If you are the kind of person who has a membership site or wants a membership site, you probably like to have fancy stuff, like to have the bells and whistles. And if a certain feature exists, if a certain marketing tactic is possible, you’re definitely going to want to try to pursue it. Right? Wrong. You need to keep your site simple – because most people who will avoid keeping their site simple never get the site launched in the first place. So, the answer to most of the fancy stuff such as split testing emails is you do not want to do it and there are many reasons why.
First of all, instead of split testing your emails, you should be focusing on split testing your sales letter. You could spend all day testing and tracking and figuring things out, but at the end of the day, you have the same 24 hours that everyone else in the world does. So, why would you waste it testing out silly things?
If somebody is on your email list and you’re going to be sending out emails to them regularly and you’re going to be launching a product properly, meaning sending out 5 to 10 emails whenever you launch something, then they’re going to open up your email and click on your link sooner or later. And if not, then they are simply not a responsive subscriber. So, it doesn’t really matter if you split test emails just so you send out a lot of emails.
What about open rates? Let me tell you something from a technical standpoint. When you test email open rates, what your autoresponder service does is embed an image in your email messages. Unfortunately, spammers also use this technique to figure out if the junk mail messages they send are actually opened. For this very reason, many email clients block these types of trackers, so your open rate tracking is not going to be very accurate at all. If you get a 50% open rate, that doesn’t necessarily mean that only half of your subscribers have opened up your email, the number could be much higher but the tracking image is simply blocked in their email client.
So, things like subject line split testing, things like open rates are not very accurate anyway. So, just stay away from the fancy stuff. As far as integrating autoresponders with your membership site, you should integrate an autoresponder with your membership site. This is one of the things that is very important.
So, have an opt-in box inside your membership site and have some kind of auto-subscribe functionality to automatically get somebody who buys into your membership site to get on your list and this is included with most membership software such as Wishlist member.
Now, why would you want to have both? Why would you want to have the auto-subscribe feature plus the manual subscribe feature inside the membership site? There are many reasons. Somebody might join your membership site and then accidentally unsubscribe from your autoresponder sequence and they want to get joined back in. So, make it easy so they can log in, enter their name and email address one more time and get back on the list. Another reason is that some people have one email address dedicated only to processing their payments and another towards receiving emails. So, if they happen to use their payment email when they sign up for your membership site or they just type in the wrong email and for whatever reason, they’re not getting your messages, they can opt in using that form on the inside to the email address they are used to for receiving messages. Pretty simple.
So, most fancy things like split testing emails and tracking open rates are not important but some fancy things, the basics, like integrating your membership site and your autoresponder is very important. It’s one thing to be told how to do some of these things, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a real how-to step-by-step video, taking you by the hand, and walking you through every step of the way? I think so.
To get access to those videos, visit www.membershipcube.com right now.