How can I stop being so lazy?

Answer by Ryan Luedecke:

I've often found motivation to be the psychological manifestation of our physiology. If this has been a problem throughout adulthood, you probably have some sort of hormonal issue.

Just guessing:

1. You eat a lot of grains/pastas/soy/dairy/fruit. You might even be vegetarian or vegan. If that's the case, eat way more green vegetables (like multiple LBs of broccoli and spinach per day) and way less grains/pastas/soy/dairy/fruit.

If you eat meat, try upping your intake of grass fed beef and wild caught fish.

2. You overeat or rarely miss a meal. Try intermittent fasting (IF). It's amazing how focused and motivated you'll feel once eating no longer becomes your top priority. There are also hormonal impacts to IF which will affect you positively.  Try to eat only between noon and 8pm everyday. Yes, I know it's heresy to recommend skipping breakfast. Just do it.

On Sunday, eat a ton of food from noon-8p and then don't eat for as long as you can on Monday (ideally not at all, but I've found that too difficult myself).

3. You don't get a lot of natural sun light. Get outdoors more often. Get some sunshine.

4. You don't exercise with heavy weights, regularly. Find some heavy things to lift (safely) and do it every other day or so. The heavier the better.

5. You drink. I do too. It's fun. But the aftermath is a motivation and confidence killer. The more alcohol you can cut out of your life, the more you'll regain your drive and motivation.

I imagine doing just one of these things would go along way towards improving your motivation. There are other things you could try as well, but this is a good 80/20 approach to start with.

Good luck – Ryan

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Email Conversion, Part 2: How to Increase Email Click Through Rates

Email Click Through RatesAs I mentioned in the first part of this series, I used to co-own a website and email list in the self help/humor space. With 1,100+ email subscribers and no product to sell, our best way to make income was to convince our subscribers to repeatedly visit our website and click stuff.

On the website we had our content outfitted with better sharing mechanisms (FB, Twitter, G+ buttons) and more relevant ads (Google Ads and affiliate links) versus what we could muster in an email. This made it important to maximize click rates on our emails and get subscribers to visit our site. It’s amazing how good you get at something when your livelihood depends on it.

By the end of our optimization efforts we had our click through rate (CTR) strategies tuned to where people who opened the email were clicking through to our website 75% of the time, or more. It’s a minimalist approach that’s worked for me in all kinds of niches including B2B SAAS.

Here’s how to replicate what we did:

1. Start with a big hyperlink link as the 1st line of your email. We used a 24px font and repeated the subject line from the email. If you recall from part one of this series, the subject line that you’re repeating here should be mysterious and create curiosity already, so it’s inherently going to entice your readers to click.

2. Put one link in the body text of the email. Give your readers a 2nd opportunity to click your link. It’s especially important for those reader who don’t realize your opening line is actually a hyperlink. We used a simple “Read More…” link as we were usually linking to blog content.

3. Keep the body text short.  2-3 sentences. 60-70 Words. Here’s the data from our email campaigns to support the recommendation.

Click Through Rate Data

4. Don’t reveal too much in the body text. The body of your email should continue to build upon the mystery that started in your subject line. Curiosity kills the cat and gets the click. There’s a reason that Ramit Sethi has a ‘Do Not Click’ button as a link in his Google Search output. People are curious beings. Give them something to be curious about…

5. Close with a personalized signature. Everyone does this now and it seems trivial, but we did it too so I thought I should mention it. Something like “Thanks, Ryan” or “All the best, Ryan” should work just fine.

6. Don’t worry about including an image in your email. If the image is that important or interesting, save it for the landing page. Over time you’ll build a reputation for having interesting images on your landing pages and that reputation will entice clicks. You don’t need it for the email to drive clicks and image formatting for emails can be a time consuming pain in the ass.

7. Keep your email template as simple as possible. While both Aweber and Mailchimp offer great email distribution services (I use both), their templates are over produced. Even their most basic templates have too much formatting. Strip them down to the bare bones. Eliminate every possible pre-formatted field and background you can. No header, no logo. No BS. We used dark grey font on a white background with traditional blue links.

Other Random Notes:

- We didn’t use a greeting. There was no Hi, Hey, Wuz up, Hello *|First Name|*, etc.  This is practically heresy in email marketing circles and, quite honestly, I’m not sure if this hurt or helped us. The reason we didn’t use the first name greeting is because we didn’t capture the first name in our sign up process. Such noobs, we were. As I’ve learned more about email marketing I’ve certainly used personalized greetings, but I haven’t tested their impact. The main finding here is that you can live without them, so don’t stress if you don’t have them. You can still have a successful email marketing campaign.

- We got greedy and tried to use our emails as a vehicle to drive additional sign ups from a PS link. It didn’t work very well for us so I can’t recommend it. – ryan 

What’s the best product launch email I’ve ever received?

Answer by Ryan Luedecke:

The best examples always come from the guys whose livelihood depends on email.

Ramit Sethi and Mike Geary come to mind.

Here is an excerpt one of Mike Geary’s emails that introduces a new product that he gets a cut from (I took the video link out). I clicked his link instantly. He does so much RIGHT:

1 – Catchy, mysterious subject line
2 – Personalized note that’s from a real person not a company.
3 – Talks about the benefits, but leaves things to the imagination and keeps it vague so that you must click to find out more.
4 – All text email. No templates. No images. No distractions. It looks one of my Gmail contacts sent me a quick note.

From: Mike Geary

Subj: This takes BALLS…

Body:

I wanted to show you something cool today that will really help your business, whether you have an affiliate business or a business as a vendor selling your own products.

To be honest, at this point in my business career, I no longer follow many “gurus”… but there’s one guy that I still consume all of his info every month, because I always learn something new, or a powerful new way to boost my profits or my productivity.  His name is Craig Ballantyne, and although he also runs a fitness business like I do, he also runs a very impressive success-oriented business helping business owners and marketers increase their profits and their productivity.

And if you want to see something that takes BALLS, make sure to watch his video here…

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Email Conversion, Part 1: How to Increase Email Open Rates to 50%+…

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Actual open rate and click rate stats for a newsletter that I published...

Actual open rate and click rate stats for a newsletter that I published…

If you’re a blogger, a startup marketer, or an email list manager. You’ll find this helpful. This is Part 1 in a two part series. It’s also my first post. 

In 2011 I co-created a business in the self help/humor space that eventually built to 1,100+ email subscribers. Every time we sent an email to announce a new blog I would obsess over the number of subscribers who would open it (covered in this blog) and click through (covered in my next blog).

Our open rate hovered around 35% in the early days which is pretty good. I wanted more (don’t we always).

My initial approach to email subject lines was to reuse the title from the blog post I was promoting. The problem was that the blog post title was very specific and gave away all the mystery. So I decided to change things up and researched the tactics of online girly magazines like Cosmo who were rumored to have insane open rates for their articles (they were also serving our niche).

Eventually, I found the perfect strategy for our email subject lines and increased our average open rates from ~35% to ~45% with several open rates exceeding 50%. Here’s a summary of how to replicate what I did:

1. Use mysterious subject titles. When it comes to open rates, peaking your readers curiosity is key. Use mysterious titles where the reader wants a fill-in-the blank type of answer for instant gratification.

2. Write the subject line in all lowercase. More psychology. When your friends send you a quick email, they normally don’t take the time to capitalize their subject lines. Subject lines in all lowercase seem more friendly and inviting, less formal and less corporate.

3. End the subject line with an ellipsis… Some subtle psychology here. The 3-dotted ellipsis indicates to a reader that there is more to come. It’s a punctuation mark that connotes suspense. Use it.

Examples:

I’ve listed out 3 sets of examples. The first group are ultra vague & mysterious subject lines that will work occasionally if you’re desperate for ideas. Don’t overuse these subjects because they can start to annoy your subscribers.

I’ve also listed some example subject lines that I’ve used in the past that are representative of the kinds of titles that get good open rates, are sustainable long-term, and won’t piss your readers off. They are more topic specific while retaining elements of mystery. Finally, I listed a few titles that produced mediocre results for me so you can see the difference between mediocre titles and elite titles.

Get great open rates but might annoy your list:

1. hey…
2. we need to talk about this…
3. something I heard about yesterday…

Get good-to-great open rates and shouldn’t annoy your list:

1. guys cringe when a woman calls herself this…
2. why guys don’t say hi to the hottest girl in the bar…
3. why guys stray and how to prevent it…
4. 1 weird way to lose belly fat…
5. the reply text that guys hate the most…

Yes, I realize these titles only work well in certain niches. You’ll have to extrapolate.

Here’s a few of my emails that had a mediocre open rate response:

1. When is it OK to check your horoscope?
2. duck faces, mirrors, red flags, oh my!
3. #41: She can only cook with an oven

Of note, even our mediocre open rate emails were 30%+, so still not terrible, but I wanted to show the difference between average and elite performers.

In my next blog post, I’ll detail how to improve the body of your emails so that you can improve your click through rate. The method that I used ended up doubling our click through rate. You can check back here in a week or so, or you can subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you a note when it’s ready.

[Update. Part 2 is live on the blog.]

All the best,

Ryan