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The money is in the list? (23)

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I keep on reading that "the money is in the list," but I find very few guides explaining how to monetize the email list more effectively.

To help others and myself learn how to better monetize the email list, I will be posting every email I send to my clients in different niches on this thread along with results. List size, open rate, CTR and conversion value.

I'm hoping some of the bigger players in email marketing will drop in and give some feedback and some tips that we can implement.

That being said, let's begin.

Here are emails that I sent out Tuesday Morning.

Health - Green Tea
This email tries to get people to read a blog post that contains offers.
https://mailchi.mp/mymatcha.co.za/ba...row-1535129?e=[UNIQID]
1500 Subscribers OPEN RATE: 19.4% CTR: 4.3% REVENUE: 1 Order for $40
*Just realized how crap my grammar is here.

Hair Products
This email tries to get people to read a blog post that contains offers. As a test I also included a weight loss product with a discount code. No luck with that.
https://mailchi.mp/9ff943859232/8-to...air-1535153?e=[UNIQID]
4000 subscribers OR: 21.3% CTR: 4.7% REVENUE: 2 Orders $30 each

Weight Loss
This email tries to promote a weight loss product on another store
https://mailchi.mp/a5eec87cafeb/this...deo-1535169?e=[UNIQID]
5800 subscribers OR: 16.9% CTR: 2.4% REVENUE: 0 traced orders

Hair Products
Main purpose of this email was to get people to opt into a subscription.
https://mailchi.mp/184de528a971/8-to...air-1536709?e=[UNIQID]
4000 subscribers OR: 10.9% CTR: 0.7% REVENUE: 1 order for $40 and one 12 month subscription $30 per month. My first subscription sign up, happy about that.

Pain Relief
This was probably one of my most successful email campaigns to date. I emailed a voucher that people could use on takealot.com "south africa's amazon," and told them is was for our product. I figured it would remove the element of trust which is always an issue online...and it did.
https://mailchi.mp/ad44656399d5/outb...lotcom-1535077
17000 subscribers OR:13% CTR: 0.9% REVENUE: $1260 or 36 order.

Some questions:

1. I email each list once a week. Should I be emailing more?
2. Whats your ratio between offer emails and emails that only provides value?
3. Would you attack the same offer with different angles? Or change offers completely regularly?
4. When a subscriber joins my email list, they receive a series of automated value emails once per week, for +- two months. I do this in hope that when I do email out promotions, they are warmed up enough to use the promotion. Is this a good strategy?

Looking forward to some feedback. Will implement every bit of advice into my next email campaigns and will post the results.

Franky

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How did you generate the list? Your open rates look not too bad honestly (but again depends a bit on the source), but the CTR's aren't that good IMHO.
What can you tell about the demographic info etc of the list.

1. Most of the time more means more unsubscribers and lower open rates.
2. -
3. Good performing offers you should definitely e-mail more, with different angles and different subject lines (LAST CHANCE - STILL IN PAIN? - I THINK YOU MISSED THIS bla bla)
4. It could be a good strategy yes, but from here hard to predict your approach is good ofcourse.

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Thanks for your response.

Majority of subscribers were generated through FB ads. My funnels usually contain an advertorial that would lead on to a squeeze page that captures the email.

All lists are subscribers in South Africa.

To give you a quick outline of my approach.

1. I would squeeze emails out of FB ads traffic by offering some kind of discount on our flag ship offer for their email address. Subscribers would then go through an automated 3 part gain logic fear type email series in attempt to sell that product with the offer they subscribed for.
2. After that, they would get a weekly automated or manual email that aims to get them to read a blog post on my eccommerce website. These blog posts usually contain niche related offers.
3. I would also send out random promotions when it suits to try monetize the list further.

Hope this clears everything up.

I really want to start hammering subscription models so I might create a subscription offer on each store and try only market this with my list with different angles, week after week.

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Very interesting.

I know this is a long term game, but may I ask how it's so far costs wise? What kind of ROI did you get?

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Return on ad spend on initial sales depends on how much I scale. It’s anywhere between 10X and 2X. This is also heavily reliant on my products profit margin.

As long as I’m making a small profit after ad spend on the initial sale I’m happy. This allows me to grow my list while still making money.

This is why I really want to learn how to monetise my list better. The more money I can make on my list the more I can scale my FB ads.


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Oh, so you are already profitable! That's looking great!

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Very nice topic! Thanks for starting this discussion and for sharing your experience and numbers!

I'm going to ask the same question stickupkid asked: How exactly did you build the list? I know you mentioned FB ads and that the audience is from ZA, but which niche? That's a very critical piece of information that's missing.

The more niche your audience is, and the more you know about them, the better you'll be able to communicate using their language and write in a way that appeals to them, and the easier it will be to figure out their needs and wants, and the lower the unsubscribe rate tends to be. It's easier to achieve high CRs with a niche vs. general audience (although a large audience MAY make up for lower CRs just with its sheer size depending on the particular situation).

Once you know who your audience is, you can identify pleasure and pain points, then find solutions/needs/wants and look for corresponding affiliate programs.

For identifying pain/pleasure points, nothing beats browsing posts on forums that are related to the niche. (Yet another reason why niching down is a good idea.)

Also, avoid doing JUST selling, i.e. avoid making every email a promotion email. I personally saw good results by sending out 2 helpful emails with informative content for every promotional email sent out. It doesn't have to always be in this rigid order, but the point is it helps to serve your list first and foremost - people WILL notice the helpful content and their appreciation will show when they start ordering the products your recommend. Also make sure to only push quality products. Do adequate research first. That way you build a loyal following you can monetize well into the future.

A way to quickly find content and product ideas for your list, is to just go and opt into every list you can find for the niche (start a new email for each niche - don't use your personal email!) You'll get a ton of emails to model yours after. Take the best tips, best product recommendations, and best copy from everything you receive over a few weeks, and rewrite that into your own series. Continue monitoring that inbox regularly for up-to-date news and information and new products that arrive on the market. It's one of the most efficient ways I know of to come up with great content. Just be careful about outright copying. Rewrite everything to let your personality show through.

Lastly - consider setting up some type of recurring income opportunity. Doing so can greatly increase the LTV of every person on your list. And when you know you have high LTV, you could then afford to spend more (e.g. bid higher) on acquiring each person into your funnel (e.g. through your FB ads). This post may help get some creative juices flowing:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ng-income-core

Feel free to continue this discussion!



Amy

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Depending on the niche, you might consider doing a newsletter-as-a-service. I've looked into the concept quite a bit while trying to improve WHAT THE AFF, so if you give some input on the niche, I can tell you a few things that you could do for your list.

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Thanks man. It's not going too bad but I'm sure there's a ton of room for improvement.

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Thanks Vortex.

I follow you closely on STM, thanks for adding some value to my thread.

Apologies about that, i should have been more specific. So in this particular situation in my intial post I mentioned 4 different niches. I should have also mentioned that they are 4 different lists entirely and have been acquired for each store separately via FB ads.

Since my lists are niched down would you say my open rates and CTR have room for improvement?

Some amazing idea's coming from what you said here. I think my problem might be I'm not seeing what others are doing.

Based on what you said my plan now is to:

1. Open research email address for each niche I'm working in. Get email funnel ideas.
2. Join at-least one forum I am working in and see what type of products they are using.
3. Start testing automated funnels based on what I find in step 1& 2.

What I generally do is send manual bulk emails once a week. After a few months I select the best ones and add them to my automated email funnel for that particular list. I generally don't have any selling emails in my automated funnels at all. I might be under selling so to combat that I'm going to drop in a promotional email after around every two value emails.

I actually started experimenting with subscription based offers in this thread here thanks to your book. It's early stages but I really want to start taking this more seriously.

Thanks again Amy. Your feedback was extremely valuable. Will be posting updates on what I mentioned above. Looking forward to reading your feedback.

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First off. I love the newsletter! I am subscribed and I read your newsletter daily.

So when you say newsletter as a service do you mean advertising for 3rd party companies, or charging people to receive your newsletter?

The main niches I am currently in are as follows:

1. Pain Relief
2. Weight Loss
3. Hair Products for women
4. Finance

Looking forward to your response.

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Cheers, that's awesome to hear! Means we're doing something right! Haha.

I mean having the newsletter as the main service people subscribe to your email list for. And you have to come up with content and a schedule that would make them do that.

So for example, no.3 on the list is easiest to talk about.

Curated content that has to do with hair care and styling, add your commentary and opinion on it, create a bit of entertainment and deliver it weekly, or maybe twice a week. An important point here is to have it scheduled, not random so have an exact day and time when the email goes out. That way, your biggest readers and fans, those who will help build this community, will be waiting for your email.

Here's a good newsletter that targets female milennials, that you can learn from a bit: https://www.theskimm.com/

And you can also reuse this content for blogging, perhaps videos, really depends what resources and skills you have at your disposal but you curate the content once and then spread it more.

For monetizing, you are in a great spot. You can always recommend the products you sell.

"Avoid hair loss with these 5 tricks". And they, look , we actually have that one product at a discount just for you!
"Check out this awesome colourful hair wax. Feel the rainbow... hair." And here's your product if you wanna buy it directly from us!

If you provide good content, you will at least double your open rate (35%+ should be super easy to get), you will probably get close to doubling click rate on some of the niches and you will sell without sounding like you are selling.

It's more work, no question. But if you are already serious about email, might be worth it for you. In other words, you position yourself as an authority on the topic, and what you recommend is super likely to convert with your readers.

You can also play with the frequency - I suggest avoiding long, unpredictable monthly newsletters. That's not often enough. Weekly is probably a sweetspot but if I were you, I'd consider doing daily for like a month, to hit it hard and see how the numbers look like. Then decide if you have to switch to weekly, or 2x a week, or whatever. Maybe the concept just doesn't work but you also find out in under a month.

One more thing... I recommend to NOT go broad and create one newsletter for all 4 topic, or mixing them in any way. Even if there's an overlap, you will get less super-happy readers when you do that.

Given your niches, you also can create a good amount of content in advance and you don't have to rely on news like we do for WHAT THE AFF, or like The Skimm does, and a good amount others.

Let me know what you think and if you have other questions, will be around to answer

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Ah! OK I guess that should have been apparent. Apologies! I was also wondering HOW the opt-ins were set up, for example what the lead magnets were that attracted the signups.

One reminder here regarding niche selection: Some of these are not really marketable niches - e.g. people that drink green tea aren't necessarily health freaks, and even if they were, "health" would be too broad to really be a niche.

Same goes for hair products - unless it was a product for hair loss.

Weight loss and pain relief are lucrative niches with lots of pain points (excuse the pun!), but IMO these are still too broad (unless your particular lists are about a certain type of weight loss or a particular weight loss method, or chronic pain with a common cause). Still, I feel that if you'd focus on these 2, you can potentially get better returns than with the other lists. (Please take this with a grain of salt though, because like I've mentioned, I don't know exactly HOW your lists were built, and whether the lists were more niche/targeted than I'm thinking they are.)

There's a really good post by John Alanis that you may want to check out, that goes into what a "marketable list" is, and more:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...st-NOT-a-list)

John is a true master of email marketing. You may also benefit from what he said in the recent "What's Working in Affiliate Marketing in 2018" report:



Sounds like a plan!

It would be difficult to say whether your OR/CTR are "good enough" because every niche and every list is different. But let's say they don't look too shabby at all, and there's always room for improvement.

Do you know what your average per-person value is over the past 60 days? That would be a good approximation of average LTV per person on your list. THIS would be the more important metric to focus on IMO.


Great to hear!

Promoting subscription-based offers that have affiliate programs and making affiliate commissions is one way. Offering a value-packed newsletter would be another way - the "Ecom Evolved" book summary covers a few more.

Here are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head that can be made into RICs:

-Collect a whole bunch of PLR/MRR ebooks/reports on the topic, whip up a simple sales letter showing examples of these ebooks and asking your list to opt-into a subscription where they'll be receiving one ebook per month for the next 6/12/24 months. Can try charging one annual payment of $xx, or a small monthly payment of <$5 that nobody will ever notice on their credit card bill so would be unlikely to cancel.

There are about a million and a half of these types of ebooks for both the weight loss and pain relief niches. And they're cheap too.

https://www.google.ca/search?ei=Zpo3....0.39ELVzW70QA

https://www.google.ca/search?ei=p5o3....0.s2YoPcOhEjg

-Start a forum (there are a ton of free forum scripts around) and/or an FB group where your list can congregate and share experiences and get some emotional support from one another. You'll need to contribute more content in the beginning though before you have enough participation. This can probably be thrown in as a bonus to your PLR/MRR subscription to sweeten the pot.

-Start your own niche association. All you'd need is to either design your own logo or buy a fiverr gig. For example, "The Future Slims Association". Sorry for such a horrid name - I'm sure you can do 100 times better. You can brand the forum or FB group with this name, and the subscription can include the "annual membership fee" for inclusion to this association. You can think of ways to introduce some "members-only benefits" - for example that coupon you gave out could be presented as such.

-Start a value-packed newsletter. This can be as simple as an update on new weight loss methods, related medical breakthroughs, and the like. All you need to do is sign up to an RSS reader service, compile a list of relevant RSS feeds on the niche topic, then every week just browse all the content from the previous week to look for interesting stuff to put into your newsletter. And if you've opted into some niche mailing lists before, browsing those may give you some content as well.


In the beginning all this effort may seem like overkill, but you need to figure out a way to get enough value from your list first, and only then will you know how much money you can afford to spend on acquiring new members into your lists. And RICs is one of the best ways to increase LTV.

Lastly - a couple of thoughts on tips/products that can potentially help your lists.

Weight loss:

-Beliefs and expectations are everything. On top of exercising and supplements, changing one's way of thinking/attitude can have very positive effects. This for example can be helpful:

https://www.amazon.com/Think-Get-Sli...ks+weight+loss

-I'm definitely not a fan of MLMs, but I've been taking a product called Thrive (please ignore the hyperlink - it's automatically generated by the forum and links to the Thrive Tracker) and it has helped me maintain weight loss as well as provide me with more energy so I'm more motivated to go to the gym and take daily walks. They've also just come out with a new product they claim can help people lose weight even more effectively than the original products. I haven't tried it yet though. (And if MLM is your thing, you can potentially use your list to build yourself a nice downline too.)

Pain Relief:

-There are a ton of different causes for pain, but if some of the people on your list are suffering from some of the following conditions, then I have a great book to recommend:

· Autoimmune disease
· Candida
· Fibromyalgia
· Leaky gut syndrome
· Lupus
· Migraines
· Multiple sclerosis
· Rheumatoid arthritis

The book is "Medical Medium" by Anthony William:

https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Mediu...nthony+william


That's all I can think of for now. Have fun!



Amy

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Awesome, following.

Due to endless policy updates, the only safe area in the forthcoming future sadly is email.

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Pleasure man, I really think you guys are on to something. Sorry for the late reply btw. There's so much great info on here from you and Vortex, been trying to consume it all and figure out how to implement it.


Very interesting. The hair products email list I have built is Mane 'n Tail. I'm wondering if I should create a mini business with the email addresses. For example provide some crazy value upfront on a separate email address (hairtips@manentail.co.za) then send my offer. "Keep receiving these emails for X per month or a once off fee." My only question with this is how much value would you need to provide in your experience.

Maybe I should find a Ebook on Hair Tips, then each week email out a new chapter. After 3 or so weeks end the chapter for the week with a cliffhanger and the offer to keep receiving the emails. Thoughts?


This has been my approach so far. I have a feeling I can do it much better though. Here's my Mane 'n Tail blog [...] https://www.manentail.co.za/blogs/hair-care-tips. You'll notice that all my blogs have an offer that sends readers to a product collection page. Will be spying on competition to get a insight into how the are structuring this. I think there is room for improvement.

Thanks for this tip. In the recent weeks I thought about experimenting with this. It's nice to hear I shouldn't bother at all.

You covered everything nicely. Thanks again! Just ONE more question. Is there a rule of thumb on what % your email list should be contributing to a eCommerce stores monthly revenue? Assuming it's your standard online store. What would be considered healthy? For example: 30% organic sales, 20% front end FB sales, 30% repeat orders and 20% email.

Would be nice to have some sort of gauge.

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Some interesting insights in this topic!

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Amy! Some more insane value here. Thanks again. Ok so I can quickly explain the opt -in. MAJORITY of my emails would be generated like this...

1. FB "Discovery" style ad copy.
2. Advertorial with coupon code intro at end for the product mentioned in the advertorial
3. Squeeze page. Email in exchange of a coupon code.

Lol, nice one.

Some good points here, makes sense. So I need to potentially niche down further and group subscribers in different buckets. That way I can target my message more effectively. I think you're right in terms of focusing on weight loss and pain relief. Especially the pain relief. It's always been my biggest money maker.

Thanks for sharing that post, will dive into it.

So i've been using FB to measure my LTV and Shopify. My only issue with this is it's difficult to figure out exactly what is helping with LTV and what is just a waste of space. For example, customers will get emails weekly until they unsubscribe, customers also get re-targeting ads for up to 180 days, so if there is an increase in LTV it's difficult for me to pin point what caused it. And it could even be a combination of both working together. Should I still assume my LTV is still a product of my list?

That being said, implementing obvious LTV boosters such as subscription based models as you suggested can only help.

Tons of value here. Thanks again. A recurring theme that I've seen on these threads is recurring income. I can see how a FB group might work for Pain Relief. My subscribers are all grouped in different buckets of different pain conditions. For example, nerve pain, fibromyalgia, plantar fasciitis etc etc. Could be worth creating a support group for each pain condition.

This "fibro support group" could even be added as a benefit when they subscribe for the coupon code to increase perceived value on my squeeze page. Hmm, really like this idea. Thanks for that Amy. I might latch onto this one.

Majority of my pain relief audience is 45+, and I don't know about your Grandma, but mine is on FB 24/7 just like all her other friends.

With reference to weight loss. Interesting angle. Instead of trying to sell physical products I could focus on inexpensive digital products designed to change their attitude first, then at a later date I could try sell physical products after gaining their trust.

With regards to Pain Relief, that book looks pretty interesting. We have done a ton of work in the early stages testing out different pain condition. We have narrowed it down to about 5 or 6.

You certainly have thought of A LOT! lol. Sorry for the late reply, I've probably read through your post about 5 times already trying to consume it all. There's so much value here. I'm really glad I joined STM again.

Looking forward to reading more of your posts!

Franky

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An interesting way of list generation. But what are your daily Facebook budgets? Narrow targeting can be pretty costly. Also, what do you use to send your emails? Some ESP or some kind of your own software?

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That sounds pretty targeted - if people are at a stage where they would sign up for a coupon code for a product then they're ready to buy. Pretty ingenious!


There are 2 things here: 1)What the LTV is; 2)which marketing task/effort is contributing what value (and whether it's worth continuing).

In other words, the LTV of your list is not just a result of your emails alone, or that of the retargeting ads alone - it's a result of all your marketing efforts combined.

I read in the "Ecom Evolved" book that the average revenue you made from your subscribers over 60 days should be a good approximation of average LTV. So if you do implement new "boosters" to increase that value, you may want to either run split-tests where each customer is only exposed to one booster, or introduce them one at a time and make sure each of them has positive impact on your LTV before introducing the next.

For retargeting ads - retargeting usually returns quite-high ROI, but if you're wondering whether it's giving you positive returns or not, you could do a split-test: Don't run retargeting ads for the next 100 opt-ins, and then track their average LTV using the 60-day approximation, and you should see whether the retargeting ads are worth what you're spending on them.

One thing though: I haven't looked into the statistics to use for this kind of split-testing - whether the 100 opt-ins would be large enough of a sample size or what the confidence level would be, I have no idea. You can probably do the research to find out.

As for any changes you make to the emails you send to your lists, those have separate metrics. If you're experimenting with new email messages (promoting new products or providing new info etc.), stuff like opening rate, link click rate, and unsubscribe rate will all give you insight into how well each email is received. So you may not need to do the same type of split-testing and wait months to evaluate LTV. The obvious first-step would be to remove/replace/rewrite emails that cause the highest unsubscribe rates. Being an expert on mailing lists yourself, you probably know all this already.


Ooh!

We've mentioned niching down - that sounds like the perfect place to start!

That will allow you to target more precisely on FB (and anywhere else for that matter), resulting in lower costs. And being able to tailor your opt-in page and subsequent email messages and products etc. to people that have specific conditions will result in higher revenues.


Thanks for all the encouragement! Likewise, it's great having you as part of the community as well.




Amy

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Hey bud. I use MailChimp. I like to keep it simple.

As for FB targeting, I keep it wide open, I don't narrow it down at all. The funnel does the narrowing down for me, for example; anyone who opts in for the coupon code is someone who is interested in my product.

Budget all depends on ROADS. As long as I'm in the profit I keep scaling. I tend to define what return on ad spend allows me to break even and usually that is my scale limit.

For some products that limit is 2X ad spend, others it's 4X ad spend. All depends on my profit margin.

If you have other questions let me know, will be happy to answer them.

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Thank you, thank you. I wish I could take the credit but I came across the funnel else where. I love the simplicity of it, can knock one up from scratch literally in a few hours.

The landing page copy I try to stick to is the UPSYD formula, have you heard of it? https://www.digitalmarketer.com/gene...ore-customers/. I'm a huge DM fan.



Ok interesting. So I might be overthinking LTV a little. As a base line I'll dive into FB analytics and make a point of what kind of LTV i'm getting over 60 days then use that as my baseline. Thanks for clearing that up!


Haha I'm no expert! I feel like I'm drowning in information overload here, still got tons to learn from people like yourself.

I'll be honest I've been pretty bad in ignoring unsubscribe rate metrics. I usually focus on OR and CTR, but I should probably focus on unsubscribe rates too. That being said, I have noticed a trade off between salesy emails and unsubscribe rates. The less my email tries to sell something the less unsubscribes I get, but the less revenue it produces. To help, I do try to limit Salesy emails to around three to four times per month depending on the niche so that I don't burn out the list.

Another option might be is to only sell to segmented subscribers who for example; "opened previous email about 5 tips for bla bla"

Would love to hear a bit more about how you personally utilize your email list Amy? Don't hold back on any of the details

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Just an update on my POA.

I'm starting a "Hair Tip Tuesday" Email Series that will run indefinitely once a user subscribes, every Tuesday at exactly 08:30am. Here is my first one [...] https://mailchi.mp/e746b5b2abf3/8-top-secret-tips-for-thicker-hair-1544129?e=[UNIQID]

One question, should I bother including .gifs?

My goal for this email series is not to overwhelm the reader with information, but rather provide a single golden nugget once per week. Trying to keep this as simple as possible.

To find these nuggets I find trending "Hair Tip" videos on YouTube.

Monetisation approach? I will be advertising Mane 'n Tail promotions in the footer of these emails.

Let me know what you all think?!

Franky

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Thanks for introducing me to UPSYD! I've bookmarked it - it looks like something I could apply right now.

As for the dilemma of salesy vs. revenue - you can have both. Try to provide value in some of your emails to train people to look forward to them, AND start to stress the importance of whatever solution to their problem you're planning to push later on, and allude to the fact that you have the solution.

Then, when you do start pushing products, again stress how important the solution is, then introduce the product as the best solution.

You can promote that product using a number of different angles. For example you can tell a story on how you did the research and decided it is the most-recommended and you couldn't find many negative reviews on it. And even how you've used other products and failed, then finally found the winning product and it changed your life. There are a number of approaches, but the key is to pose the product as a solution to their problem.

Identify pain points and link them up with product features/benefits. The more the better!

I actually don't have very extensive experience with email marketing. When I was doing SEO I had multiple email lists in different niches. On hindsight, I should have focused on growing my lists, because some of them were doing quite well in terms of LTV. But I was always bouncing from one thing to another, and would get bored after setting up the initial lead magnet and opt in and autoresponder messages. If I had done more split testing to optimize the funnels, and bought paid traffic to grow those lists, they would have turned into some real valuble assets. Hindsight's 20/20. Live and learn. I'm just getting back into the email marketing thing again with ecom - exciting stuff!

So yeah - can't say I'm an expert, although yes I do have some exerpience. I'm learning from our exchange as well - so thank you!

I've never tried including gifs in emails - but you are encouraged to split test this! Would love to know how much of a difference it can make.

Your newsletter sounds like a great idea! And the little tips are nice. Just don't be expecting a lot of sales from these - because they don't address pain points for which the recommended product is a solution. In other words, the tip is not directly related to the product. But these emails will build goodwill and train people to open your emails.



Amy



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