A (0:01)

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.

B (1:07)

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.