Chapter 15 Homework - 

Set Up Your Mailing List for Success 

This chapter’s homework will recap all we’ve went through 

and put it into practice: 

1. Sign up with an email service provider. I suggest Mailchimp, 

but if you’re dealing with affiliate marketing then use Aweber. 

2. Create some sort of an incentive to get your users to sign up. 

This could be a short guide, 

an industry report, 

free Bitcoins 

or anything else you think is relevant 

to your target audience. 

3. Set up your first list and web form. 

Each email service provider will have their own tutorials 

on how to do this. 

4. Start collecting emails by placing the email form on your website. 

Ideally you’d want to put multiple versions 

on it via Thrive Leads or Optin Monster 

(pop up, top bar, after post etc.). 

5. Make sure to create a customized thank you page 

for your subscribers, 

explaining to them what happens next. 

6. Create a welcome email to your subscribers. 

Decide on what form of communication you’re going to use - formal or personal. 

7. Continue to test, track and optimize your email marketing messages. 

My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets 

 Additional advice about email marketing Before we end this chapter, I’d like to share some final pointers regarding email marketing:  Don’t EVER deal with buying or selling email addresses. This is bad practice and will come back and haunt you later on.  Make sure you track and test everything, don’t just take my word for it (although you can use my word as a starting point).  Make sure to send out emails on a regular basis. There’s no use in just collecting emails and not sending anything out. If you do this, once you decide to send you’ll be amazed by how low your open rate is and how many people mark you as SPAM. People have short term memories when it comes to subscribing to stuff online, make sure to keep them engaged.  Write emails that you’d like to read yourself, make sure to send yourself a test email before each broadcast and ask yourself - “Would I open this email? Would I want to read this?”  For advanced users, if you want to track your email marketing campaigns in Google Analytics use this guide. 270 www.99bitcoins.com

 My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets 

 Chapter 15.6: Email Hack - 

How To Get 1,000 Bitcoin Subscribers In A Week 

This next hack is something I use very often 

to bump the number email list subscribers I get. 

Once a month I will hold some sort of a giveaway, 

but with a twist... 

Here’s a breakdown of how it’s done: 

1. I choose a very compelling product - for example, a ticket to InsideBitcoins or a Bitcoin hardware wallet like TREZOR. Since I know not everyone would want this prize I also allow the contestants to receive the value of the gift in Bitcoins instead. 

2. I set up the giveaway using the KingSumo giveaway plugin. This is a paid WordPress plugin which basically takes care of every aspect of the giveaway for you. 

3. I make sure to promote my giveaway on the relevant social channels as explain in Chapter 14. 

If you want a full demonstration of how it’s done you can read this excellent blog post by Josh Earl which is actually how I found out about this plugin. 

If you want to see the different giveaway on 99Bitcoins click here. 

Just so you’ll understand the potential of this, in the last giveaway 

I ran I got over 1,000 valid subscribers for a $50 giveaway and all within a week. 

The reason these giveaways are so powerful is because they allow other contestants to increase their chance of winning by bringing in more contestants. 

So basically each contestant becomes sort of an affiliate for your contest which makes it pretty easy to go viral. I had one guy that brought in another 150 people on board, and I didn’t have to do anything for it. 

My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets 267 www.99bitcoins.com Chapter 15.5: Optimizing Your Email Bounce And Complaint Rate An email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that could not be delivered, mostly due to an invalid email address. In order to eliminate this rate to almost zero I’d suggest the following: Use double opt-in confirmation - By default this option will be set to “on” on almost any email service provider. It just means that the user will have to take an additional step to confirm his subscription by clicking a link in an email sent to home. This makes sure that you’re getting an actual valid email address and although it may lower your sign up rates, it’s worth it in the long run29 . It’s also legally required in order to collect visitor emails by the CAN-SPAM act. Ask for “work email” or “primary email” - As stupid as it may sound, inside the email text box ask the user to enter their primary or work email. Also make it clear that in order to receive the incentive he’ll have to actually access the address he put it. 

Clean up your list once a month - If you’re doing things right your email list will start to build up pretty soon. I suggest you clean it up once a month by removing inactive subscribers. This is good since it not only lowers your bounce rate but it also allows you to pay only for subscribers who actually read your emails. It’s up to you to decide what is considered an “inactive subscriber”. For example, I delete anyone who hasn’t opened any of my emails in the past two months. Considering I send out one email a week, someone who didn’t open my last eight emails probably isn’t going to start now.  

29 http://blog.mailchimp.com/double-opt-in-vs-single-opt-in-stats/

My Dirty Little Bitcoin 

Chapter 15.4: Optimizing Your Email Click Through Rate Once you get enough people opening your emails you now need to make sure they actually follow through on the actions you want them to take. The industry benchmarks for CTR on emails is usually between 1.6%-4.6%, exact figures can be viewed here. My own emails reach a CTR of around 6% (this is out of the total emails sent), here’s how I do it: Use a small amount of links - Don’t bombard your subscribers with too many links. Usually figure out what’s the main action you want your readers to take and only insert up to two links. For example, if I want to update my readers on a new post that is out I’ll send out something like this: 

__________________________________________________

================================================

As you can see there are only two links, both which are leading to the same post. This message got a 6.7% click through rate. Anchor text should be attractive - Anchor text refers to the text which is highlighted by the link. Most people just use “click here” or “read now” which is fine, but if you look at the example above you’ll see how I use a more benefit driven anchor text to make the link more attractive. I try to convey what they will receive if they actually click the link. No “funny looking” links - Try to format all links to have anchor text. This is very easy if you’re using HTML, but if you’re using plain text you may find yourself needing to post links with long strings of character. This may scare some visitors away. My suggestion in this case is to use a URL shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl.

Secrets 266 www.99bitcoins.com 

My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets 

Chapter 15.3: Optimizing Your Email Open Rate The first thing you’d want to work on is boosting your email open rate. If no one opens your emails, no one is going to click on them. To get an idea of what’s a good open rate here are some industry benchmarks by Mailchimp. 

I can tell you that I get around a 26% open rate to my emails which is above average. Here are some quick tips to optimizing your open rate: 

Headline - Since this is the only thing the user sees before deciding if he’s going to open your email or delete it you have to have a good headline. Use all of the techniques we’ve talked about before and also make sure to personalize it if possible. 

If you collect your subscriber’s name as well as his email you can add his name in the headline via the email service provider - that usually gets higher open rate. 

Optimizing the sender’s name can also generate a greater open rate. I like using this formula: [my first name] from [my company name]. So emails that you will receive from me will be sent from: Ofir from 99Bitcoins. You can easily set this up via your email service provider as well. 

Last but not least you should make sure your emails are sent during the right time. Studies have shown28 that the best time to send emails is usually on weekdays between 8am-10am. This of course varies according to your industry (check the reference for different industry analysis). 

From my own experience, the Bitcoin related emails I send out tend to perform best when they are sent on weekdays. Since I cater many countries on my blog it’s hard to time my email broadcasts but I usually send them around 4pm GMT. Coindesk and CryptoCoinsNews send their newsletter out at 2pm GMT. 28    

264 www.99bitcoins.com 

https://blog.mailchimp.com/insights-from-mailchimps-send-time-optimization-system/ 

My Dirty Little Bitcoin Secrets 

 Avoid the SPAM folder/promotion tab - People can’t open your emails if they don’t find them. In order to avoid hitting the SPAM folder or promotions tab on Google it’s advised to instruct your readers to look for your first email and whitelist it. 

Here’s an example: 

I also created a short animated tutorial about the promotions tab here. 

One of the best ways to insure your emails get into your reader’s primary inbox is getting them to reply to one of your emails. In 99Bitcoins I use two different methods for this. The first, is that I ask for my subscribers to send me a short intro about themselves before I send them the complimentary Bitcoins. 

Second, after 2 weeks of being subscribed I send a follow up email asking them for some feedback on the blog, here’s how it looks:

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