What to Expect From Your Mailing List
…and Our Product Launch BIG Mistake
originally posted on the Mokumax blog here…
This is the start of week 3 of Growing Our Company By 10,000% in 2016. BlackBox wasn’t quite ready to launch so we just sent out beta invites to our mailing list last week.
Exclusive to our mailing list, we gave away the BlackBox Pro Package for 90 days for free. (We’ll be sending out another invite tomorrow so get on the list below if you want some freebies!)
Mailing lists are a lot like sending snail mail. You can only expect a certain ROI. If you get close then you should be happy. If your list performs better than that you should be ecstatic.
Our modest list started as 1,330 subscribers at the time of the mailing. Here are the stats of our latest email campaign as of today. It’s been 6 days since we sent out the beta invite.
Out of 1,330 emails we had 181 people open and potentially read the email. 2.1% of those people actually clicked on the link in the email. That sounds really bad but it’s better than our list average and it’s almost what’s expected in the industry. It would be better if we had a larger list. It’s a work in progress.
Bounced Emails And What That Means
Our list had 64 emails that bounced. The bounces were either classified as a “soft” or a “hard” bounce.
What is a hard bounce?
A hard bounce is when there is a permanent failure in delivering the email. Mailchimp lists these main reasons for a hard bounce.
- Recipient email address does not exist.
- Domain name does not exist.
- Recipient email server has completely blocked delivery.
What is a soft bounce?
A soft bounce indicates that there is a temporary problem. Again, here’s what Mailchimp has as 3 examples of a soft bounce.
- Mailbox is full (over quota).
- Recipient email server is down or offline.
- Email message is too large.
Users unsubscribed — Should I care?
We had 12 people unsubscribe from our email list. That sucks. I hate rejection but the truth is we only want users interested in growing their social media presence. It’s natural to be interested one day and then decide the information is no longer relevant to you. People change positions so it’s to be expected.
I have said this tons of times — It’s not a numbers game. We want to reach targeted users that want to get more customers from Twitter.
I would rather have 1,000 passionate users than 100,000 users that are lukewarm. We’ll grow the list organically to people that care about growing their business.
The Most Important Part Of The Email Campaign
The point of sending out an email campaign is to share information or get the user to click your CTA link. We had a total of 29 clicks so far. Seems low but pretty much all of these people signed up for BlackBox. That’s a great start! On the first try we got users. I’ll send a follow up email campaign tomorrow with another offer.
Mistake Of The Week
There was a major lesson learned this week. We were so focused on developing our product that we put off promoting it until it was 95% finished. We learned that there is never a bad time to start promoting your product… even if the product is still in development. Mitchel Harper’s Medium post How I got $248,000 in pre-orders before I even had a product explains it best.
By promoting his product while he was building it he was able to:
- Capture a targeted audience anxious to buy
- Build anticipation for the official product launch
- Get feedback during the design phase — build exactly what people were looking for
- Save time by not guessing what users want
Lesson learned!
Final Thoughts
It’s only been a few weeks and we are learning a lot. If you want to learn from our successes and mistakes and gain access to special invites please join our email list now.
If you like what you read be sure to recommend it by clicking the ❤ button below, and subscribe here to get first access to updates on our progress.
PS. I am also writing on Medium for the Marketing & Growth Hacking publication. Be sure to follow it for lessons on growing your business with no money.
PPS. What techniques do you use to effectively grow and use your email list?
Don’t give up!
Craig
