In response to my email yesterday, a reader writes in with doubts about daily emailing:
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I think daily might burn out my audience since I speak of very human and heavy topics. I’ve been playing around with a weekly educational email and light launches otherwise.
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Here are some highly personal numbers:
During my sales promo last week, for the 1-Person Advertorial Agency, I made over $11k. By the time the payment plan payments roll in, I will make over $13k. For sending 7 emails.
Big whoop, good for me, right? Here’s the number that’s relevant to you:
Exactly 1.01% of my list took me up on this offer.
98.99% of my list said NO to this offer, either indirectly, by ignoring it, or directly, by going to the sales page, looking it over, and deciding against it, or even more muscularly, by unsubscribing from my list.
And yet, somehow, the math, 1.01% conversion rate and all, worked out in my favor.
Economist Daniel Kahnemann had this book. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Fast thinking is intuitive, automatic, and feels really certain. It’s how you know the answer to 2+2 = ?
Slow thinking is plodding, might require pen and paper, and doesn’t feel nearly as sure, even when it’s 100% right. Slow thinking is how you work out what 222*222 is.
My point is that our fast-thinking brains are not designed to deal with the realities of direct response marketing.
Our intuition — our fast thinking — says that nobody wants to read those 40-page sales letters. Nobody will pay thousands of dollars for a course, or tens of thousands of dollars for coaching. Nobody wants to get a sales pitch in their inbox every day — “not in my niche!”
And you know what?
Our intuition is right!
98.99% of the time, or thereabouts.
But it’s in that 1.01% of time where our intuition is wrong, where the slow thinking kicks in, that a successful or even very successful direct marketing business can be built.
This slow thinking stuff applies to daily emailing.
Most people in the world do not want to hear from you daily. Even most people who sign up to your list don’t want to hear from you daily.
My open rate is a little over 30%. Two out of three people who are on my list don’t want to hear from me every day!
And yet, I’ve been living off my very modest-sized email list, for years now, comfortably.
This slow thinking stuff applies to offers too.
Our intuition — our fast thinking — says to try to accommodate as broad an audience as possible with an offer.
But slow thinking eventually figures out the truth. The narrower, the more niche, the more restrictive and specific an offer, the more likely it is to attract the attention of the right people, to sell, and to sell for good money.
This is something I’ve baked into the process I’ll be taking a few people through next month, which I’ve taken to calling the “Road trip to a $1k+ offer that sells 3-5 times each month.”
Meanwhile, if you’re emailing weekly, that’s certainly way better than not emailing or emailing only sporadically.
But if you want to monetize a small but dedicated list, for years, without fail, you will find the path easier and richer by emailing daily. If you want my help with that: