My average daily open rate for the last week of February was 33.89%. My average daily open rate for the last week of March was 35.84%. That’s a staggering increase of 1.95%.
Well, it’s not really staggering. It’s not really anything.
Open rates don’t tell you much, and what they do tell you is often bad. I’ve written before how for one large list I was mailing with daily offers, I found a mild inverse relationship between open rates and sales — on average, each extra 1% of opens cost us $100 in sales.
But my sales are up as well. Like I wrote a few days ago, this past March was a record month for me. I made plenty of sales in that last week of March, many more than in the last week of February. I won’t say how much more, but it’s enough to go to Disneyland with.
What gives?
I can tell you my impressions. The jump in both open rates and sales very clearly came after March 6, when I ran an ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter. But — about that.
The staggering increase in open rates might be due to new subscribers who came via that ad. I don’t know, and ActiveCampaign gives me no easy way to figure it out.
But I do know that the bulk of new sales I saw in the whole of March compared to the whole of February did not come from new subscribers who came via the ad. The bulk came from my existing subscribers.
Many of those sales came from people buying new offers I had made in March, such as Insight Exposed and Copy Zone. That’s normal.
But one thing that struck me is how many existing subscribers, some of whom have been on my list for months or even years, decided this March to buy offers like Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email, which I have offered dozens of times before. These readers successfully resisted all my previous pitches, but they found themselves curious and willing to buy now.
It wasn’t just one such person. It was lots. I asked myself what made the difference.
My best answer is this:
There’s a lot that goes into the success of email marketing beyond the actual email funnel and copy. At least if you’re doing something like I’m doing, which is a long-running, personal, relationship-based email newsletter.
I’ll leave you with that for today. And I’ll just remind you of my coaching program for email marketing and copywriting.
I have to include the email copywriting in the coaching program, because it’s what almost everybody wants to learn and believes is most important.
But in my experience, email copy is rarely the thing that really makes the biggest impact in the results of your emails. By results I mean sales, as well as soft stuff like retention, engagement, and influence.
Anyways, if you are interested in my coaching program, you’ll also be interested to know this program is only open to two kinds of people:
1. Business owners who have an email list and want to use email to both build a relationship with their customers and to sell their products
2. Copywriters who manage a client’s email list, and who have a profit-share agreement for that work
If you fit into one of the two categories above and you’re interested in my coaching program, write me an email and say so. Also tell me who you are and what your current situation is, including which category above you fit into. We can then talk in more detail, and see if my coaching program might be a fit for you.