Writers: Never Stop Tweaking Your Automated Email Welcome Sequence
Complacency will kill your results. Diligence will earn you more money
When I first started my email list all I wanted to do was have something up there, ready to ship, once I got my first subscriber. The first emails were less-than. I had a publishing plan, but when you first build a automated sequence you’ve got to write a ton of email.
In copy-speak, your first emails are the controls (the highest-performing emails to date). Albeit they’re bad controls, but for us, these emails become the benchmark.
The control is both your worst-enemy and your greatest teacher.
The idea to try and beat the success of the control with next iteration of your email. Copywriters try to beat controls, winning huge payouts if their letters beat the current sales letter in the marketplace.
We’ll do the same thing with our email list, but on a tiny scale.
As you scale your publishing business, small tweaks in your copy can have a large impact on your monthly income.
I’ll give you a couple examples:
One of my landing pages converts at 40%. This is a good number for the industry, but I’m still leaving 60% of the people who’ve clicked my link, but haven’t signed-up for my list, on the table. That’s a TON of people.
So, I continue to change little pieces of the landing page. Even a small bump (half-percent to one-percent) in sign-ups can have a significant impact in my business over time.
Another example: I added one sentence to a sales page and it took my results from a couple sales a month to multiple sales a day! Without adjusting anything else on the page.
Testing and tweaking your copy matters — a lot!
Most writers are worried about their lack of traffic, when many times that’s not the metric we need to focus on. Perhaps you’ve got plenty of traffic, but your copy is turning them away from becoming a subscriber — then, a buyer.
OK August, this is all fine, but what do I tweak?
You can endlessly adjust your emails until the day you die. This is neither a good use of your time, nor a help to your writing business. We’ll tweak some of the major keystones in your email and leave the rest for later.
Not only will we only tweak a handful of things, we also need to use scientific method in order to judge our results properly.
If you want to understand the success/failure of your email adjustments, you must change one thing at a time, then allow enough people to interact with that email to judge its effectiveness.
I would run at least 200–500 people through a changed email before I judge its success. 500 is better, but I know, for many, that’s more than your entire list.
Don’t get in the over-tweak habit, relying on the responses of only a few people. It’s not enough. You need the results in aggregate. The more people you test, the closer you are to predictable results in the future.
Here’s the order in which I tweak my emails:
- The subject line — The subject line is like 70% of the success of your email. If you can get your email opened, by a person who wants what you offer in the content, you’re inches from the finish line before your adjust anything else.
- The story in the content — Are you providing infotainment? Am I drawn into your story? Does the story have anything to do with me personally? Does the story stir the proper emotions to help encourage the reader to take action.
- The offer — Make sure you offer something your readers want. Maybe your copy is compelling. You’ve got a subject line that gets opened, but your offer is bad. This might be the time to re-think the book/course you’re presenting.
- The P.S. — Most people read the subject line, then scroll to the bottom and check for offers and links. If you got someone to open your email, there’s a very high probability they’ll read your P.S. statement too, even if they skip the rest of your email. Use this real estate wisely. Don’t squander it by filling the space with some clever phrase that doesn’t encourage your reader to take action. The P.S. should always re-ask for the same behavior in the body of the email.
Since this process takes time to uncover the results, focus your attention on the more-important emails in your sequence.
The best part of this slow-moving experiment is that you don’t have to get it right the first time. This is the real beauty of email.
A note on A-B testing —
You can also run a quick test if you want to choose your best subject line right away. If you’ve got at least 500 people on your email list, you can send a one-off email, using the A-B testing component of your email service provider.
The software will automatically send half your list one subject line, and half the other. Or, it will send a small segment of your list one of the two choices, calculate the best subject line, and send the rest of your list the winner.
Once you find your favorite subject line through a one-off email, you can use it as your current control in your automated sequence.
Don’t lose the original control
I’ve made this mistake more than I’d like to admit. I learned. I don’t make it anymore. I made a few changes to a landing page or email and the response plummeted. I mean, dropped like a hot rock in a bare hand.
I went at it like a hotshot copywriter, thinking any change I’d make would make the response go up.
The problem was I didn’t keep the exact wording of my previous control. You know, the one that was 25% better than the mess I introduced. This means I had to re-test my way back to the original results. This was a very expensive (and rookie) mistake.
Testing takes time and traffic.
If your traffic is slow right now, you can’t waste a second losing your original control to accident. Had I kept it, I could’ve made the change right away and returned to my original results.
Maybe you test against a control and your results improve for awhile, but get stale. Sometimes you can revert back to the older version to boost the results again.
I realize this sounds like a lot of work, but much of the time it involves waiting after tweaking a few words, so the work involved is minimal between tests.
Feed the asset
Your automated welcome sequence is a full-time sales staff for you, operating 24/7/365. Not only do we need to feed the sequence a new stream of customers to grow and replace any attrition, but we’ve also got to make sure we’ve got new data for testing.
As writers, selling isn’t always our favorite thing.
Our email welcome sequence (when done properly) will grow our business for us. Our email does the heavy-lifting. We don’t have to hesitate to make phone call or send a live email to our list. The automation doesn’t care. It works relentlessly to help earn us semi-passive income while we sleep.
This gives us writers more time to practice our craft, more time to do our work that matters most, and it multiplies our efforts indefinitely, so we can operate an international publishing business from our pockets.
Your email list is an insurance policy for your publishing business.
I’ve developed a free, seven-day, Tribe 1K email masterclass to help you get your first 1,000 subscribers without spending a hot nickel on ads. Tap the link below to enroll.
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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.
