← The Email Sound Booth with Liz Wilcox
The Email Sound Booth with Liz Wilcox
*SALES EMAIL SUMMIT* Christopher Maselli– free event invite for affiliate commissions
00:15:40
What’s up, inbox innovators? In this episode, we chat with Christopher and Gena Maselli of Writing Momentum, and together, we nerd out over the power of a well-crafted sales email. You'll hear how Chris took a “meh” pre-written summit promo,...
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- [00:01]
A
What up? Liz Wilcox here, the host of Sales Email Summit. Before we get into this interview, I just want to let you know that this summit is sponsored by list gadget. ListGadget.com is how you can turn every email into a growth machine. We've got embeddable polls, leaderboards, referral programs, and more. And I know this sounds crazy, but you can do it in about 3:30 second startup time. Now, right now we are offering $10 off the starter plan to make it just $9 a month. So if you're into adding email polls, reactions, subscriber leaderboards, and more to your email newsletter, head on over to list gadget.com all right, let's get into this episode. Chris, I am so excited. Please, please, please let us know what is the most interesting or the most lucrative sales email that you have sent out in the last six to 12 months.
- [01:08]
B
Hey, Liz. And hey, everybody. Yes, my name is Christopher Micelli and I'm with writing momentum.com and my wife Gina and I, we help writers write, publish, and sell their books. And, and just first of all, thank you so much for having me on here. I think it's so interesting to hear about other successes and challenges. And so I just, I can't wait to hear what everyone has to say. So the most interesting email that I sent out this last year is for a summit that we took part in. So there's a children's book mastery summit that our friend Karen puts on. She lives in Africa and we met her online and she said, hey, I got this summit and I'm inviting people to speak. And so we've been speaking at it for several years. And in that summit, it's really made to teach people how to write for children, right? How to write for children, get published, that sort of thing. And there's a portion of our audience, since we talk about writing, that enjoy going to something like this. So I would say it's adjacent to what we normally do. And when you join a summit like this and you go to speak at it, they often send you a bunch of like, marketing assets. So you'll get like social posts that you can put out there and they send you the email so you don't have to write your own. But anytime we get something like that, I like to just go ahead and rewrite the emails in our own voice because I feel like, you know, we all have our own voice and I don't, I don't want to just send something out and put our name on it and it not send sound like Us, I think that would just be kind of strange. And plus, you run the risk of them getting an email from someone else in the summit and have it reading exactly the same. And then they know that neither one of you actually wrote the original email. Right. So I went ahead and we rewrote this, this email to send out to those who might want to attend. And we did use, you know, of course, the assets to, to figure out what kinds of things to include in it, but we rewrote it fresh in our own voice. And it's really kind of a standard marketing email. So the subject line is claim your free ticket to the Children's Book Mastery Online Summit. And then just briefly, I won't read the whole thing, but I'll give you the idea of what it says. It says, hey, Liz, it's that time of year again. The Children's Book Mastery Summit is happening July 22 through 26. Karen from Children's Book Mastery has gathered 25 best selling authors and industry experts in writing, publishing and marketing to share their strategies for succeeding as a children's book author. We are so excited that she invited us to be a part of the summit. Chris is talking about writing by the numbers and Gina teaches on how to build your readership through email. And then we list some other speakers who are going to be there. And then it says the online summit is free to attend and includes freebies from the speakers. So don't wait. Register today and join us for this exciting event. Then this is the first link. Click here to get your free ticket. Then it says, whether you're an aspiring or new children's book author or you've been at it for years, you'll learn tons of new strategies to take you to a whole new level. We hope you'll join us because together we have writing momentum. That's always our tag at the end of our emails. And then we signed our names Chris and Gina. Then we have our second link which is P.S. we've already grabbed our free tickets and get yours. Now that's a link. It takes less than a minute and you'll be all set to take your knowledge and skill to the next level. And then we let them know too that we recently talked about this on our podcast if they want to check that out. So that's the basic email itself. So why did this work for us? I think the reason people opened it is because first of all, we, I really liked our subject line and we usually ab test our subject lines and this is the one that won. It says Claim your free ticket to the Children's Book Mastery Online Summit. And what I like about that is that first of all, it has an action in it. It tells them to claim something. Two, it tells them it's free, so they know how much it costs, that there's nothing extra there. And then it's on children's book writing. So automatically, if they're not interested in children's book writing, they're probably not going to open the email. But it gives away a lot of information right there at the beginning, just in the subject line, which is pretty cool. I also think one thing that really helped in this was this angle that we took that says we've already grabbed our free tickets. Get yours now. Because usually, you know, when you tell people about a summit or something, it's kind of like, it's kind of like a sales pitch, right? You're saying, hey, go do this, go get your ticket. But we wanted to make it a little more inclusive, like to say, hey, we're participating in this too. We've grabbed our free tickets. Get yours now to come join us. Right? And I think that that went a long way. That link got a lot of clicks and it's kind of like it's not something we're pushing at you, but it's something that we're participating with you. And I think. And so I think that's good to keep in mind. So here's our actual numbers for those who are. Who love the stats. So this went out to 1,444 people. Now I will tell you, before we met Liz, our list was almost double that size. But Liz really encouraged us because we had horrible open rates. She encouraged us to cut down our list and get rid of all the fluff, all the people who weren't active. And oh, that was so hard to do. It was so hard to do. But we cut our list in half and started building up from that point. And you know what? It turned out to be one of the best things that we ever did because all of our rates went up, our open rate, our click through rate, everything went up. And so we're so glad we did that. So 1444 people of that 706 opened it. So these are 706 people that were interested enough in children's book writing to open it. Okay. Which is pretty good. That's 48.9% open rate. Now we pretty much always get about 50% open rate or better. In fact, if we don't get about 50% open rate, we know we did something wrong or the subject line didn't work. And that's because we culled down our list to make it as tight as possible. Then with that open rate, we had 37 clicks to go through and purchase, you know, one of the free tickets. I say purchase. It's a. So what happens at a summit like this is they purchase a free ticket, they get to attend the session for free, but if they want to, they can purchase lifetime access to the videos. And that's where we actually make money as affiliates. But 37 people went through and clicked to get that, which is pretty good. I mean, think about that. That's 3% of our entire list. And this is just the people who are interested in children's book writing. 3% is pretty decent for a first email to go out. In fact, a few days later, we sent out a second email on this exact same summit that said, hey, there's still time. Go ahead and grab your ticket. And would you believe we had almost the exact same open rate. We actually had, I think a few more clicks on that one to where we ended up having about 6% of our entire list was going to this summit with us, which we considered a really good victory. And so we're excited about that. And then we had several people who also clicked through to watch our podcast because we mentioned that. And so that wasn't such a bad thing. So anyway, this was. This was a good email. This is one that went out. It accomplished what it needed to. Offered something free to our list. As part of the reason, too, why we like doing things like this is because it's something that we can give to our list as a value add, even though it can also make money for us. So it's kind of a win win, we feel like. Anyway, so that's it. The Children's Book Mastery Summit email was one of our best ones.
- [09:41]
A
I love this, Chris. So I got two questions for you. Number one, what motivated you to send out that second email about the summit? And you mentioned affiliate sales. Did you make any affiliate sales? Like, did anybody?
- [09:58]
B
Yeah. Do people buy the upsell to the lifetime access? They absolutely do. And that's really up to. A lot of it is up to the landing page, right? So the email has to do its thing. It has its purpose, which is to get them to click through to the landing page to sign up for, for that freebie. But the landing page's purpose is to say, okay, you're here for the freebie, but you know, we also are going to give you lifetime access to the videos for a small fee in this case, you know, it really kind of depends on how affordable the item is as to whether people buy it, is what we've found. So for the summit, that in this case, the summit Videos for Life is about $60. And as an affiliate, you might get, let's say, half of that or something like that. But really, the $60 is worth it to some people because they know that, look, there's 20 or more recordings in here. Each one of them is 30 to 45 minutes. And the only way to get them all free is to watch them live or like on the day that they're released. So in order to watch them at their convenience or to watch them again and again, which is what we recommend that most of our, the people in our list do, because that helps you learn the material even better. So watch it again and again. They have to then own the trainings. And to do that, it cost, you know, $60. And so it's, it's usually worth it to. For a lot of people. The people who are really interested in this case, it's a children's writing summit, it's. If they're really interested in writing children's books, they'll probably say, you know what? $60 is worth my money in this case, in order to go ahead and get it. But beyond that, even when we record those sessions, we encourage people who attend the sessions, whether they're on our list or not, to get our free materials that are in our email or in our membership, because when they come and sign up for our lead magnets, our materials, our free PDF, then they become a part of our list and we can start to build a relationship with them. And I think that's, that's the thing that we have learned the most about email marketing, is that it's all about relationship. It's about building a relationship because, you know, you can, you can speak something into someone's life in the short term, but if you're able to email them every single week, you will speak into them for the long term. And yeah, sure, financially, there's a lifetime value on someone who's on your list that can be much higher than, you know, any small single purchase. But more than that, it's about being able to make an impact in each other's lives by having those relationships.
- [12:55]
A
Chris, this is why I love you. And this is why I asked you, and you were one of the first people I asked to come to this summit. I feel like you just really understand email. And I just Love it so much. So of course, if you are thinking I need Chris and his wife in my life, I need some writing momentum. How can people get on your email list so they can see all your goodness and get that writing momentum you guys talk so much about?
- [13:32]
C
Yes.
- [13:32]
B
If you want to find out more.
- [13:33]
C
About writing and writing momentum, just go to writing momentum.com and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page there you'll find some different free downloads.
- [13:45]
B
That you can get.
- [13:46]
C
One of them is an ebook on how to finish writing your book in six week sprints and I would love to give that to you as well as if you're interested in getting some real support when you're doing your writing, whether you're writing your emails or you're going to put together a book or anything else, check out our membership. It's@writingmomentum.com membership. It's only $25 a month. It includes co writing sessions and training sessions and critiques and roundtables and more.
- [14:14]
B
It's really great, a lot of fun.
- [14:15]
C
Fun, great group of people and we'd.
- [14:16]
B
Love to have you there.
- [14:18]
D
Full disclosure, I am in Chris and Gina's writing momentum membership and I love it. I love it for the accountability. Like honestly, I'm not even writing a book. I just need to write emails and so sometimes I'll go to like their co working and stuff or their calls where they have co working at the end just because I like the accountability and I need the accountability and I can just work for 20 to 60 minutes and I get so much more done when I'm on a zoom call with people. So that's why I'm all in on Chris's membership. It just helps me keep accountable to my writing goals. So anyway, you already know what I'm going to say. I want you to have Chris's email. I want you to be able to send out email information for when the next time you promote something free and it goes to that upsell. So steal his email and the Steal these Sales Emails Template pack. A plug and play collection of every single email from the summit, including this one. Rewritten it into a simple template so you can customize in minutes. No decoding, no guesswork, just copy tweak sent and make or make sales just like Chris and everybody else in the summit for $35. It's a total steal. Get it. Steal these Sales Emails Template Pack link in the show notes.