You may recall a few weeks ago, I shared with you that I was going to be promoting programs for Virginia Muzquiz and Liz Scully.
I set things up so that it was really easy to opt out of the campaign while remaining in my community, and I’d like to share with you a few things I have learned doing that which you may find interesting, especially if you are interested in affiliate JVs.
Get ready for some numbers!
The industry average is that when one promotes a launch full out, like I did, 5-8% of their email list will unsubscribe.
2.7% of my list unsubscribed during the promotion period. This is the same unsubscribe rate as I experience when I’m not promoting a launch.
What I did have was 9.5% of you opting out of the campaign.
Of those who chose not to opt out, the open rate was 25-30% which is the high side of average.
What Does This Teach Us?
First, I like to think it means that if you’re sticking around, it’s because you think I offer some valuable content. That’s certainly my intention.
However, what really stands out is that I did something that most people do not when promoting a launch:
I told you what I was going to do, and I gave you control on if you wanted to do it.
Unfortunately, too many lists are run thinking of their readers as “prospects”, “leads”, or “audience numbers” as opposed to people.
When I first started building a list, some of the advice I got was very dehumanizing of the audience, and I didn’t like it. I feared that my results might suffer because of my sentimentality.
I didn’t want to promote partners and launches just for the commission. At first, I thought I was supposed to promote for the buck, not for the connection. It turns out that my instinct was right, and I reversed course.
I learned that the more I think about serving my community, the better the results with my community.
I was gratified to discover that treating my community like people rather than like numbers actually creates better results.
What a crazy idea! Treat people like people and they like you better!
When 8% of an audience unsubscribes, they are saying that they are too busy to be receiving the campaign, and they are getting out the only way they can.
(They are also saying that they don’t really care about the content they get from that list runner.)
By giving you choices, the same percentage chose not to receive the campaign, but also chose to stay in the community.
That really means a lot to me that you believe that, in a world full of email clutter, you believe that I am worth the space to keep getting messages from.
How did the launch go?
My community is small by industry standards, but wouldn’t have known it by the leaderboard.
Out of 28 partners, I was in 10th place for number of people who chose to participate in some way. Many of the folks in 11th through 28th place have audiences 10-20 times as large as mine.
Average engagement rate is about 1%. Our community engaged at almost eight times that.
You guys are awesome. That’s why I put all the time I do into finding content for you, finding programs to share, and writing these emails.
Thank you for placing your faith in be to invest your time reading my emails.
You keep reading, and I’ll keep bringing you good stuff.