Email Marketing

A message from Porter Spamsberry & Co

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Each day, I like to check my spam folder several times because — who knows? Maybe somebody wrote me with a declaration of love, and I don’t get much of that in my usual inbox.

But no. No love ever in my spam folder.

Instead, all I ever find is dozens of messages from senders like:

Tech Crashes
Lucrative Market News
Worldwide Recession
Recession Starts Now
Market Collapsing

It’s not just the sender names that look the same.

All these emails have the same format, with a linked first sentence… a domain name that’s the same as the sender name (recessionstartsnow dot net)… and the identical “Thank You!” message that appears when you try to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribing, by the way, is impossible.

New disposable domains and new senders keep popping up in my spam folder, day after day, like moles. American Conservative Group. In Time Investing. Wallstreet Burning.

Sometimes, these website have disappeared by the time I click the link in the email, just a few hours after it was sent out.

But some of these emails do still point to live websites.

And on those websites, there’s always a video sales letter, which always features the same glum face. The glum face belongs to Porter Stansberry, the investment researcher and copywriter who started and then sold the billion-dollar company Stansberry Research.

What’s going on?

My suspicion is that this is some affiliate getting creative, and not a new email marketing strategy from Porter & Co, Stansberry’s new venture. But maybe I’m wrong.

If you know, and you would like to tell me, I will be grateful to you.

In any case, let me tease you about something else Stansberry-related:

A while back, a senior copywriter for Stansberry signed up to my newsletter. He replied to one of my emails, and offered to tell me the number one secret behind Stansberry’s billion-dollar success.

I won’t tell you what that copywriter told me — there’s value in not blabbing publicly.

But in case you would like to get on my email newsletter — after all, top copywriters and A-list marketers read it every day — click here to subscribe.

 

What never to swallow at the start of your newsletter

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No, I’m not talking about swallowing your pride. Read on because it’s important.

​​Last night I was reviewing a newsletter. The newsletter was full of valuable content, but the author didn’t try to sell me on that content in any way. He meant for it to sell itself.

This brought to mind something I heard marketing wizard Dan Kennedy say:

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We sometimes take the attention of the people with whom we communicate with all the time for granted. That they will give us attention because of who we are and our relationship with them. It’s a bad presumption. It was not a bad presumption a decade ago when there weren’t as many of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. But now there’s a lot more of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. And so we gotta earn it, every single time.

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If you’re anything like me, then your brain will try to feed you excuses, all day long, just because it wants to stop thinking. It will say:

“They opted​​ in to my newsletter. They expressed interest. They want to hear what I have to say.”

“They like my persona. They read my emails in the past. They bought stuff from me!”

“​​I’m sure they will read this too. It’s good enough.”

​Don’t swallow your brain’s excuses. ​Don’t take your readers attention for granted. That’s not good enough.

Not if you want the best chance to influence people, to present yourself as an authority, to get your readers to buy or share or do whatever it is you’re after.
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The more closely people read your stuff, the more of your story and your arguments they swallow, the more you manage to spike their emotions in the minutes they spend with your content, the better it is for you. And in a way, for them.

As a Big Pharma salesman might tell you, the most expensive drug is the one that doesn’t work.

And as I, a Big Copy salesman, will tell you, the most expensive 3 seconds for your reader are clicking on your email and skimming straight through to the end because he’s not properly engaged. That’s 3 seconds wasted for nothing.

On the other hand, 3 or 13 minutes reading every word you wrote because you sold it properly ahead of time — that can be both valuable and enjoyable.

So how do you pre-sell your valuable content?

That knowledge is something I don’t pre-sell. That’s something I sell.

Specifically, that’s what I sell inside my Copy Riddles program. In case you’re interested:

Copy Riddles shows you A-list copywriters sell and pre-sell valuable but dry information. But Copy Riddles does much more. It gets you doing the same.

This doesn’t mean you have to go all John Carlton on your newsletter readers.

You can be subtle or savage in the way you pre-sell your content and your information. It’s your choice.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to. And the most condensed and powerful way to create messages that people respond to is inside Copy Riddles.

As I mentioned two days ago, this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The old future of new newsletters

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I’m a regular reader of Simon Owen’s Tech and Media Newsletter — it’s an insightful rag. For example:

A few weeks ago, Owens wrote a piece about the future of new media startups, and what those will look like.

He made five predictions. One of those was “niche editorial products.”

Here’s a relevant bit from Owens’s article, where he is writing about Axios, a conglomerate of email newsletters (free and paid) that sold for a thumping $525 million back in August:

What most impressed me about the company was how it simultaneously managed to be a general interest news site while also funneling its audience into niche verticals, making it much easier for it to deliver highly targeted advertising and industry-specific subscription products.

In other words, Axios offers general and free newsletters on the front-end… and specific and expensive newsletters on the back end.

When you put it like that, this ain’t nothing new:

1. Write something like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Give it away for free or sell it for $0.46 on Kindle.

2. And then, to the people who bought the book, sell something like the Dale Carnegie Institute’s High Impact Presentations corporate training, which consists of two in-person sessions, and costs $2,195.

So Owens’s prediction might not be new, but it’s still a good reminder for each new generation and each new technology.

And it’s something I’m thinking about, especially in the context of email newsletters. If you have a highly niched offer, it might be something for you to think about also.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that this basic idea is not just about offers. The same idea actually applies to copywriting, marketing, and effective communication of all types.

In fact, everything I’ve just told you is related to “chunking up”, which is the first big and new copywriting insight I had by looking at the bullets of A-list copywriters.

The way I describe it inside my Copy Riddles program, “chunking up” allows you to expand your market 3x, 5x, or more.

Which goes to show:

Once you learn the essence of effective communication — once you learn to make interesting and attractive appeals — you can then apply that from a single sales bullet all the way up to the core structure of a $525-million business like Axios.

Perhaps you’re curious to learn more. Perhaps you want specific examples from print ads, video sales letters, and paperback books.

Perhaps you even want to practice chunking up yourself, so next time you try to get your message or offer across, it comes naturally.

You can do all that, and more, if you buy Copy Riddles, which I am currently selling. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

3 Tuesday bland breakthroughs (Dec 20 edition)

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In preparing to write this email, I dug up my notes for a high-priced consult I did this past summer. For that consult, I looked over the email marketing of a running and profitable business, and I came up with little-known, highly technical, A-list email copywriter secrets to skyrocket conversions.

Since I am now promoting a new coaching program with a focus on email marketing, I’ve decided to give you a sneak peek into that high-priced consult, and reveal some of the behind-the-velvet-rope ideas I conjured up in there. Here are the three most exciting ones:

– email more often
– inject more curiosity and intrigue
– add some personality to it

Those exciting ideas might remind you of the “bland breakthroughs” of a marketer I’ve code name Gavin Juff.

And maybe these bland breakthroughs make you glad you never hired me for an email marketing consult. After all, is this anything worth paying for?

Well, Camille Clare, the business owner who hired me for that consult last summer, wrote me some time later to say:

Just so you know, since your feedback, we have tripled our sales via email. So that’s pretty awesome and thank you 🙂

Why don’t people email more? Add some intrigue? Inject a bit of personality into their copy?

It’s beyond me. But the fact is, there are plenty of businesses that don’t execute on the basics of email marketing — even if they’ve been hearing about those basics since Saddam Hussein was in office.

Enter my new coaching program.

As genuine A-list copywriter David Deutsch might say, I’m not promising that this coaching program will triple your sales from email.

But I am promising I won’t just tell you the obvious “what to do” — email more, you dummy — but I will give you specific one-on-one ideas, tailored to your business, for how to implement those “what to dos.”

The truth is, that’s actually what I did with Camille in that consult last summer. The extra thing I will do within my new coaching program is work with people week-by-week, and make sure they actually implement these ideas in their email copy and their email marketing.

Is this anything worth paying for?

No, it’s not. Not for most people.

But if you have a running and profitable business, or at the very least, an email list of some size and quality, then it might be worth paying for. Because it might end up making you much more money than you pay me.

My new coaching program will kick off in January. I will be promoting it until tomorrow. If you think you might be a good fit for it, then the first step is to sign up for my email newsletter. Click here to do that. After that, we can talk in more detail.

Story of coaching with Dan Ferrari continued

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Yesterday, I promised to share with you how I paid off 6 months of very expensive coaching in less than 60 days.

The story is this:

Back in 2019, I’d been working with an ecommerce company for about a year, writing their entire sales funnels, including advertorials and Facebook and YouTube ads.

At the height of it, we were making 2,000 sales every day to entirely cold traffic.

And then the next day, it was time to make 2,000 new sales to entirely cold traffic.

Meanwhile, the previous buyers’ data went off to some cold storage facility in a bunker at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Over and over, I proposed to the ecomm guys to start sending emails to these previous buyers. “It’s free money,” I kept saying. “Let me do it. I’ll do all the work. Just pay me a part of the money I’ll make for you.”

I did this maybe five times over the course of the year we had been working together. Each time, the ecomm guys had some excuse, and they said no. The reality was they were simply making way too much money on the front end, and they didn’t feel like bothering with the setup.

In the meantime, I joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group.

I also realized that, even though I was getting paid $150/hr to write “horror advertorials” for dog toothbrushes and strapless bras, there was not any opportunity here to reach the next level as a copywriter. And frankly, I was bored with writing advertorials day in and day out.

I decided it was time to cut off the relationship with the ecommerce company, and in that way, to force myself to look for better clients.

“What about writing emails for them on a rev-share basis?” Dan asked me.

“I tried selling them that,” I said. “Each time, they dragged their feet and eventually said no. They obviously don’t want to do it. I’m done with them.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “But try it one last time.”

So I did.

Because one pact I made with myself during this very expensive coaching with Dan was to do whatever he said — even if it seemed futile, even if it felt repulsive, even if I knew better.

So one last time, I made the rev-share email pitch to the ecomm guys. And whaddya know. They finally agreed, for whatever reason.

A few days later, I started writing and sending emails to one of their buyer lists, made up of 40k+ people.

It wasn’t an immediate win. But within a month, I figured out what worked.

And then, the ecomm guys opened up a second 40k+ buyer list for me to mail. And that’s when the money really started rolling in, both for the ecomm guys, and also for me.

Like I said yesterday, this new source of income paid off 6 months of Dan Ferrari’s coaching in under 60 days.

That was not the only bump in income and opportunity that I got from Dan’s coaching. There were others, where he had a much more direct and involved role. But though valuable, those other opportunities don’t compare to the money I made as a result of this simple piece of advice. “Sure. But try it one last time.”

I wanna highlight two things:

You might say that Dan’s contribution was trivial in this case. Maybe so.

But without his trivial piece of advice, I’m 100% sure I would have ended that ecomm relationship early, and I would today be out a large sum of money, and a large amount of experience with email marketing at a very high level.

You might also say the stars had to align for Dan’s comment to have the impact it did.

I mean, how many businesses making 2,000 sales a day are dumb enough to never try to sell another thing to previous customers? It’s easy to make money in that situation.

Again, maybe so. But many businesses, even successful businesses, have marketing cracks like this. But often they can’t see or can’t fill those cracks themselves, and it takes somebody from the outside to force a change.

The same is true of people.

If you’re smart, like Dan is, then you set yourself up to coach people who have a lot of the pieces in place already. People who just need an outside perspective on plugging up cracks, or a push at the right time in the right direction for those existing pieces to click and fuse together.

Because getting somebody from 0 to 1 can be impossibly hard work.

Getting somebody from 1 to 10 might be less hard but isn’t much more rewarding.

But if somebody already has a half-dozen 17’s in hand… then you don’t need to show them how to go from 17 to 30. You don’t even have to show them how to add up their half-dozen 17’s to make 102.

You just have to show them something like the “multiplication trick”, and suddenly, their half-dozen 17’s click and fuse and are suddenly worth over 2 million.

I hope I didn’t lose you with that mathematical analogy. Because it’s time for my pitch, and I’d like your full attention.

As I wrote two days ago, I’m starting my own coaching program. The focus is entirely on email marketing. How to send more emails. How to make those emails more interesting. How to sell more, and at higher prices, using email.

If this is something that interests you, and if you suspect you have a lot of the pieces in place already, then I’d like to talk to you. As the first step, you will have to be on my email list. Click here to sign up.

Income at will

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Tonight, as this email goes out, I will be finishing up the third and final call of the Age of Insight core training.

That done, I still have a few bonuses to deliver.

But pretty soon, I will be finished with everything I promised as part of this offer.

I will have the recordings of all the trainings. With a bit of polishing and tweaking, these will turn into assets I can sell down the line.

I will also have a better and deeper relationship with the group of people who went through Age of Insight, most of whom have bought stuff from me before.

​​If these people got insights from this course, if they got good ideas, if they got value they can use to make themselves more successful, odds are good they will want to come back for more in the future.

A few days ago, Dan Kennedy wrote:

If you’re in a position that at almost any time you can come up with an offer that your customers, clients, patients, donors, followers, or fans list will like, then you have the ability to create income at will.

This position should be a big priority for people to get themselves into. Because in harsh reality, this is actually the only financial security there is. Because one way or another, what you already have can be wiped out. So the only real financial security you ever have is being in the income-at-will position and able to replace disappeared wealth.

I got started with income-at-will very hesitantly last year.

After sitting on the idea of my Copy Riddles program for a few months, I finally got up the nerve to presell it. I then delivered it over the course of a month, while creating it day-for-day.

Then came Influential Emails, also last year. I had the idea for that training one morning. By the afternoon, I had a sales page up and an email went out to drive traffic to that sales page. Again, I presold this training. I delivered it over the next few weeks, and made a nice sum of money as a result.

Next was the Most Valuable Postcard. I sat on that idea for a while, but when I did decide to do it, up went a minimalist sales page. Later that day, a few hours after my one and only email about this offer, I had filled the quota I wanted for this experiment.

Then there was the Most Valuable Email this past September. And then Age of Insight last month. And that brings me to today, and my new offer.

It’s no secret that the reason I’ve been able to create income at will has been this very email newsletter.

I have done precious little to promote myself other than writing a daily email.

I have also done precious little to sell my offers other than writing a daily email.

I’m not telling you anything new here. You probably know the value of email marketing. But the question is not whether you know it.

​​The question is whether you yourself are in that desirable position, where you can write some emails and create income at will.

Enter my new offer.

My new offer is a coaching program, focused specifically on email copy and email marketing. It will kick off in January.

The primary goal for this coaching program is not to make you into the Michelangelo of email copywriters.

The primary goal is to make this coaching program pay for itself, and for much more.

The main mechanism to do that is getting you to send out consistent, interesting, influential daily emails, which you can tack an offer onto whenever you want.

In case you’re interested, the first pre-requisite is to be on my email list. You can sign up for that here.

I’m not worried about my email from last night — really

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My email last night about James Altucher drew a surprising number of thoughtful and emotional responses…

#1 “If that’s what got James Altucher to stop, that’s really sad. I too enjoyed his writing.”

#2 “Great email. I always enjoyed James Altucher’s writing, too. It’s so quirky and off-beat.”

#3 “So… your email couldn’t have had better timing.”

#4 “I appreciate you sharing the email you never sent and hope he finds his confidence again someday.”

… but what my email yesterday did not do is get any sales. And in fact, it also didn’t get almost any clicks to the sales page – not compared to what I’m used to seeing.

To which, all which I can do is give a Gandhi-like smile, shrug gently, and then hiss through clenched teeth:

“Come on people, don’t you realize I’m trying to run a little business here? Buy something or move on.”

But a little more seriously, such is the world of not-really direct response marketing in daily emails.

Last night’s email drew a lot of engagement, but seems to have been worthless for business. But maybe not.

I’ve sent similar emails to this list that made me multiple thousands of dollars. In fact, I might collect all such emails into a course one day, which I will call:

“Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

The truth is, if you have a daily email list, and you’re not just spamming people with random affiliate offers, then it’s often the cumulative effect that makes people buy.

And even when people are mostly “sold” by a single email, it’s often not the email from which they clicked through to the sales page.

So the way I see it, it doesn’t make too much sense to stress over an email that seems to have been worthless for business.

Likewise, it doesn’t make too much sense to celebrate the emails that did make sales (except my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline” — more info on that exciting course coming up soon).

So what does make sense?

I can only tell you the four things I do:

1. Keep an eye on sales over a longer time – like a month. Things tend to average out over a month, and hidden effects become less hidden.

2. Do worry if the total sales over that longer period are not going up. (If the total sales are going up, then still worry, but less.)

3. Do make new offers — again, keep your eyes peeled for my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

4. Follow Gary Bencivenga’s advice about getting 1% better each day. Except 1% better each day seems like a lot to me. So I aim for more like 1% better each week.

Which brings me to my offer:

It’s not new. And it’s certainly not the only way to get 1% better each week. But maybe it will be the difference that allows you to get better, regularly. Sign up for my email newsletter, and get more emails like this, every day.

What we can all learn from princes William and Harry

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A few hours after I write this, the Queen’s coffin will be placed on a gun carriage and will lead a procession down a packed Mall, along Whitehall and then into Parliament Square before entering the Palace of Westminster.

Walking in the procession behind the Queen will be her son, the new king, Charles III.

But perhaps more remarkable, Charles’s two sons, William and Harry, will also be walking in the procession.

That’s remarkable because for the two princes, this act will bring back painful memories of when they, aged 15 and 12, walked behind the coffin of their mother Princess Diana in 1997.

What makes this act still more remarkable is that princes Harry and William are embroiled in a bitter personal feud with each other. (I don’t know the details of the feud, and the Daily Mail article I just read didn’t elaborate. So I guess I never will know.)

Whatever the case may be, I think this all just highlight the importance of unity.

Unity of family… unity in moments of crisis… unity when different, individual, tiny elements come together to form a bigger and more powerful whole.

Because after all, isn’t unity really the essence we all strive for, in life in general, and in email marketing in particular?

In particular, I have just read about the first ever email marketer, a man named Mr. Pease.

Mr. Pease sold a product called “Pease’s Horehound Candy,” a kind of cough drop. And since he lived in the first half of the 19th century, he clearly didn’t use email, not the way we know it today.

But Mr. Pease’s remarkable marketing was the essence of what email is about. It would work today as well as it did in early America.

So what did Mr. Pease do to advertise his cough drops? ​​From chapter 8 of P.T. Barnum’s book, Humbugs of the World:

Mr. Pease’s plan was to seize upon the most prominent topic of interest and general conversation, and discourse eloquently upon that topic in fifty to a hundred lines of a newspaper-column, then glide off gradually into a panegyric of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.” The consequence was, every reader was misled by the caption and commencement of his article, and thousands of persons had “Pease’s Horehound Candy” in their mouths long before they had seen it! In fact, it was next to impossible to take up a newspaper and attempt to read the legitimate news of the day without stumbling upon a package of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.”

Mr. Pease got very rich selling his horehound candy with his humbug news item advertisements.

And that’s what I hope will happen for you as well, if you only follow his very smart, very durable, very unified marketing approach.

The good news is, in many ways you have it easier than Pease did. For example, Pease had to pay for advertising space each time he wanted to get his message out. But email today is pretty much free.

Of course, Pease did have some advantages that you today do not have.

Such as, for example, a ready-made and large audience of newspaper readers.

Or the fact that those newspaper readers read their newspaper with a curious and trusting mind, rather than with skepticism and disinterest.

Or the fact that those readers didn’t have Twitter, where they could start campaigns to mock or even shut down Pease’s company because of its misleading advertising.

But fear not!

Because there are simple, quick, and quite specific methods to overcome those problems in your email marketing today.

And if you have a business, and more specifically an email list, and you would like to make like Mr. Pease and market your way to great wealth, then may I advise you take a look at the fine offer below.

What, you want me to tie this offer into the topic of unity, or to princess William and Harry?

Not today. That’s not what I learned from Mr. Pease.

But if you do want potentially business-changing guidance with your email marketing, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

My takeaways from yesterday’s informal survey now that I’m out from under a mountain of virtual mail

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I’m way behind schedule today because I spent much of the day buried under a virtual mountain of virtual mail. And each time I clawed my way to the surface, gasped for air, and pulled out a stray bit of virtual paper from my throat, another batch of virtual messages landed on top of my head and buried me again.

The context:

Yesterday, I asked my list what the most recent podcast they listened to is. I also offered a little bribe to get people to respond.

An arenaful of people took me up on my offer and wrote in with their most recent listened-to podcast. As a result, I found out some interesting things about my readers:

1. They listen to more business-related podcasts than purely fun or general-interest podcasts. It was about a 60-40 split.

2. The podcasts that came rolling in were extremely diverse. In spite of all the responses I got, there were very few duplicates.

3. The one marketing podcast that did pop up multiple times was the Chris Haddad Show, in particular the episode with David Deutsch.

4. The general interest/purely fun category was broken up into three main groups: 1) self improvement (by far biggest), 2) comedy (second biggest but relatively small), and 3) truly off the wall stuff. A few examples of the last category:

“I’ll be honest — it was Words In The Air, a spoken-word poetry podcast that’s completely useless to you”

“Something to Wrestle with by Conrad Thompson and Bruce Prichard. It’s an insiders view of the WWE from the days of Hulk Hogan, through Stone Cold, up to today.”

“Recently, while on a five hour drive… My wife made me listen to this podcast where women tell their birthing stories. It was horrible.”

There are two takeaways I can make from this. Maybe they will be useful to you also:

The first is that if you keep writing daily emails long enough, then people on your list begin to be a composite of you and your interests.

After all, points 1,2, and 4 above describe me and interests pretty well (except for the birthing thing).

​​As for #3, I’ve listened to an episode of Chris Haddad’s podcast once, though that was the episode in which my name and my 10 Commandments book were mentioned.

My second takeaway is that Ben Settle might be right.

Ben said somewhere, probably in one of his emails, that he never surveys his list about what products to create next. He doesn’t ask people or about their tastes either. Or their preferences.

​​The only worthwhile survey question, says Ben, is what people bought last.

That was why yesterday I asked for just one podcast, and the most recent one you listened to. I believe this produced a much more honest and insightful survey than had I asked, “What are some of your favorite podcasts?”

Anyways, I now have a lot of good info for when I do decide to make a podcast push.

That won’t be right away. I still want to put out some new offers first.

I also plan to convert some of the offers I’ve launched already into offers I can promote all the time.

All of which means, I might not be offering my Email Marketing Audit much longer.

If you have your own email list, and it’s making you some money, then my quick and easy audit could be worth a lot more to you than I charge for it.

You can find out more about it at the link below. And if you are curious about it, then I can repeat yesterday’s message:

The perfect moment is now. The moment never was this good. It might never be this good again. So to get started while this window of opportunity is open:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

The real secret to how I survive the biggest mistake you are making the fastest way

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Yesterday evening, I got an odd email from a reader. The subject line read:

“About your email subject lines”

There was nothing in the body of the email. There was just an attached file, “7 Tested and Proven Email Subject Lines that Get Your Emails Opened.” Among them:

1. How to survive _____
2. The biggest mistake _____ make
3. The fastest way to ______

I have this Chateau Heartiste policy of keeping my replies to readers no longer than what the reader wrote me. And since this reader didn’t even include a hello, I couldn’t, according to my policy, reply to ask him why he was sending me this guide to subject lines.

Was he displeased with my subject lines in general?

​​Was he impressed with my subject line yesterday? ​​Did he think it fit one of these molds in some way?

​​I guess I’ll never know.

But since this reader did send me tested and proven subject line ideas, I squeezed a bunch of them into my subject line today.

After all, why not? I don’t think it will make a molehill of difference. Here’s a story on that matter:

Last year, I wrote an email with the subject line, “More real than real.” That email was about some slightly esoteric stuff. I purposefully didn’t want a DR-style subject line for it, one that might attract the wrong kind of attention.

A bunch of people wrote in response to that email to tell me how much they liked the story and the lesson I was sharing.

I also got a response from a smart and successful marketer. He warned me that he almost missed my email, which he thought was valuable once he read it, because my subject line didn’t catch his eye at all. He even rewrote my subject line to show me how it’s done.

And then, the next week, he wrote in with a similar message, again pointing out that my subject line is suboptimal and that he almost missed another valuable email from me. As far as I can tell, he continues to read my emails to this day.

I am not pointing fingers or making fun of anybody.​ I’m just pointing a finger at something obvious:

A lot of standard copywriting wisdom, which was extracted from cold-traffic tests, isn’t particularly relevant to warm daily emails, which people mainly open because they’ve learned that you have something fun or interesting to say. In warm emails, the “headline” is really your name, and not your subject line.

Maybe you say I can be cavalier about this, because I still don’t sell regularly in this email newsletter, and I certainly don’t A/B test my subject lines here.

Fine.

But I have been in situations where I was actively selling in email, and where I was actively testing. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists, which were made up of buyers, and which produced millions of dollars of sales, thanks to emails I wrote. And yes, thanks to subject lines I wrote.

And you know what?

I once ran a little test to find out how our email open rates influenced our sales.

​​Result?

Experts were shocked. Literally. I mean, I, an email marketing expert, was shocked.

And that’s why I want to warn you about the biggest mistake that email marketers make when it comes to subject lines. And that’s to follow “Tested and proven subject lines that get your emails OPENED.” If you want to read the real secret of why this is a big problem, here’s the fastest way to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/why-ecommerce-list-owners-should-beware-high-open-rates/