button once they see a fish on the livestream. This I suppose will somehow cause the river lock to open and will let the fish through.

Like I said, I and another 993 bipedal simians were intently watching this unchanging livestream of murky river water, hoping to be the one to press the stupid fish doorbell and the let fish through on its way.

I thought my willingness to sit and stare at nothing was notable because I am currently in the middle of preparing my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind this Thursday.

I’m scheduled to talk about writing emails that elicit engagement — that get people to hit reply and write you something in return to your daily emails.

Eliciting engagement might seem like a foolish endeavor — “sales emails are there to make sales, bro.” But in my experience, writing for engagement does in time boost sales, plus it has lots of other good knock-on effects.

So how do you write for engagement?

The fish doorbell gives a clue. One big reason that people will engage with you is simply to feel helpful.

Just ask people for help. Give them the opportunity to feel smart and useful. More often than not, you will get engagement.

This can be taken to extremes or exploited to make people do foolish things, such as, for example, getting them to watch a livestream of nothing, in order to press a button that does nothing, with the ultimate goal being something completely absurd or intangible — “swim on little fish, godspeed.”

Of course, this is a newsletter about influence and persuasion.

​​And so you can bet that my conclusion is that appealing to people’s better sides, their desire to feel helpful or useful, is not the only way to go, or the most effective way to create engagement.

Maybe I will one day turn this Titans XL presentation into some kind of training on how to write for engagement, and make this info available more broadly.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Whatever may happen, if you would like more ideas here and now about how to write for engagement, plus see specific examples of it in action, you can find that in my Most Valuable Email Swipes #8, #9, #11, #23, #24, #27, #31, #42, and #48.

MVE Swipes is a swipe file I include with my Most Valuable Email training. This training shows you how to help your readers understand and experience abstract ideas in first-hand, intuitive ways, which stick with them for years to come. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How do you turn skim milk into butter?

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A question comes in about turning skim milk into butter:

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I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.

I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?

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The answer in short is “probably no.”

If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.

But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.

It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.

​​But it’s never as easy as right at the start.

​​And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.

So what do you do?

You got a couple options.

One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.

Or — and this is where my butter analogy breaks down — you can create new offers. There’s no law saying you can only sell people things once. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.

I’ll have more to say about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products. That’s something I have been thinking about a lot as part of my new “hot seat coach” role within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

But that’s for the future.

For now, I do have a very high-quality ladle to sell you.

It will skim off the cream from your list if you’ve never emailed regularly before… it might pull in occasional sales even if you never do anything more to grow your list… and it will be an indispensable part of launching new offers, in case you ever do decide to do so.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Hamilton

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No, I didn’t go to see Hamilton on Broadway. But I am in New York City.

Last night, I went to dinner with my friend Sam and his girlfriend Olivia.

Olivia has a background in musical theater.

So while we sat in a very dim restaurant and ate sweet potatoes and Japanese-style chicken wings, Olivia enthused about Hamilton, the sung-and-rapped musical that’s broken all kinds of Broadway records.

Olivia won the Hamilton ticket lottery when the show was just opening. She had to actually quit her job to go see it. She loved Hamilton then, she loves it now, and she wanted to share it with Sam and me.

Sam and I were skeptical. But all right.

Last night was pouring rain. Tickets to Hamilton are generally impossible to get. So of course we didn’t go see the live show. Instead, we went back to Sam’s apartment and watched Hamilton, the recording of the Broadway production.

And it turned out to be… one damn musical number after another.

Sam and I kept dutifully quiet and stared at the projected images on the wall. After an hour, Sam paused it to go to the bathroom. This was an opportunity for Olivia to ask if we were enjoying it.

No. And no.

“I knew it,” said Olivia. “I could feel the energy in the room.”

With Hamilton, the recording, you are supposedly seeing and hearing the show just as it was when it was live. But the reality is that it’s impossible.

There’s the missing excitement of going somewhere live, and feeling that you’re participating.

Then of course there’s the intangibles of an actual live 3D presentation, the sound and vision that cannot be reproduced at home on a 2D surface and with a little speaker.

Plus in the theater, there are hundreds or thousands of other people there, all set to enjoy the show, all infecting each other with their enthusiasm.

All of this is just one more reason to do things live whenever possible.

To do in-real-life musicals rather than sell DVDs…

To offer live trainings over prerecorded ones…

To write live emails rather than send canned autoresponders.

No, I’m not saying a freshly written daily email will have the same impact as a live Broadway show. But in its own small way, a freshly written email feels live and real in a way that an autoresponder email cannot replicate. And over time, that effect builds up.

If you want to write fresh emails — new ones every day, which feel live and real as opposed to flat, canned, and stale — then you can find that in my Simple Money Emails training.

​​Simple Money Emails shows you how I do it, and how you can do it too, starting today. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Stale autoresponders

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A personal confession:

I’m a compulsive salad buyer. I buy those prewashed and precut bags of mixed greens, and I stack them in my fridge. I eat them too, but not at the speed that I buy them at.

This often means that, like this morning, I’ll peek into an already opened bag of salad and evaluate critically whether it’s too wilted to consume. Meanwhile, other, perfectly fresh, new bags of salad sit in my fridge, waiting until they too become old enough and unfresh enough to deserve my attention.

Do you maybe sense an analogy in the making? Something to do with marketing? Well, here goes:

On last week’s Write & Profit coaching call, I asked one question to three of the five people who are in that group. The question was:
​
​”What’s the strategy behind your autoresponder?”

There are good reasons to have an email autoresponder. And then there are bad reasons.

One bad reason is, “Everybody says I should.” Another bad reason is, “Because it’s a functionality of my ESP.”

Here are a few of the problems I saw with the autoresponders among my coaching students:

#1. They were out of date. They did not represent the current philosophy or positioning or main offers of the person writing.

#2. They were not as good as their more recent emails.

#3. They did not feel fresh or real, because they were not fresh or real.

#4. They did not allow new subscribers to get to the most current and exciting offers.

If you have nothing else to eat in your fridge but wilted salad, then that makes your choice of dinner easier.

Likewise, if you don’t write fresh emails, then having a stale autoresponder is better than sending no emails at all.

On the other hand, if you are writing fresh emails, then you need to have good reasons for also having an autoresponder.

And in the absence of such good reasons, it’s better to just throw the old salad, I mean old emails, out, and serve up what’s fresh and new.

Fresh and new is not hard to do. And if you want my recipe book for fresh emails, on demand, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/