Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

I received an email question today about our follow-up emails in our auto-responder series at Aweber. One of our awesome readers here at MemberCon joined several of our email lists on our membership sites just to see how we do things.

She immediately noticed that we don’t personalize our emails with the subscriber’s first name like many of the “gurus” do. Why not?

Good question and there are several reasons:

1) We don’t ask for the subscriber’s first name on our opt-in pages because the conversion rate for people who actually sign up is lower when you do (or I should say, when we do – others may have different stats but from what I hear it’s common across the board). The more information you ask for on your opt-in page, the lower your conversion rate will be for that page. In order to achieve the highest conversion rates (views vs. actual completion of the form), we ask for one thing and one thing only: their email address. Even one more field – something as simple as asking for a first name will decrease your conversion rate significantly.

2) Personalization was awesome and cool and unique when the technology was first available, but in the years that have passed since it was the cool thing to do, everyone knows the email wasn’t written just to them. Initially, conversions and clicks and opens on emails that included the subscriber name went through the roof. That just isn’t the case anymore. And since it doesn’t help conversions (see #1) we simply don’t see the need anymore.

3) There are too many chances for it to get screwed up. How many times have you received an email that started exactly like this:

Dear {first name},

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah (Where the sender somehow mistyped the fill-in code that was suppose to insert your first name but instead the raw code is the only thing that was inserted.)

——or——

Dear Chris

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah (when your name isn’t Chris)

——or——

,

I wanted to tell you about….blah, blah, blah. (where the first name area was blank where the software was suppose to insert it)

I’ve received emails just this week with all 3 of these mistakes. Anyone on the planet who still thought the guru was emailing them personally now knows that isn’t the case. Bottom line, there are just too many chances for error in inserting the first name and when you or the software screws up, it’s embarrassing.

So there you have it. All the reasons we no longer personalize our autoresponder emails. If there was a minor reason #4, it would be that it’s simply one more line of text to read before they get to the “meat” of the message and the link we want them to click.

Anything we can do to get them to that “take action” link faster is a good thing.

Of course, I welcome your opinion on the matter!

building your list, email marketing autoresponder services, Aweber