A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!
The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.
First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.
And then he wrote:
===
So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.
Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.
And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.
I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.
Keep up the good work,
Your grateful student and zealous reader,
Jakub
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I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.
In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.
And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:
It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.
Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.
A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.
People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.
Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.
They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.
It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.
Except you kind of can.
True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.
But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.
So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.
Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.
Sales pages are one place.
But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.
Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.
I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.
Maybe I will fix that in time.
For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info: