I was reviewing my recent marketing promotion for the phantom teleseminar on 9 Secrets to Ebook Success and thought it might be interesting to share what I tracked and what I learned.
(Phantom teleseminar=you just sign up for the audio, there’s no actual call time.)
Overall, there was a great response with nearly 90 people signing up for the teleseminar during the month of July. And I’ll admit, I didn’t do nearly as much promotion as I’ve done for others.
But I still got some interesting results…
Sign-up by Autoresponder
This was the first time I’d done registation via email to an autoresponder instead of a web form– and I highly doubt I’ll do it again. Here’s why…
The good about registration by autoresponder–
- It was super easy–people could just click the email link and hit send. So having one less step to go through could be part of why registrations were a lot higher this time around.
- It was fun to see the comments people sent along in their sign-up emails.
But on the downside–
- A whopping 51% of sign-ups did not confirm. With double opt-in, you submit your email address, then receive an email that contains a link you must click on to actually be added onto the list. I suspect two things were at work here:
–The lack of a reminder page to check your email for the link (like you normally get after filling out a web opt-in form)
–And often, you don’t have a double opt-in system when signing up by autoresponder. You just send the email and get whatever document you’re looking for back
- Also, posting an autoresponder email address on public sites attracted junky sign-ups. At least six sign-ups were clearly sketchy. (Of course, these emails didn’t end up on the final list because they never confirmed.)
- You can’t track clicks on email links like you can track clicks on URLs. So it was very difficult to track where people actually saw the email to sign-up.
Solo Email
Anyone who subcribes to my Compelling Marketing Ezine and hadn’t registered by July 9 received a solo email with the subject line: “Sorry, you’re not invited to the call.”
The edgy subject line seemed to be a hit–generating some quite funny responses as well. In all, 10% of everyone who received the email signed up, which is great–especially since two previous announcements in the ezine had already gotten a strong response.
Response among those who actually opened the email blast was near 40% but I prefer to focus on overall response since open rates can be wildly inaccurate.
The email had three email “links” to sign-up because some say three links is most effective. I created a different subject line for each of the three email links so I could tell which links were clicked if the click tracking didn’t work. (And it didn’t.)
Surprise–NO ONE signed up from the first link! Since the rule of thumb is that the first link will get the vast majority of the clicks my results totally defied that standard. Instead, 85% of responses were from the second email link and 15% from the third.
It would take more testing to figure out why the big difference from the supposed norm since a couple factors could have been at work. But the key point is that you should always do your own testing to see what works for you.
Overall, the solo email brought the highest amount of sign-ups, accounting for more than 25% of teleseminar registrations.
And six more signed-up when the email was sent out via Twitter (which Aweber automatically does for me)–boosting the total response to 33% of total teleseminar sign-ups.
Next time, I’ll reveal how other teleseminar promotion methods such as the ezine, Facebook and Twitter fared!
yeah, I love the idea of not having to listen and getting the recording…though much like .pdf information, I think it may result in lower conversions if you are trying to sell since there is less commitment…plus the whole new way thing totally confused my small, crowded, tired, brain.