How To Lose 1% Of Your Customers With Just 1 Email
onstartups.com
onstartups.com
(Yes, it would make sense to pay attention to the unsubscription rate if the author shares the historical data of those unsubscribers. Did they make a lot of purchases in the past and the long salesletter is just bugging them off - which is reducing the "life time value" per subscriber?
But I don't think that data has been collected. (Or the author would have shared it with us in my opinion...) So - this to me feels like a decision made keeping the wrong metric in mind.
I do agree with you, especially when considering the life cycle of the user. Maybe NK never looked or calculated the average member value of his users. Some of these users might have reached the peak of their member cycle and decided to unsubscribe. It could have also been (as you mentioned) that the long text had "turned them off".
Nevertheless, the important factors in which he should focus on are the following: - CRM - keeping a good relationship with his user base - Sales - number of joins/sales made by the campaign --> which would transfer towards average revenue per email - Maintaining a good quality list of users who are truly interested in his product --> it's all about quality over quantity, and not the other way around.
Lastly, the most important factor which NK did pick up, was that there was a surge in unsubscribes. Why was there a higher than average number of unsubscribes? He looked into it, and attempted to "win back" some of those users by sending them a personal email. --> I personally would have added a question asking them as to why they had unsubscribed (to find out the truth behind the sudden spike in unsubscribes).
Was it, indeed, because the deal price was a lot lower than the first two, as implied by his later "solution" of using long-form emails for larger priced deals?
All in all, it seems that this piece was written for an audience that already knows what's going on, rather than for us. That certainly isn't a knock or a problem, though.
"Totally agree.
Working on toning that down big-time.
Hope you'll give us another chance some day."
Me: "I'll give you another chance right now, keep it Hacker News grade, and I'll stay. :)"
Him: "Agreed. Short and sweet."
So I resigned up. Lesson learned: You can repair damage. Some customers know you are human and will give you another go.
Not quite. Then you'd still have 36.6% of your initial customers.
It feels so cheap. He should have added the e-mail he was talking about, I use AppSumo and I remembered the e-mail in question, but I bet many people didn't (and they will not register because of that cheap plug!).
edit: punctuation and grammar.
It was long. And very odd.
I'm kinda used to that from Appsumo by now so it didn't really register for me. Truth be told, I just clicked through to see the offer straight away and ignored the rest as TL;DR. Reading it now.. the nicest description I can come up with is "rambling"
EDIT: Patio11 has a point about the formatting :) so: http://errant.me.uk/appsumo.html
Posted as an image to preserve the distinctive formatting. Continues in that kind of vein for a while.
I'm pretty potty mouthed on Twitter and have lost quite a few followers over the years but I look at it as guaranteeing that the people who do stay following are exactly the sort of people who I want following me. In the same way, it seems like the sort of people who buy things from AppSumo's offers are the ones staying on the list.. so getting rid of the whiners and non-buyers is a good thing.
He also gave tips to get subscribers back.
I dread each time my inbox lights up but recognized that 60%+ of our business is driven through our email list. Our AppSumo.com emails for the most part were always short and sweet, just the way I liked them.
Then why the change?
I wanted to hire a real copywriter so I can focus on other things in the business. My friend Neville is a funny writer and had been extensively studying / practicing copywriting best practices.
Doesn't being a writer imply having studied and practiced writing? And what are "copywriting best practices"? Something tells me Neville is a factitious fall guy.
Usually we see < 0.5% unsubscribe rate
A 2x increase isn't that big of a deal and doesn't warrant the urgency eluded to in the title.
* The funniest thing about it?
This email was our highest conversion to buy ever. Ah, so this post isn't about losing customers, it's about justifying and excusing the new long form sales emails.
They laughed when Neville sat down at the keyboard, but when he started to write...
In all seriousness though, read On The Art of Writing Copy by Herschell Gordon Lewis, and also Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. By reputation they are the two best books on copy writing and advertising ever written.
I'll check those books out to see what advice they give, though; personally, I learnt copywriting by.. well, writing copy.
1. Stalking people does not resonate with me. Bad lead.
2. What are you selling? Tell me what before why. Seriously.
3. The attempts at humor were really bad.
But the reason I was ready to unsubscribe is that I'd been noticing for a while that the AppSumo deals were more like extended free trials than actual cheap stuff. The spammy email pushed me over the edge.
I still follow the RSS, and sometimes click through to see the email-signup-wall.
By the way, I did buy one of the AppSumo deals early on.
Always thought its better to have less great customers than more bad ones. Guess I am more sales oriented that email-list-size oriented.
It's possible that their sales to the third party companies depends more on their list size than on their conversion rate.
Maybe his e-mail list is growing and after getting a few e-mails people realize that this isn't what they expected. Or the expectations they had for the content weren't set properly. Saying that funny/longform e-mail is that what caused the sudden unsub spike is jumping to conclusions.
I know that I have been very happy on several mailing lists of entites wanting to sell me stuff, but when the messages get too frequent, too long, too spammy or too far from my stated interests... Unsubscribe. I forgive a few indiscressions, but when I see this abuse is a pattern, I unsubscribe.
We use paper and toner, etc. We can buy extra on a good deal, so I was on Staples list. Started out a message every few weeks, then weekly, then daily... Unsubscribe.
I was on NewEgg's list. We use cases of disks and RAM and other commodities, so we can take advantage of exceptional pricing if the chance presents itself. We also sometimes must go to alternate sources if our primary suppliers are out of stock. I am on their list, and even told them what I wanted to see. However, they still tell me about microwave ovens and watches... Much less frequently now that I have told them my preferences, but they are still in danger of losing my subscription. They are on the line... But I'd have canceled already if they sent me offers on microwave ovens more than once in a very great while.
I understand the value in trying new stuff, but it's the old early-adopter problem: if you have a certain loyal userbase, do you risk doing stuff that they are too savvy to pick up on (and might backlash over), or do you pander to the huge new userbase you got from a recent promotion? Eventually you have to leave the fluffy world of appealing to HN readers, but there are ways and ways.
Without knowing the context of the e-mail, or why that 1% quit, this is basically the equivalent of news hosts saying, COULD YOUR CHILDREN DROP DEAD TOMORROW? Tune in at 11 to find out.
Alas. But yes, you have to be very careful with what you say. It's many times harder to overcome a negative impression than to create a positive one.
I too found the long emails easy to dismiss. I don't even know where to look to find out if I need this real quick - and I'm not going to invest the time to read it to only find out its not of any interest to me.