This morning I woke up and checked my email to find a new sale notification. Daily Emails 101, $5. “Damn it,” I said.
For the past week, I’ve been running my “Daily Emails 101” offer to cold Meta traffic. Results as of this morning, when I shut the campaign down:
Outbound clicks: 195
Sales: 6
Conversion rate: 3.07%
I was doing this because I wanted to test if this offer had legs on cold traffic. It apparently does — only barely.
I was told that 3% to an ugly, unoptimized page, selling a $5 offer, is the minimum you should get if have any hope of eventually having the optimized funnel break even on cold traffic.
With today’s sale, I managed to squeeze in right at the buzzer. (I was going to run the campaign until 200 clicks and then stop.)
Compare that to the results I had when I made the exact same offer to my list about a month ago:
Outbound clicks: ~470
Sales: 155
Conversion rates: ~33%
The same dude whose “offer validation” process I’m following said that if you’re testing an offer to warm traffic like your email list, you should get at least a 20% conversion rate.
I got over 30%, which I think is a reflection of the quality of my list and the relationship I have with that list, thanks to emailing daily.
My point today is not about how wizardly I am at email marketing. My point is how email marketing, even when done at an average level, completely transforms the math of selling.
Same offer. Same copy. Only difference is cold audience vs. an audience that’s gotten a bunch of emails from you… and the result is 3% vs 20% conversion rate in the average case, or more if you’re willing.
This morning, when the 6th sale came in via cold traffic and I realized that my offer still has legs, I said “damn it” because it means I will now have to do all the work of building out the cold traffic funnel for real:
Better copy… order form bumps… upsells… more ads… constantly monitoring results… watching money drain out of my account and then maybe get replenished, maybe not… family drama… increased blood pressure… rising oil prices… basically pandemonium.
All that sounded exciting before I got started. Of course, now that I’m in it, it just seems like a ton of drudge work.
I’ll still do it, primarily because of ego. Because after being in direct marketing for 10+ years, it bothers me that I’ve never really “mastered traffic,” whatever that might mean.
But logically — logically — things are just so much easier and better on the back end.
It’s 10x easier to a sell a $5 offer to your email list than it is to cold traffic.
It’s perfectly legitimate to sell a $5k offer to your list with just a few emails (I’ve done it multiple times this year), while it’s impossible to do on cold traffic, at least directly (yes, you can do it as an upsell, but even that’s likely to require sales calls).
And the back end is just more fun — not everything needs to be a “template,” “swipe,” or “AI prompt,” the way it does on cold traffic.
It all starts by emailing your list regularly. Actually, not regularly. Daily. I don’t want to shortchange you.
You can get average results by emailing regularly, but you get top-tier results simply by showing up every day.
It’s not hard to do. In fact it’s even fun and after a while, liberating. You can get started today if you like, and if you want my help, there’s my Daily Email Habit service, which gets you writing daily emails, daily. For more info on that: