Given our number of students (1200+ in 30x500 alone), their number and range of product successes, and our overall business size, people often think @amyhoy and I must have a HUGE email list for Stacking the Bricks.
You need to have a huge list to generate this much success, right!?
Nope. I wanted to share a peek behind the curtain and help people better understand email lists, and more importantly list size.
While migrating to ConvertKit over the last few months, we decided to do some list hygiene. The good news is that since leaving Drip Our open rates ARE back up since moving.
But the CK team recommended we consider cleaning out some of our cold subscribers to improve overall deliverability (not just raw % numbers).
So, how big is our list?
Our list is just shy of 14,000 subscribers. Respectable for sure (and maybe eye-popping for someone just getting started) but remember that everybody starts somewhere, and we definitely started wayyyyy below 1000.
What's interesting (at least to me) is that many people – including our peers! – assume we have at least double this size. Also notable, we have several 30x500 alums with lists MUCH bigger than ours. They also make more $$.
Not all subscribers are still tuned in.
Here's where things get interesting, though.
According to ConvertKit data, over 6000 of our subscribers haven't opened or clicked in the last 2 months. Given that we send email every week, that's...a lot.
42.8% cold.
The thing to remember here is that this is not necessarily a BAD thing. It was surprising to me, and not a great thing for sure, but it's not exactly alarming.
Subs go cold for lots of reasons.
Could be us (email subjects aren't good, for instance).
Could be them (busy, no longer interested).
So what do you do with cold subscribers?
This week we are running a re-engagement sequence for the first time ever.
Those 6000+ cold subscribers will receive up to 4 emails over the course of the next week.
Each of these emails offers value, a way to reconnect, and a way to indicate "I'm still interested!"
This concept isn't novel or anything, but a lot of the examples out there are pushy or needy or passive aggressive.
"We miss you!"
"Hey did you die?"
"Did I do something wrong?"
"Don't you want VALUE?"
"Don't you want to SUCCEED!?!"
No no no. None of that.
Everything in our sequence is friendly and direct.
You can read the exact emails below, but I've also created a shared visual automation for ConvertKit! Go here to see it and add it to your account, and then modify it for your own purposes.
This first email asks the direct question and gives a good reason for sticking around.
Clicking any of the links explicitly adds the same tag that we'll use to indicate someone wants to remain on the list.
People have all kinds of weird email habits so the second email comes 2 days later and offers an easy way for them to update their email address.
While this one doesn't register the specific tag (this is a ConvertKit limitation) they'll be automatically removed from the "cold subscriber" segment by clicking that link and taking action.
In email #3 I wanted to do something bold: give people permission to ask us for direct advice.
Now we're not offering 1-1 video calls or anything....but we are inviting people to ask a specific question.
Some might be anxious about opening the floodgates to questions, but here's why I'm not worried:
A: this is the 3rd email, which people will only get if they didn't act on either of the first two.
B: this is a list of COLD subscribers. I'm not expecting most of them to open this email at all.
But for the ones who get the email, and open it, we can offer a VERY valuable opportunity to ask us a question directly.
(You'll see why this is magical later.)
The last one cuts right to the chase. Click the link.
I heard from a few people that they'd be worried about a sequence like that due to people who might miss the sequence entirely due to one of their weird email habits/coping mechanisms, or simply being on vacation.
That's why I added this line to the very last email we send:
Change your mind (or miss the deadline)? You can always re-subscribe from our homepage: https://stackingthebricks.com
If they realize we stopped sending to them, they're likely to search their inbox for us, or look in the folder where they hide our goodies. When they do, the last email will make it pretty clear what happened and how to get back on the list.
So that's the sequence. Nothing too fancy, nothing whiny, nothing passive aggressive.
And so far, it seems to be working! Here are the stats from the first email after the first ~48 hours:
The final stage: preparing mentally to DELETE YOUR SUBSCRIBERS.
At the end of this sequence, if a subscriber has not clicked or opened, we will delete them. Seems scary, right? All of those hard-earned email addresses....
@amyhoy and I have talked about how this feels so weird for us, too. It almost feels wrong. But we've also talked about how that's not rational at all.
These subscribers aren't reading anyway. Why would we keep sending?
Wanna talk ACTUAL numbers? I thought you might.
So. Back to list size, cuz that's why I started this post.
I'm expecting a fairly small % of our cold list to re-engage (but I could be wrong!)
We're already at 6.6%. That's close to 500 people.
That means at the end of the series (ignoring new subscribers and normal churn) we will have around 8500 actual subscribers.
Actual Subscribers is a much better statistic to keep track of, since these are the people who actually reads what we send.
Now, let's put that number into some perspective:
- JFS has sold around 4500 copies. That's over half the list.
- Our holiday bundle sells 400-500 units every year. That's 5% list to sale conversion.
- 30x500 has had over 1200 students enrolled between our bootcamp and our self guided academy.
That means 30x500 currently has a 14.1% list to sale conversion rate on a VERY premium product. 14.1% of our list has already bought our most valuable (and most expensive) product.
WHAT SORCERY IS THIS!?
You're probably used to seeing low single digit percent conversion rates, or even partial %. These are considered "normal" in most online marketing circles.
But "normal" is relative.
Our subscriber count is low-ish, but our subscriber quality is VERY high.
The source?
We grow our list the with ebombs - aka fix-delivering educational content (and not just blog posts!).
We focus relentlessly on understanding our audience and their problems. We offer fixes. We communicate in their language.
BTW: those questions we're letting people ask us in email #3? Those are all ebomb fodder. Anything that can be answered over email (or with a video, or with a re-usable template/kit/checklist/etc) can be an ebomb.
Helping one person turns into helping many. Sneaky? Nah. Scalable? Absolutely.
So do you need a big list to be a success? Hell no.
What you DO need are people who trust you.
People who you have actually helped, and believe you can help them again and again.
You need to understand them, deeply and clearly. Maybe better than they understand themselves.
Let's run some more numbers. Cuz you like numbers.
Maybe you don't have a list at all, or just your first few dozen subscribers. And you're sitting there thinking "whatever Alex this doesn't apply to me, my list is NOWHERE near the size of yours and Amy's."
And I'll tell you "yes, you're right, but it doesn't have to be."
With similar list-to-sale conversion rates (which our students routinely achieve), a 500 subscriber list built this way can easily generate 50-70 sales.
This means a mid-tier product ($140-$200) could break the $10k revenue mark with just 500 subs.
Grow your list a little bigger, around 1000 subscribers? A tiny product ($50-$70) can make $10k with the same math.
Small lists can make real sales.
And that's just from one product!
Customers who love one product are likely to buy the next thing (if you understand their pains and that next thing is based on them).
Once you start to factor in list growth and multiple products and you can start to see with simple math how tiny empires can be built from even tinier lists.
And this is without recurring revenue.
Big lists are nice, but most of them are bullshit.
So next time you see someone touting a giant email list, or you think you need a huge list to start selling products, STOP.
With the former, big lists are top line numbers that don't really mean much if you don't know their conversion rates.
With the latter, start selling now.
When you can make $1000 in sales this way, you can make $10k.
When you can make $10k this way, you can make $100k.
1.5x-2x-5x or more year over year growth ACTUALLY can happen when you are consistent and use an effective process.
The key isn't precisely what you sell, or even the exact model you sell with.
The key is who you sell to, and how well you understand them.
What if the person your emailing is busy this week? Maybe they have a lot of work to do or are on vacation. Have you considered creating a "very cold" list that you could test engagement with at a later time?
Remember, these are subs who haven’t been active in a few months, not the whole list. There’s also a full week after the sequence runs for folks to click.
Will some get missed in the sweeep? Possibly!
But FTA:
That covers the exception well enough for me :)
As always, I'm happy to answer questions about anything in this article.
Currently on India time so my replies might take a little while, but I'll get to 'em! :)
@alexhillman are you able to share what percentage of recipients hit reply to your email #3 and asked a question?
Yup! When the whole sequence is done I'll share the final stats.
@alexhillman great post! When are you two opening up your 30x500 program again? I'm currently on your list but haven't noticed mention of it...
Their processes seem to have some issues. I've asked to be notified at least twice, but multiple enrollment windows have passed and I never got the price or the link.
UPDATE: I found your email and see what happened.
It looks like you joined our waiting list on the 15th, but the January enrollment sequence had already begun 4 days prior.
To avoid missed information during the pre-enrollment series, we intentionally do not drop new subscribers into the series after it has begun. They are kept in the waiting list until the next enrollment period.
It's worth noting that this email series isn't just sales, but a fair bit of pre-enrollment education that is designed to help people understand what they're investing in. 30x500 isn't right for everyone so this series helps people make a more informed decision.
This step also reduces mismatched expectations (something we hear about a LOT with students who have enrolled in other courses and been frustrated or disappointed). This also lowers our refund rate and most importantly since implementing has drastically improved our student success rate as well, which is the #1 thing we optimize for.
Our smaller products are all available off the shelf becaide they are fairly easy to support. Operationally, we do this 30x500 enrollment in batches to make it much easier for us to provide new student support when it's most critical. Remember that 30x500 isn't either of our only businesses (we both have other thriving businesses to support and grow), so we have to be smart about our time!
I understand that this can be frustrating of the info isn't transparent enough, I'm taking that into account to improve our onboarding emails to set cleared expectations.
And according to our system, everything is set up correctly for you to get info about early enrollment in April!
That was the most recent time! I tried a few years ago when I saw patio11's rave praises (long before starting Alchemist Camp).
I can see the value in that. Is it available in a long-form page anywhere?
One thing that brought me back to try again was Amy's Techzing interview, which was great for getting an idea of the mindset. It was from several years ago, though, so particulars of the course may have changed a fair amount.
Can't speak to a few years ago, we've switched email platforms too many times since 2014-15 :(
I don't think we have something specific on the page about the pre-enrollment education being a part of what folks sign up for when they join the waiting list. That's a good catch, I will def add something more specific there as well as in the initial welcome email. :)
A LOT has changed in the course since the techzing interview - mindset is still a huge part of it, but the current version builds the mindset lessons into the actual practice rather than as a conceptual thing that's separate from the core 30x500 lessons. This change has made a HUGE difference for people actually shifting mindset while putting the lessons into practice.
Credit where credit is due to Kathy Sierra for inspiring those changes!
What's your email address? I'll check to see why that happened. You can send it to me directly [email protected]
Thanks!
We'll be opening again in April - drop me an email and I can double check to make sure you're on the list to hear about early enrollment, too :)
An issue with this kind of setup is the assumption that you know whether or not a given person has opened your email. Sure, in aggregate, open rates can give you an idea how interesting your subjects are or how valuable previous emails were.
But you have no way to know a specific person hasn't opened your email. You can add whatever kind of tracking pixels or invasive elements you want, some email clients won't load them (including Gmail depending on your settings).
Another thing is there are some people who do want to buy your course but don't want to use their inbox for reading pre-written blog posts, "drip" campaigns, etc. I was in this camp myself last year and never found out how to sign up or pay.
Now that I'm back at my computer: your comment includes a mix of facts and your own assumptions that I wanted to analyze a bit and share some of the truth behind our decisions.
I promise this isn't personal in any way - I see thoughts and assumptions like this often in this community and I really think they hold a lot of people back! My genuine hope is that I can crack things open and help others reading along, too.
Fact: there's no way to know FOR SURE that someone has opened an email, and that's a good things
Assumption: I'm interested in who is opening our emails.
I'm not!
Open rates are, as you accurately suggest, a proxy metric at best and a vanity metric at worst. Click rates are definitely better, and the emails we send have a mix of "all content is in the email" and "email preview of content on our site."
But neither are something I look at on a daily basis, or something I calculate as an overall metric for any kind of success. The top metrics for us are, in order:
You'll notice that only one of these three are connected to emails at all (% of a list segment who buys).
In the context of this particular email-specific article, what I'm looking at is overall changes over time (+/-) and noticing large swings in either direction. Last year we saw a MAJOR downswing in open and click rates (like, half what we normally see). Our other metrics were still up, so it wasn't critically alarming, but it was enough to make us thing that something was wrong.
So that's the only reason I'm looking at open/click rates at all: moving to ConvertKit has brought our baseline email metrics back up closer to what we expect, and given us a number of other improvements along the way.
Fact: There are people who would prefer to buy a product off the shelf instead of via drip sales. There definitely are!
Opinion: those people are the majority, and/or we must be leaving money/opportunity on the table!
For the first time in...ever...we launched a single place where people can browse and purchase every product we sell except for 30x500: https://shop.stackingthebricks.com
In the past, we made it hilariously difficult for people to find these products. Not on purpose, mind you...it just was the way it was.
We still made money (because we get enough other things right!) but this was definitely a mistake. Since launching that shop, sales of that category of product have grown 4x per month. And that's without any of the fancy drip campaigns you hate ;)
But as I mentioned in my other comment the entire 30x500 enrollment/sales process is strategic...and based on 9 years of execution and nearly 2000 students across 4 (or 5?) different formats.
We've revised a LOT about 30x500 over the years. I talked about some of the internal learning design changes we've made (and why) in this recent podcast but I didn't talk as much about how enrollment has changed over the years, and along with the formats.
There was a time when 30x500 was a by-application process due to limited seating (30 people per bootcamp), and we turned down 80% of the applicants for a variety of reasons.
There was a time when the only way to enroll in 30x500 was a 2 day live bootcamp, which made participating from half of the world's worth of timezones wildly inconvenient or painful (and yet, people did it!)
There was a time when we had three different packages you could buy, and the top package included an extra 4 weeks of guided implementation.
There was a time when we quit running our highly profitable bootcamps for an entire year, hired a research assistant, and spent hundreds of hours turning the 2 hours bootcamp material into the self-guided course that we offer today.
We could sell WAY more seats if we were faster to capture student success stories and case studies, which are far more wide ranging than the ones currently on our site. But we've put more work into the material itself, and really understanding where our students struggle so we can improve the course and their results. (This year is the first time we're investing seriously in case studies to the point of hiring outside help....and I'm super excited to share the many "quiet" successes in our student community.
I share all of this because we often do things that look some-kind-of-crazy from the outside. Amy did this with her 2nd SaaS. When my coworking community was threatened with a crippling rent hike, I went with full transparency instead of closed-door negotiation.
Almost everything we do is strategic, and in service of the long term. Of course we make mistakes. We try to own the mistakes, talk about them, and improve the next time. Sometimes things are imperfect now (and email marketing is an area where we've been imperfect for a LONG time).
But as long as it works well enough to help us help our customers, we'll keep shipping and improving.
This is great - I've been meaning to set up a reengagement sequence for my own list for a while now.
Am also hovering at ~40% no-opens looking back 6 weeks.
This post has been really helpful - I was planning on doing pretty much the same steps as you describe here anyway, but the examples will get me up and running much faster. Thanks!
One question/comment I have is that you seem to have a pretty all-or-nothing approach to the list - either you want in to the weekly blast, or you don't.
I wonder if there's a middle ground/escape chute, where you allow subscribers who don't want to read a regular article every week to instead opt-in to certain types of email. Special offers, teardowns and technical articles for example.
That way, a small segment of cold subscribers who are 'default don't open' would become less regular but reliable 'default do open' subscribers.
I'll definitely try it out myself but would love to hear your thoughts too.
Glad this was well timed and helpful! Let me know how the scripts work for you :)
As for volume, we already (quietly) changed our main newsletter from weekly to every 2 weeks as a test. We’ll see how that impacts overall open and click rates but that’s gonna take at least 2 months to see any meaningful change if at all.
Further segmenting based on interests is already underway, both explicit and implicit, we just aren’t using it yet!
Given the overall performance of our list, this optimization is less to solve to cold subs problem and more to help produce relevant results faster.
It’s just a lot more work than other optimizations in the works, and much harder to test given the current tools for debugging automations and measuring results. So it’s not exactly next on my list!
I do also have a “snooze” automation prototyped but it needs to be tested. It works as you might expect: it lets someone pause for a specific period of time.