COMMENTS
let me get this straight: you "lost 1% of those people over the next 24 hours" and this email "was our highest conversion to buy ever", correct?
It seems to me you have issues with metrics and you are capturing way too many freeloaders in your email database. Plus, you are are probably not segmenting the list properly.
Might this be the case?
Ha.. was that Neville M.?
I wish you'd taken the time to format this blog post properly, instead of leaving in a slush of weird spacing and "+------------------------------------------+".
Surely you should never measure the success of a campaign on number of unsubscribes?
You could get lots of unsubscribes if you had been emailing a whole load of people with a short and very funny joke once a week then asked them if they would like to buy some great software at a very reasonable price. If you had a mailing list of 2,000 people and lost 1,000 people who were never going to buy anything from you and made 10 sales of $100 each, you would surely consider that a success?
You could also give people an option to keep receiving short meaningless non-commercial emails from you on a separate list.
After a while, you might decide that one list was more useful to you than the other.
"too many freeloaders"
Raquel, that's funny!
Noah, I know exactly how you feel and have the same issue every time I send out an email. Ditto the observations about what you learned.
Giving your very direct, honest, and respectful of customer attention value communications, it would've been fascinating to try the long letters with a modified opt-out strategy.
This is perhaps the segmenting Raquel hopes for. The idea would've been to fess up in a brief preamble like Dharmesh does introducing your post that you have a new copy writer and he writes longer copy.
You'd give your audience the chance to opt-out of the long copy list without having to leave the original list. Plus, you'd have let your customers see you were doing an experiment that you knew not everyone would like, but that you left the customer in control.
Just an idea,
BW
It would be interesting to find out if those that unsubscribed actually bought anything previously or if they were just clogging up your database.
"The number of words goes up with the price" yet I've just received a massively long email for a free / $25 a day video course... (PS - I nearly did unsubscribe because of the rambling blurb, but I know I get some interesting stuff every now again, so you have another chance :) )
I had ignored the new message format in my inbox and just skipped over them. After reading this post, I figured I would go take a look at what the fuss is about. Indeed, I hate the new format too. Unsubscribing.
[Love AppSumo though, but will just pay attention to twitter from now on]
The key is that the unsubscribers were not customers. It's possible a couple of them bought something to try to gain power over you by claiming to be customers outraged by the e-mail, but that's the extent of it. Do not listen to them.
Folk, relax, relax!
The whole point here is that you cannot make decisions based on opinions or hearsay. You need data. You need to create a controlled environment and learn what works and what does not.
Want to learn how to do it? Try this: http://www.widerfunnel.com/solutions/conversion-optimization
If you feel like you're over-communicating with your audience, you should check out big time Pulse. These guys have created a system where users choose the information they want, and the delivery vehicle they prefer. Plus, it's all trackable. Email, SMS, social media, it's all there. Cool stuff, and it could take away from some of your fear over email unsubcribes. I've linked to it on my name. Check it out.
When I start to get too much spam I get pissed and unsubscribe and stop doing business with a company.
It's also true that most people don't do this and spamming your customers can bring in big bucks.
So really you can go either way.
So where is the link to the offending email? It always frustrates me when someone posts a mea culpa, beseeches me to learn from their errant ways, and then doesn't show me their screw up.
If I give a speech to a room full of 1,000 people...
...and 10 of them walk out during the speech.
Is that enough reason to completely change course?
Maybe some of them:
-Had to use the bathroom
-Weren't interested in the subject
-Are whiny little bitches
Who knows.
I believe if you make an email informative and entertaining it will work.
Sure it may be long.
But if someone won't take 2.5 minutes to read it....they also probably won't buy your $99 product.
Peace,
Nev (the guy who wrote the email that pissed off a whole 40 people).
:-)
The underline text at the end, probably should be a link "Sign up to AppSumo.com to see what our new emails look like."
"lost 1% of those people over the next 24 hours. Imagine... If we sent 100 emails then we’d be out of business. "
No. Afther that, ((100 - 1)/100)^100 * 100 = 36.6% of your custumers will stick with you.
Nev,
I am surprised that a professional writer, such as yourself, would throw around misogynistic insults on an employer's web site.
The copywriter Nev now weighs in. This is getting interesting. Nev, just for the record, I have no opinion about your email itself. After all, as noted above I have not seen it. I think you make a good point about the
meaning behind the numbers. I am not exactly sure why an email would offend someone merely by being long. That's why I wanted to see it, to see if it was indeed offensive. I can see why a long email might prompt someone to opt out but that is another matter. Any email sent will result in opt outs. The example here is (if I understand the numbers correctly) that 0.5% more than "normal" opted out. If you spin it another way, double the normal number opted out. Which is a fairer assessment? Likely the former. I love a provocative discussion but let's get the truth out there.
One other minor point: 1% of 40,000 is 400, not 40. Ok, maybe that isn't minor. ;-)
What's funny about Noah is he is a huge spammer, and he's now extolling as if he's only just realized people hate him for it.
I call B.S. on this article. I think the metrics are BS and the tweets are BS. Unsubscribing.
Is it really accurate to say that something that costs $0 is good signalling as the best deal ever?
Yes. I would wholeheartedly expect that giving away something for free will outperform all your sumo deals that cost even a dollar. Think about the penny barrier on the web...
The high unsubscribes and highest conversion ever can't really be both attributed to the long text.
The conversions could have been due to a whole slew of factors, probably the deal?
A better gauge would have been the obvious A/B test (with the same deal). Would be interested to see how that works.
And really.. 1% isn't that bad an unsubscribe rate... People love AppSumo..
If we are sending back responses to emails what was requested then we may lose customers.
If we are not sending back responses to emails what was requested then we may lose customers.
Interesting that this was your most successful email ever, despite losing many subscribers. I have a daily email with currently about 6,000 subscribers on my list and I have noticed a similar phenomenon:
I have Facebook and Twitter share buttons in my daily emails, and the ones that are shared the most are also the ones that trigger the most unsubscribes. Of course those shares generate more new subscribes so I'm still not sure what to make of this.
Maybe it's better to be both loved and hated than ignored?
Here's the message in question, gathered from HackerNews: http://www.errant.me.uk/code/snip/10
I don't know about "offensive", but calling your audience a bunch of stalkers isn't necessarily the ideal way to make friends with everyone. I suppose it does select for a certain type of audience, which probably happens to include a bunch of testosterone-fueled, amoral, grammatically-challenged startup folks.
You know, this is great work. If you're not getting anyone unsubscribing, you're probably not writing anything that moves people. To maximize the result you need to be seeing higher unsubscribe rates and the quality of your list will get better and better.
If no one is unsubscribing it's probably because people don't even bother to open your emails ... dull, boring and ineffective!
Keep your friend as your copywriter ;)
This whole post was confusing... doesn't show the actual email, and this guy Noah Kagan needs some writing lessons. In the end it sounds like it was posted here to get exposure for his website. But I still don't know what it does. Waste of bandwidth.
I'm the CEO of GoSquared - the company that this wonderfully controversial AppSumo email was promoting.
Just to clarify, we never saw the email before it was sent out, but I remember at the time that Noah and my whole team thought it was an amusing and light-hearted take on our service while promoting just how unmissable the deal was ($50 for $300 of service? That is a crazy bargain!)
Perhaps the email was longer than it needed to be, but it evidently helped get the idea of our service across to an overwhelming majority of the audience. All in all, if we did another AppSumo deal I wouldn't have any complaints if Nev wrote the email again :D
Fascinating discussion.
OMG NEVILLE ENTERS THE CONVERSATION AGAIN
::room suddenly quites to hear what he says::
Thanks James!
Yes the emails are long, because I had a lot of good things to say about the service.
I could've said:
"OMG COOL DEAL FOR TRACKING VISTORZZZZ!^^^^!!!!"
...and got a bunch of CLICKS, but it wouldn't be enough to get people reaching for their wallets (however it wasn't A/B'd so I can't say that with absolute certainty).
Also:
Some people read FULL emails. Like when I'm on the toilet reading long-ass emails (pun intended) on my iPhone...I tend to read the whole thing.
Some people SKIM through the parts they like. Just because someone doesn't read LINE BY LINE everything I wrote doesn't mean they won't buy.
They may read the intro, some of the middle, then skip to the deal....however they still were conveyed a good amount of info if I did my job correctly.
Pssst.....HEY....you whiny bitches in the back of the room...can you please keep quiet as you leave?
Interesting look at your experience here...always a good idea to analyze the data and adjust accordingly. I tend to agree, however, with those who said that most likely the unsubscribers were "freeloaders" or those who haven't bought anything and were unlikely to do so. Better off without them.
Nev,
Noah did a decent job apologizing to those offended by your email in a sincere, humble way. Now you've gone and blown it by commenting on this article in a way that is arrogant, misogynistic, and offensive. You should be fired.
i appreciate your write up.
This is really good tool for email marketing.Thanks for this tool.