by: AskPat 289 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 289 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have a great question related to email from Andy. But before we get to that, speaking of email, I want to thank today's sponsor which is AWeber.com.
Probably the best company out there to help you get started with building your email lists and also your autoresponder series, which we'll talk about today with Andy. AWeber I've been using for over five years now. I've built a list of over 120,000 people with them and their customer service has been amazing and their interface and the ability to create these emails that you're going to send out to your audience that you collect over time, it's just really easy. I love AWeber and I recommend them if you're getting started with email marketing.
So, if you want to check out AWeber for 30 days for $1, go to AWeber.com/askpat and you'll get that deal there. Again AWeber.com/askpat. You can also watch a testimonial video of me there, talking about more of why I love AWeber.
Awesome, let's get to today's question from Andy.
Andy: Hey Pat, what's up? My name is Andy and I run a blog called ChannelEmpire.com where I teach people how to create a successful YouTube channel. Thanks to your recommendation I started using AWeber to build my email list and I built up an autoresponder of about 12 emails so far. But I've noticed that some of the emails are getting a higher open rate than others, obviously. But, I was wondering if it was a smart idea to rearrange that autoresponder series, and put the emails that are getting the highest open rate toward the front, so that when people sign up to the list the first few emails that they get are the ones that I get the highest open rate, and maybe that will entice them to keep opening emails further down the autoresponder, and increase the open rate for all my emails. I was wondering what Pat would do in that situation, so thanks for everything you do Pat. I'm looking forward to your response.
Pat: Hey, Andy. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I think this is a really smart question because, for one, it's obvious that you're looking at the open rates which is really important to do. I know a lot of people who send emails out and once they create those emails that are put in their autoresponder sequence they don't even check to see what happens. And you're right if people don't open certain emails, likely they're not going to open some of the next ones down the road. So, higher open rates are great, and it's good that you're noticing which ones do that.
The first thing I would mention is before you rearrange anything, because there's some stipulations that go along with that. Try to figure out the reasons why the emails with the higher open rate have a higher open rate. Now, let's think about this really quick. There's a lot of factors involved in regards to open rate, the biggest one probably being the subject line. The subject line is what people see when they get that email, and it either entices them to open it, maybe they're curious, or it sparks something in their head. Or it's just kind of boring and they delete it or they don't look at it, so the subject line is really important.
Look at the subject lines of the emails with the higher open rate and see if you can adapt those into your ones that have a lower open rate. There might be a pattern that your particular email subscribers seem to respond better to than others, and it's important to test. So again I would do that before rearranging, let it go for a couple weeks and see what happens from there.
Another thing that matters is when do these emails get sent out? Now, certain emails are able to, especially in AWeber, get sent out at certain times. So I don't know if you have them open at the same time everyday or every week, whatever the frequency is for your audience, but if they differ then that's going to play a role as well. So, check out the ones that have a higher open rate and see what the deal is there.
I will say that in terms of frequency of opening emails, if you're going weekly which is fairly common. Typically I have it set out so that they open those emails exactly a week later at the same time of the day that they open them. Because that is essentially a time that you know that they are going to be reading emails, because that's when they signed up to get yours. So, that's when maybe they're on a break or something from work, or that's when they have time during the day. Again, it's not always going to be the case, but just to keep it safe, I've found that within that same day and that same timeframe, that's when I'm going to send emails to those people, whenever they happen to subscribe. So, that's another thing.
Now, if you do find especially after this test, when you test these emails subject lines that there are ones that are higher open rates, it does make sense. You're right. It does make sense to have them be sooner than later in the autoresponder sequence for the very reason that you just mentioned. It's going to give them a more likelihood, or a chance that they're going to open more emails down the road. If you can really impress them with your email content and the value you have to provide, which you can only do when people open those emails and then you give them the content within those emails. Then they're going to be more likely to generate a connection with you and build that rapport by which point they would be very happy to open those emails down the road even if the subject line isn't that good.
So, that being said, you have to be careful here, because a lot of people just simply rearrange things in AWeber, then they get emails from people saying that they've gotten those emails before. AWeber has every email be a certain number, so the first email in the autoresponder sequence is email number one, the second email is email number two, three, four, five, so on and so forth. People on your list, when they get email one then they are already docked as having gotten email one and they're ready for email two, and then when they get email two they're ready for email three.
Now if you rearrange before they get to email number three, for example, and you switch the first email to the third one, they're going to get the same email that was there in week one, in week three in their next email. So, it's just all based on the email number and how many numbers each subscriber has gone through. It’s a little bit wonky, but it makes sense. Now the best way to approach this, Andy, if you are going to rearrange is to create an entirely new list and then connect to your opt-in forms on your website to that new list. Now this isn't going to . . . I mean it's going to segment your list, but you can send emails to both when you send out broadcasts and things like that.
But, the thing is it'll just make it so that all of your new subscribers will go through this sequence the way you want them to go through. And it's also going to give you an interesting set of data and you can run parallel, side by side to the other set of data and see exactly what's happening and really make the right adjustments and be able to decide what's best. And then you can either pick one or the other, it's sort of like split testing down the road as well.
Now I do know that in broadcast emails you can split test in AWeber. I'm not exactly sure if you can do it in your autoresponder sequence but I love split testing headlines when I'm sending broadcasts out to everybody. And when you send a broadcast out you can pick your old list and your new list, so to make sure that everybody's getting an email. But again it's another way to practice your headlines and get to know who your audience is, and what's working best for them. In going back and seeing what the patterns are for those higher open rate emails, that's exactly where you want to start and I would try and incorporate those types of things in your emails that have a low open rate first. Because again it's not about the email essentially, it's about the subject line and so you want to play around with that first, Andy, before going through and building a new list and then having to keep track of both of them.
Andy, I hope that answers your question. I really appreciate it and I look forward to hearing how everything goes after you potentially put these things into action. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much, and for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like to potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is go over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
And before we get to the quote of the day to finish off the week here, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber.com—mentioned several times in this episode of course. Andy picked them up, thanks to my recommendation and I know a lot of you have as well. If you haven't yet and your looking to get into building an email list, which I swear it's one of the biggest mistakes I made when first starting out was not building an email list. And I made the same mistake twice, so I highly encourage you, if you don't have yet an email list to build one as soon as you can. That's where the money is, that's where the relationships can be built. To start out, go to Aweber.com. So, the deal for 30 days for $1 you can go to AWeber.com/askpat and you'll see a testimonial video about AWeber from me there as well. Again AWeber.com/askpat.
Cheers, thanks so much, and here is a quote from Charles F. Kettering. He says, “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you least expect it. I've never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.”
Cheers, thanks so much for all your support, and if you have a quick moment since it's Friday, head on over to iTunes and leave a quick review for AskPat. It would be really helpful. I appreciate and read every single one of them. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next week. Bye.
