Week #21 Email Update: How to get customers to love your brand – from Brandon on Sept. 10th
I hope you had a great Labor Day weekend and a short workweek!
Now we’re headed into Week 38 of 2022 like a black tailed jackrabbit outrunning a bobcat across a meadow of tall green grass.
Here’s your weekly roundup with things that will give you an edge to win in your business and your life:
- Community announcements and shoutouts.
- New EDGE podcast episodes that will move you and your business forward. Including….
–> How to Get Customers to Love Your Brand
–> Results From My Experiment to Improve Focus
–> How to Get Your Net Promoter Score
–> Radical Digital Transformation to 10X Your Company
–> We saved over $125,000 in our 401k for 2021. Learn how.
–> A Crazy Person Burned Down Danielle’s Office. For real!
–> and more.
- Strategy worth sharing that will improve your email marketing that we’ve tested with great success. It involves us deleting over 3,252 subscribers today unless something happens.
- A book worth reading that will help you with marketing.
- A movie worth watching.
- What I’m writing about to help you.
- An offer for you
- This email took 3.75 hours to research, write, edit, format and create. It’s packed with valuable information for you.
Let’s go!
Community Announcements
Welcome the 74 new subscribers to this newsletter who joined since last week. We’re grateful to have you here! We’re now 17,459 strong.
Thanks to Mary Harcourt host of Ready.Set.Glow. Podcast who had me on her show last week to talk about how I built my first business and used SEO for 95% of our marketing. When I sold the company we had over $550,000/month in free organic traffic. Meaning it would have taken $550,000/month invested in Google Ad words to get the amount of traffic we were getting for free. Talk about low CAC! When the episode is released I’ll post it in a future email.
Thanks to IMDb for including the EDGE on their site. If we weren’t legit, we are now 🙂
Worth Listening on EDGE
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How to Get Customers to Love Your Brand with Dr. Aaron Ahuvia | Ep. 386
Dr. Ahuvia is the world’s leading expert on brand love. We talk about how you can boost your brand by getting people to love it. What loves means and some tips you can use to create brand love.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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3 Cash Flow Metrics You Must Monitor to Grow Your Company | Ep. 388
Three cash flow metrics that you must monitor if you want to be able to successfully grow your company.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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How I Built a Better Baby Wagon with Tiffany Ramachandran Founder of Joey | Ep. 389
Tiffany shares her “how I built this “story of how she’s building Joey, a modern family brand whose first product is an amazing stroller wagon for kids that does it all. Check the show notes for a discount code.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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How to Get Your Net Promoter Score | Ep. 391
How to quickly and easily get your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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401k Part 17 – Case Study Business Owner Saves Six Figures in Their 401k Plan | Ep. 392
Matt and Brandon talk about a real world case study where the business owners saved over $150,000 in their 401k plan.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Radical Digital Transformation to 10X Your Company with Chris Hood Head of Business Innovation & Strategy at Google | Ep. 393
Chris and Brandon talk about digital transformation, what it means, why you need to understand it or risk getting beat by your competition.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
On Business Podcast
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A Crazy Person Burned Down Danielle’s Office – Business Insurance You Need | Ep. 5
We talk about business insurance, what you need and why. We use the crazy person that set Danielle’s office building on fire and burned her office to the ground as the backdrop to the lessons learned
Worth Sharing
 Don’t panic just yet… |
The bad news first. Today, Saturday, we’re deleting 3,252 people off our email list.
From a vanity perspective this hurts! We’ll be at 14,207 subscribers.
The good news. With 17,459 subscribers we have been averaging a 40% open rate.
For reference, the average email open rate across all industries is approximately 21.33%*.
Last email we sent had a 42.3% open rate. Screen shot below from our ConvertKit account.
 Convert Kit screen shot from our Aug. 27th email |
If we take the 40% average open rate, which amounts to approximately 6,954 and divide that by our new total subscribers our open rate jumps nine points to a 49% open rate. That’s out of sight!
That will have all sorts of positive effects:
It will signal to the email providers, think Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Yahoo Mail, that we’re delivering quality content that people want.
That will in turn result in the algorithms ranking our domain name we send from, @brandoncwhite.com, high on a trustworthiness.
That will result in less spam placement, likely even less “Promotions” or “Updates” placements in Gmail which will in turn mean more opens across the board.
Internet service providers (ISP) will also place more trust on the domain, further helping our deliverability.
It also means that when someone signs up for our email list from one of multiple ways, or buys something from us, the follow up email shows up in their Primary box, meaning they don’t miss it.
Again, more open rates, better customer experience, higher Net Promoter Score.
How we got to the #
In ConvertKit, and most all email hosting providers, you can segment your list by “engagement”.
In this case we took all the people that have not engaged in the last nine months and sent them an email sequence asking them if they wanted to stay on the list. With the programming Gia did if they click the link they can stay on the list. If they don’t they are gone by the end of today.
The sequence we send spans a specific amount of days and has specific copy. Of course we want people to stay.
But, we only want them to stay if they find what we write valuable. If they don’t we’d rather not clog their inbox nor have them not take up space on our email list which costs us more money. And as I’ve outlined above, erode our domain credibility if they don’t open and engage with the email often.
Why Send the sequence if you know they have not engaged
The iOS update for Apple Mail that was done last year prevents any pixel to send a message back to the email sender to indicate that the email was opened.
That means for anyone using Apple Mail we can’t tell if they open one of our emails. This could and does result in some bad data for us. Someone could be opening the emails and in our stats they look like they aren’t engaging.
We don’t want to delete people who may actually want to stay on the list. So, we send the sequence.
I’ve been skeptical how much the iOS update really has effected email tracking because most people use Gmail and Yahoo emails. And most of them, from my non-scientific polling, use the Google or Yahoo app if they are on an iPhone or any phone for that matter.
The data says I’m completely wrong about my observation. Recent reports suggest Apple Mail whips everyone’s butt.
An Email Client report from February 2022* on market share:
- Apple: 59.8%
- Gmail: 27.4%
- Outlook: 4.3%
- Yahoo Mail: 3.4%
- Google Android: 1.7%
- Outlook.com: 0.9%
- Samsung Mail: 0.3%
- Windows Live Mail: 0.1%
- Web.de: 0.04%
- GMX: 0.04%
What can you do to track your email engagement?
There are a few ways to track who engages with your emails. The best way is to track clicks. This means providing content to your readers that makes them want to click at least one link in your email.
Then, you can create a rule to flag all people that ever click a link. I’d suggest tracking every single link because you then can segment your list by interests. This will greatly help you provide relevant information to people who are interested in it.
As we say goodby to a few thousand subscribers today, we celebrate an open rate that will be off the charts. And we’ll be more motivated then ever to grow the EDGE list.
Summary
Use this strategy to increase your domain trust and open rates.
If you don’t manage your email list yourself, ask your email manager to clean the list. Make sure they don’t delete people immediately, but send a sequence to give people a chance to stay. Make the message personal. And I’d suggest doing this at least twice a year at a minimum. Ideally, do it quarterly.
Note: we use ConvertKit and recommend it because of their high deliverability rates and customer service.
You can get a free trail and the best deal here
* Sources: 2022 Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks by Industry from Mail Chimp, Litmus Feb 2022 Email Client Report
Worth Reading
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
by Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee
By now you know I’m always looking for research on how the mind works, the psychology of how we process things, and cognitive neuroscience. All to be able to apply to marketing great products.
This fascinating book is the result of the authors’ worldwide exploration of magic and how its ancient principles can now be explained using the latest discoveries of cognitive neuroscience. They convinced several magicians to reveal exactly how tricks work. If you want to keep the mystery of magic alive, then don’t read this book because it outlines exactly how some tricks work and why they work.
While that’s fun to find out, for some of us, The secrets behind magic tricks reveal how your brain works not just when watching a magic show but in everyday situations.
And that’s what makes it really interesting.
It has over 258 ratings on Amazon and scores a 4.5 out of 5.
Agree. Recommended.
You can get the book for under $10
Worth Watching
 photo: Netflix. Play the Trailer |
Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee
Oh man, this is a wild film!He’s the original computer genius gone rogue, inventor of one of the most successful (and most hated) pieces of software of all time: McAfee Anti-Virus.
At his peak, John McAfee was worth $100 million. But when his neighbor was murdered, McAfee went on the run — and invited a film crew with him.
With access to hundreds of hours of never-before-broadcast footage of McAfee as he’s pursued by the authorities, this is the definitive story of a larger-than-life character, a man who ran for President, escaped from prison multiple times, and claimed to have hacked the world.
So here’s the deal. It isn’t an academy award winning film. The reason it’s entertaining is because of the absurd stuff that John does. You just can’t make this stuff up!
Available on Netflix
Watch the trailer and decide for yourself
What I’m Writing About
 |
Still at the keyboard writing my first book. I started on the evening on June 16, 2022. My lack of progress the last two weeks is documented below.
The reason I haven’t made progress is because…
Gia and I have been writing and setting up the webpages for an offer that hopefully…
Turns the idea of this email newsletter and EDGE podcast into a business.
Most importantly we’ve been working on an offer that provides you with a off the charts ROI if you decide to buy it.
Surely you can relate…taking an idea, turning it into a product or service, and turning that product into an actual business.
If that doesn’t happen then all this turns into a hobby. A really expensive one.
How the EDGE “Idea” Has Unfolded
Idea:
Provide people just like you with valuable information on mental fitness, physical fitness and business from lessons learned over two decades of a few successes and at least twenty failures as an entrepreneur.
Products:
Ideas turned into some products.
EDGE Podcast:
In the top of the charts on a daily basis, is ranked in the top 1.5% of all podcasts worldwide, has amazing guests, over 380 episodes, we’ve successfully spun out one show from a weekly episode that is already in the top of the charts after five episodes and both shows are growing weekly.
EDGE Email Newsletter:
As I wrote about above, we have on average a 40% open rate. we will end the weekend with over 14,200 people on the list with a projected 48%-52% open rate. That’s a great indication that we’re writing things that people find valuable.
EDGE Print Newsletter:
We ran an offer about two years ago and at hits height had over 115 subscribers.
The newsletter was not profitable so we we stopped doing it with the idea we’d figure out how to make it profitable. More on that in a minute.
The important part was that the feedback we received was excellent. People loved it.
Business Plan Course:
We’ve had over 1,500 paying students take it. Other than some criticism that our interface could be better, which we corrected, all the feedback has been excellent.
If there was any other feedback it was people asking if they could pay us to do the business plan for them.
I didn’t want to do that at the time and declined. But, I was listening to what the market was saying.
We have success stories from people launching their business with plan it produces, raising money for existing and news businesses with the deck, launching new products from within larger companies, and stories how the financials alone brought clarity to people’s business that helped them take it to the next level.
We haven’t offered the course in over two years.
The Offer
The offer is open for business, but will officially launch this coming week and will run for four weeks. Then we’re closing the doors.
The story in the sales letter is real. And what I write about is one of the top reasons I’m able to sit here and write this email from our recording studio at our house in Half Moon Bay, CA with a view of the Pacific Ocean that I am grateful for every day.
The offer is not be for everyone, it might not even be right for you, and that’s OK.
Our bet is that enough people will claim it to turn the products into a business and not just continue what we’ve been doing, but grow and improve what we offer you.
Here’s what we’re going to do along the way…
We’re going to keep you updated with exactly how it’s shaping up so you can learn from the journey as well, maybe take some of the lessons learned and use them in your business.
We’ll write monthly progress and income reports from the EDGE business moving forward.
You’ve got a front row seat free of charge 🙂
Here’s my total words by week from the book I’m writing:
Week 1: 8,000 (+8,000)
Week 2: 30,641 (+22,641)
Week 3: 33,368 (+2,727)
Week 4: 33,123 (-245)
Week 5: 33,798 (+675)
Week 6: 32,948 (-850)
Week 7: 33,496 (+548)
Week 8: 31,572 (-1,924)
Week 9: 31,594 (+22)
Week 10: 31,594 (0)
Week 11: 31,642 (+48)
Week 12: 31,642(0)
Week 13: 31,642(0)
The Week Ahead at EDGE
- Four guest recording sessions for the EDGE podcast.
- Drop a New Episode of On Business Podcast Tuesday.
- Send out the next version of this newsletter.
- Drop new episodes on the EDGE YouTube channel daily where you can catch the video version of episodes.
- Officially launch the EDGE Print Newsletter Offer
Last Word
Thanks for reading. Here’s to a great rest of the weekend and week ahead!
Warmly,
Brandon
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