I got a reply to my last email. I’ll quote it exactly because it’s important. “Every wiz-bang method I’ve seen in the last 6 months only works if you already have a list of 20,000 people who are engaged. That’s not me.” It’s not just the last 6 months. It’s for the last year or so. Pretty much everything you’ve seen does assume an engaged list. It’s the gold standard in case studies. Makes a video and claims their sequence made $40k. It did, but buried somewhere is the fact that they sent it to their buyer list of 22,000 people. If I had a list like that it’d work for me too. With a list like that they buy without reading the sales page. My list doesn’t look like that, but the percentages track. Four thousand people. Fewer than a hundred opens. It looks like I don’t have an email problem, I have a not-enough-of-the-right-people problem, and until that’s fixed nothing else is worth starting. Ever felt like that? That’s the most expensive thought you’re currently having. Is this what you think comes next: get a fresh list. Run a re-engagement campaign, scrub the dead weight, spend the next four months adding sixteen thousand subscribers. Then start. Unfortunately, you’ll get the same result at four times the cost. Bigger cost. Same silence. The problem your list has in common isn’t that they’re burnt out. It’s simply that you’ve never once asked a question they could answer in three seconds. You keep sending them things to read. They’re busy reading, that’s why the room’s quiet. I proved that to myself yesterday, and I mean yesterday. My list is roughly 4,000 people who hadn’t replied to anything in a year. There were no links in it, I just asked the readers to reply with the word ‘consistent’. Two people did. Two. I know that number looks pathetic. It’s not – two is all it takes to break the argument. A list can’t be dead and reply. Those are two names, from people who’d been mute for twelve months, and I got them by changing what I asked for rather than who I asked. It’s the same people who didn’t reply for a year. All I did was write an email and send it. You don’t need twenty thousand engaged subscribers to start. It’s what some people will show you so you’ll assume it was the cause. But we’ve all been told that. Placement and asks beat list size. Your list isn’t tuned out, it’s luke-warm. You can fix that this week. No re-engagement campaign, or purging. If you’ve already run the test yourself, you’ve got your own number sitting in your inbox from a couple of days ago, and if it’s more than nought, the objection is answered. Doors open 15 September. If you already know you’re in, reply with the word “consistent” and I’ll make sure you see it before the list does. Regards, |
