Email's main job is getting people to open the next one. Most sales from new subscribers happen in the first 30 days, so pitch early rather than wait. Ben Settle's daily story-driven emails and Ramit Sethi's direct sales approach work better than long nurture sequences.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about the number one job email marketing is supposed to do. It's very simple. What is it? Its job is to, well, get your, get your reader curious enough to open the next email. Your job is to continually be interesting over time, right? You don't want to just keep spamming people all the time because then you're not interesting anymore. Then you're annoying. You want to continually provide value to people where they think it's valuable to stay on your email list, it's valuable to engage with your content. And maybe, maybe just down the road, they're going to come over and they're going to buy what you have to offer. That's very simple. It's something I learned from one of the pioneers of internet marketing.
And what's his name?
His name is Perry Marshall.
So, here's the interesting thing. I was talking to a friend of mine who works at HubSpot and they all— they're known for email marketing. And he saw the same thing that me and a few other people saw in which when someone subscribes to your email list, they're typically either going to buy right away or within like the first 30 days or they're not going to buy much over time. That doesn't mean all those people won't buy anything in the future. It just means you typically can generate the most amount of sales in the first week or first month that they're on your list. And what we found is a lot of marketers are saying, hey, create that story, create that bond. get them to open up your next email. But at the same time, when we've tested that, we found that we just generate more revenue if we pitch them on the first or second or third email and just try to get them to buy right away versus getting them to keep opening up more and more emails from us.
Yep. So actually, you know, there's this case study done by, God, who are they called? Benji from, Growth something. God. But they did this case study where I think they were talking about how instead of trying to collect email addresses, kind of to your point, they're just driving people to fill out a consultation form. Yeah.
Emails don't work as well as they used to. People don't fill them out as much as they used to. Conversion rates on popups, content upgrades, everything is down. I'm the same way as what Benji thinks. Instead of me, like, I don't— like, don't get me wrong.
You're having a webinar, right?
Yeah, I just drive them to a webinar. I'm like, hey, I want you guys to open up my next email, but I'd rather get you guys to just opt into a webinar and convert right away or take a quiz and turn into a lead. I don't want people to, you know, just get emails from me and be like, all right, here's an amazing email, open up the next one and so forth and so on. I just want to sell right away. And I found that it just generates more revenue than continually pushing and pushing emails so they open up the next one and the next one. Because I learned this from Ramit Sethi.
Mm-hmm.
In which if you just keep giving information for free and you just keep educating them, and if your goal is just to get people to only open up your emails and you're never trying to sell them, people will assume that everything is free. So then when you do try selling them, it is much harder to convert them due to the fact that they're used to getting everything for free.
Ah, and I got something for you, for those of you that are kind of struggling with that, but that's going to be in the next episode. The one final thing I'll say is for those of you that You know, there's still a lot of people that, you know, subscribe to the whole send an email every day thing. And if you are looking for someone that has a good example of this, Ben Settle, his name is Ben Settle. And he has, I think he has an email list still that's going on. You can find a way to download a bunch of his newsletters called Email Players. You can check it out, just trying to find like Email Players download or whatever. And then you're gonna have a bunch of swipe files about like him just writing a bunch of emails every single day. I think he was the one that popularized the whole Seinfeld emails where you're just basically writing like email every day about kind of what happened during their day. And then there's an offer at the end. Look, there are people that can make it work. Neil and I, I don't think either of us are those types of people. I don't— when's the last time you wrote like a personal email?
I write one every Tuesday.
Oh, every Tuesday. Okay, great.
For my blog post, I literally— are you talking about to a person or just to my whole list?
To your list. What does it say every Tuesday?
Everything's custom because I write a blog post and then I write a custom email to send out the blog post.
That's weird. I don't see those. Anyway.
That means you're not subscribed or that means you didn't open up the emails because I cleaned my list.
Oh damn it. He cleaned me off. Anyway, so anything else you want to add?
No, I'm good.
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