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With my final action steps completed yesterday (writing messages 9 and 10), I’m ready to wrap up the 30 day challenge with a review of how far I’ve come in the last month.

Here’s what I want to look at:

• Growth of subscribers
• Optimization improvements
• Celebrations of automated content added
• Bonus interview with Aweber’s Justin Premick
• Make an action plan for the next 30 days

Let’s get started…

Trajectory Of List Growth

When I started this list on Day 1 of the Autoresponder Challenge, I was at 0. I definitely had existing traffic from search engines and various websites. However, I wanted to focus that at a new squeeze page and show you what I would do from the beginning.

Throughout today’s recap I’ll be relying on the reporting features of Aweber (another reason why I use them!).

Here’s a graph of the growth of subscribers during the 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge:

The obvious spike in the middle of September is due to my internal promotion to both Viral Hosts and my own lists.

But what I want to call your attention to is the trend before and after those promotions. Obviously the steeper the incline, the better. But that there is an incline at all is what you definitely want to be shooting for first.

Notice how there is a small spike first around September 13 for a day. This is when I added the video to the squeeze page. The next day I did my internal promotion. Yet even after that, the list is growing faster because of the optimized squeeze page, and the increased visibility of my opt-in form on my blog and on my download pages.

Optimization Improvements

Let’s take a look now at how the tweaks that I made over time made a difference in the conversion rates, too.

I’m not just getting more traffic from the steps I took, but I’m converting more of the traffic into new subscribers. This was definitely a major goal.

My squeeze page went through 4 stages.

Before I started the challenge, I had a pretty long opt-in form (1), and as you would imagine, I was getting a pitiful opt-in rate. Here’s what I was getting:

Yep – a measly 3.5%!

Then I made changes (2, 3, and 4). Each of those changes included a split test of the opt-in form itself. Take a look at this report from Aweber for this list.

As you can see, my first new squeeze page (2) was getting a paltry 16.5%.

With the combination of a new squeeze page layout (3), asking only for the email address, using a video to introduce my list (4), and relying on more endorsed traffic, my opt-in rate soared to an average of almost 42%!

That’s a huge improvement from the 16.5, and light years ahead of the 3.5%.

Let me put these numbers into perspective by demonstrating to you what these means monetarily.

When you run numbers like this, you can see why I really wanted to do this challenge. And I hope it knocks you upside the head if you’ve been slacking off yourself!

The following chart is based on getting 1000 visitors over time (the time frame itself doesn’t matter). The first line is my old squeeze page, getting 3.5%. Each row under it is the average opt-in rate I started getting after each of the changes I made.

The final row is my ideal target of 50%.

Remember that I’m monetizing my list with a $47 product on the download page of the free gift. To keep things simple, I’ll assume that the conversion rate of 2% holds true throughout this example. I simply want to show you the power of focusing on your front door.

The difference from start to finish is an improvement of 1117.14%! That’s over 10x better results!

Tip: This improvement was on my squeeze page. To see how you can improve your salesletters like this, check out the Direct Response Marketing 2.0 course

More importantly, I’ve improved my revenue from $0.03 per visitor to $0.40. With this number in hand, I can use CPC (cost per click) advertising smartly. As long as the numbers hold up, if I pay less than $0.40 per click (i.e., per visitor), I’ll be in profit as I continue to build my list! This is great information to have.

Of course, the next step of the optimization would be improving my sales conversions (OTO), or increasing the OTO price. But that’s for another challenge.

I simply want to make sure you see the importance of measuring and split testing! Got it by now?

Any changes I make after this challenge can be seen on my squeeze page.

Added Automated Content Delivery

Next, I want to celebrate the additional delivery of content over time that’s now in an automated system that I never need to turn off.

The actual open rates and click thru rates are not where I want them yet. But the fact that I have 49 days worth of communication, and I have a baseline for improving my results is great after this first month.

Here’s another report from Aweber, showing the numbers of subscribers who are on each particular message at this point in time.

The drop off of the graph should not be alarming – that’s just showing the numbers of people who are on that particular message. Over time, this will level out.

However, what is disheartening so far is the low number of clicks for the subscribers. I definitely have work to do to increase this. But what I do like to see is that my open percentage is holding steady around 30%. However message 7 right now is only at 18%. If this number holds over time (it’s a pretty low sample right now for statistics), then I definitely need to work on the subject line.

As a point of comparison, here’s the same report for this 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge list.

We can talk separately about what readers of this challenge are doing (or not doing), but this is the kind of level activity across time that you would expect to see.

What I’m hoping for in the long run is for the proportion of people on the list at each message who open and click will stay the same or even increase over time. That’s when I’ll know I am doing my job of delivering valuable content my subscribers eagerly await and consume.

In addition to these 10 messages I’ve written so far, remember that I also added the blog broadcast. So even if I never touch this list again with another new message, my blog posts will continue giving fresh content every Friday as long as I post to my blog at least once per week. That rocks!

Bonus Interview With Justin Premick Of Aweber

As a special celebration for you and me, I wanted to get even more email marketing strategies to you. So I got Justin Premick on the phone for a discussion of what’s working now in email marketing. Justin is the Director of Education Marketing at Aweber, which means he’s in charge of overseeing how Aweber makes sure its clients are getting the best results they can from their email campaigns.

This is a free bonus for you, and I know you’ll learn a lot. During the call, we address these questions:

• How adopting the permission marketing philosophy helps you stand out above your competition
• How often should you be emailing your list
• How can you get more people to opt-in to your list, and then stick around to read your messages?
• How publishing your email newsletter to Twitter can quickly expand your reach
• How can publishing your blog to your subscribers’ inboxes increase repeat traffic
• How ISPs are getting smarter about deciding if your emails belong in the bulk folder
• What types of segmenting you can do to laser-target who receives your emails
• How to measure actions taken by your subscribers in real world dollars
• And much more.

I hope you enjoy this bonus gift from me to you, and take action on what Justin reveals!

Autoresponders and Email Marketing Secrets With Justin Premick

Action Plan For Next 30 Days

I accomplished most of my own goals for the previous 30 days, and that’s exciting. But it’s not the end of the story.

I’ll take a break to recharge my batteries, but in a few days, I’ll come back to this list to continue optimizing the various pieces.

I encourage you to reflect like I’m doing here, and make a plan for another run of 30 days of action steps.

Here are the areas I’ll focus on:

• Write messages through #25, giving me over 6 months of content
• Work with Google Website Optimizer to split test multiple areas of my squeeze page
• Enhance my blog broadcasts by working on the digest template
• Take the blog broadcast template and use it for my regular follow up emails for more consistency
• Optimize my OTO page to increase conversions in the sales process
• Do more quick surveys that include just 1-3 questions for more feedback and market data
• Complete my reports for month #2 and following months (I’m giving them 1 per month)
• Add a viral tweets box to my thank you page to get more tweeting going on about my free gift and newsletter, while increasing my Twitter following as well (but in a non-spammy way!)
• Enhance the affiliate program for the list.

I imagine that these changes will continue to have a significant impact on the long term growth of my business.

What steps are you going to do?

One of the things I’ve learned as an internet marketer is we often get pulled in many different directions. And if we’re not careful, we don’t give ourselves a focused, dedicated period of time to really optimize a key area of our business like our email list.

I hope you’ve seen from this 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge, which truly was a live experiment in action for both of us, how setting aside this time can really pay dividends.

Once a quarter (every 3 months), I encourage you to pick an area of your business and focus as much attention on tweaking it as possible.

I originally wanted to do this for myself 6 months ago. But I kept putting it off.

Now that I see how I improved my opt-in rate from 3.5% to 41%, an improvement of over 1100%, it almost makes me sick to my stomach to think abou the lost revenue I could have had for my business. Not only that, but because I put it off, literally thousands of people likely did not get the benefit of solutions I could have been providing them if I had my system better optimized like I do now.

Lesson learned!

I hope you enjoyed this experiment. Please let me know your closing thoughts and future action steps with a comment below! And if you’d like me to do another 30 day challenge on another area of internet marketing, please feel free to make that suggestion with your comments.

Teach you again soon!

Bob Jenkins
DiscoverAutoresponders.com

p.s. Remember, I filmed screen video of every action step I took throughout the 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge. Sometimes, I threw in some bonus strategies as well. If you didn’t already upgrade, you can get all 30 “over my shoulder” videos at DiscoverAutoresponders.com. You’ll need to login first (or create a free account if you’re new), and check the link in the menu to upgrade.

p.p.s. Occasionally, I open up a few slots for a 1-on-1 email marketing makeover. This is where I personally walk you through the transformation of your list building efforts. For details about this, and to see if I have any openings, please go to BobTheTeacher.com/emm.

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