I Have Good News And Some Very Good News

First of all for some good news: with a little bit of magic, Konppix Live CD and my iPod I managed to retrieve some of the most important documents from my laptop. Oh happy days!

And now for some very good news.

Few days ago while sitting at my job I decided to totally rewrite my Aweber follow-up sequence. And I mean rewrite it from the scratch, basically because it sucked, people were unsubscribing and it didn’t feel like something I would like to read if I would get a message like that.

So here’s what I did and so far it works just perfectly.

I made all of those messages really, really personal. And I mean they are so personal that when you receive one you wouldn’t believe that the email was written few weeks ago and everything is automated.

First of all, “subject” line. I stopped Capitalizing All The Words In The Subject Line, Like Most Of The People Do. Basically because you do not send a letter to your friend with a subject line like that (I guess Frank Kern was the one who came up with it.) You are more likely to write it like this:

“hey, check this out, dude!!!”

So I did almost the same stuff… Except the “dude” part and exclamation marks at the end of it. Now when you see the subject line you would think that the message is from your close friend, not a marketing “dude.”

Want some examples?

Here’s a few:

1st message: “just a quick hello from me”; 2nd message: “THIS IS THE BOOK”; 3rd “shit, i almost forgot {name}” (this one is sent right after the one before as if I really forgot something) etc.

But the subject is just a little part of it.

The messages are also very personalized. Now what I do is I ask my subscribers to reply me, I ask them questions, I ask them to commit to learn what I am going to teach them and in fact write me an email with their commitment, I eliminated such words like “everyone”, “all of you” and other plurals. Instead I chose the most powerful word — “you.”

So what are the results?

People are replying to my autoresponder messages like crazy (I can even start making testimonials out of them) and answering the questions that I asked them, they are writing their commitments and how they liked my Bonus book (I told you it was good!) And guess what, even though the list is still small the unsubscribe rate before the “rewrite” was about 6-9 people a day and now, for the whole 6 days the unsubscribe rate is…

Flat 0, while the amount of subscribers stays the same — 30-40.

To summarize it, I might just say that — write your mails like you are writing to your one good friend and acctualy have him/her in mind while you do it.

And secondly, write letters so your readers would want to reply and ask/answer something to you personally (did you know that if they reply your messages GMail and Yahoo will never put it into the SPAM folder, unless they manually mark it as a spam, basically because Gmail will put your email address into their contacts book.)

Of course, I haven’t tried to sell to them anything yet, but I have a plan and I think it will work out just perfectly.  But more on it later.

PS. For all of you who are new here, a quick summary of what’s happening here. I am building my first paid membership site and record everything what I do while I do it.  If you want to catchup with what’s been happening lately, start reading these series from the first post.

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