AWeber Interview - Using email to grow a community

Everyone, it's Justin Premick at AWeber here. I'm sitting down with one of our users, Ramit Sethi. He is a blogger about personal finance at iwillteachyou to be rich dot com. He's also a publisher of a book by the same name. It's an Amazon best seller. It's now on the New York Times list as well, I believe. Is that right?

Yeah.

Very cool. And we're gonna sit and talk a little bit about email and how he's using email marketing to grow his business. Have you seen any evidence of that sort of viral effect on email subscriptions?

Yeah, when I asked my. When I send out something really good and I ask my email subscribers to forward it along, then I do something. I can certainly tell that there are new users coming, particularly when I direct them to a landing page so I can start tracking this stuff. But in general, what I use my email for is to keep my community happy. So there are various reasons. You can use it to acquire new users, you can use it to sell things, you can use it to keep your community happy. I really prefer keeping the community happy. And if I do that, people will inevitably buy stuff or share it or whatever, if they trust me, which is the whole point of my site.

Now. That's almost more of an indirect marketing as opposed to a direct marketing approach. So how do you judge the effectiveness of your email campaigns?

I use a combination of metrics and gut feel. So metrics. I would look at open rates. I would look at sales. If I ever sell anything, which is extremely rare, indirect stuff, it's feedback. So when people click reply, it comes straight to me. So when I send a newsletter or a message out, I will get often hundreds of responses within the hour. And I love it because people will say, like, this is great. This is amazing. Or like, sometimes they'll unsubscribe. And I see all the unsubscribe notes and people will be like, this is. He's sending it too frequently. Or I really don't like his tone. It's offensive. In fact, I have my autoresponder message number three has subject line, damn, I can't believe that. Whatever, whatever. And a number of people unsubscribe. They were like, this is. I can't believe you have to use curse words to get your message across. And for me, that's great. I'm glad that they unsubscribe because it's not a good fit. And so I'd rather have a small list of dedicated people than A massive list of people who are not going to read or click or share.

It's a great one. Now, you said a lot of times you get hundreds of responses. How do you triage all of that? Because we've written posts on why you shouldn't use a do not reply, for example, and a lot of people will say, well, yeah, but how do I handle the influx of email that's on top of my current workload?

I'm actually thinking about that right now. What I do right now is I have a filter setup that has my address in the filter. So if they reply and it has the aweber stuff at the bottom, then it will filter it and tag it and I can review that stuff. But what I'm probably going to do is change my email of the sender, let my users know, and then I can filter it by email address.

Okay.

That's more reliable for filtering.

So the more important thing is to make sure you can set that aside to go through it at the appropriate time.

Yeah. And it really depends on how you want to be perceived. Like, I. People like that I'm accessible and I am accessible. Like, I'll go to a city and I'll say, hey, who wants to meet up for lunch? Okay. So I do respond to most of the emails. Unless they're really kooky. I do get those. So that's like, that's, you know, that's my strategy. I'm an approachable dude. Some people, like, they don't want to respond to emails and that's fine. They just filter it away and don't ever look at it. Right.

Yeah. And I would argue that your strategy is the one that more of us should be paying attention to. I like to be accessible too. Because if somebody cares enough to write. Yeah, they're, you know, it's like the same thing you said with people who unsubscribe. If you're not engaged, if it's not right for you, you know, okay, it's fine.

It's fine. It's not. I used to actually feel really bad when people would unsubscribe. It was very emotional. And the thing is, when people unsubscribe, typically they're. They don't feel good. They're angry sometimes and they write really mean things. And what you have to understand is like, it's just not a good fit. It's like, you know, it's like hitting on someone. You start by being very offended that they rejected you and you realize it's actually just not a good fit. It's not that they hate me. It's just not a good fit. Yeah.