Apologies in advance to the folks who follow this blog to learn more about the guitar, music and how to become a better musician. That’s my target demographic. More specifically, those who recognize the value and efficiency of a methodical approach to learning the instrument.
This blog is not about that.
There is a blog category on MasterGuitarSchool.com called, Marketing and Promotion. There are only six blogs in that category; the one you are reading is number 7. That’s 7 out of well over 300 blog titles.
Marketing and Promotion is NOT one of those subjects that I’m passionately interested in; it’s one of the things that is necessary in order to do what I am passionately interested in, which is play the guitar, and consequently, share what I’ve learned about playing the guitar.
As far as I’m concerned, the Marketing and Promotion blogs function to show transparency relative to my business practices and demonstrate that my motivation is truly rooted in the love of music and the guitar. Making a crap-ton of money is not my primary motivation. If it was, you can be sure that I would be waaay more interested in Marketing and Promotion!
A kind of personal mentor to me in the Marketing world who has also been an online guitar teacher since about 2006 (he was in the online game early!) has flipped from focusing on the guitar to focusing on Marketing and Promotion and is now employed outside of the music/guitar field in that capacity. He once told me that he loves sitting at his computer 8 hours a day analyzing stats. More power to him, but no, thank you!
Maybe someday I can afford him or a guy like him to do that kind of thing for me. I would love that!
Until then I’ll muddle along as an amateur hack in this area, doing as little as I can to make it work.
If you’re interested, you can read the backstory of my entrance into Marketing and Promotion at The Fun Has Not Yet Gone Away.
So…I feel compelled to share my latest trial and tribulation in this area. A bunch of crap I have to do in order to be able to do what I love - play the guitar, and make a nominal living at it.
In the process, I hope to show that my primary motivation is the love of the guitar. Ok, I admit that maybe it’s also to vent a little!
When I talk about “list management” I’m talking about an email list. This email list is independent of social media; it’s not Facebook followers or any kind of likes, engagement or interactions on social media (see You're Not Doing Social Media Right!)
I use social media to funnel people to my teaching site, MasterGuitarSchool.com. I optimize the website for search engines and I also have an ad budget.
And although I write because I enjoy it, this blog functions as a marketing tool as well; as a matter of fact, if you are reading this you’re already on my website because MasterGuitarSchool.com hosts this blog.
So I collect email addresses through various means, but ALL of them have either opted in, have downloaded something from the website or have personally contacted me. Merely interacting with me on social media or reading this blog will NOT put you on the list.
So I have my Main List. That’s almost 5,000 at the current time. That’s not a huge list in the online marketing world, but it’s an honest list, honestly gained.
Then there is “list segmentation.”
A little over 1600 of those almost 5,000 are “Site Members.” These are people who have signed up to that segment. That’s my tribe. They are interested enough in my guitar method that they fill out a form and create an account at MasterGuitarSchool.com.
That enables them to access benefits available to Site Members only. For more info see, Why Become a Site Member? (See what I did there? 🙂)
There are many other segments of the Main List. “Customers” are those who’ve downloaded anything. I have 45 downloads available - that’s 45 different “Customers “ lists. I know who’s downloaded what. I have lists for personal students, former students, and so on.
You can see that creating and managing all this is a real headache! Never fear, there are email marketing and list management platforms out there that will do a lot of that for you!
When I first started out with this business model around 2013 or so, my aforementioned mentor referred me to an email list management platform called “Mad Mimi.” I’ve used them ever since.
I dabbled with other platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact and others. I stuck with Mad Mimi because it was simple, functional and intuitive.
I could send an unlimited number of emails for a monthly flat fee based on the size of my Main List.
Most platforms charge a small base rate and/or then charge by the email. The more emails you send the more you pay. I like the monthly flat rate that stays the same no matter how many or how few emails I send. You’ll see why in a minute.
Mad Mimi enabled an optional “second send” 72 hours after the first send that automatically excluded anyone who opened the first send. This upped the “engagement” significantly (“engagement” = anyone who clicked on a link in the email).
My aforementioned mentor told me that sometimes you have to “touch” someone, not just twice, but 8 or 9 times before they’ll open your email. I thought that was excessive.
I decided to test that hypothesis and contacted tech support at Mad Mimi to ask about doing more than one resend. Another thing about Mad Mimi; the response time was minutes, not days!
The guy told me that, statistically, the open rate after the second send wasn't worth it but if I wanted to go to the trouble there was a way to do it manually:
After the automated second send, wait a few days, then export the list of everyone who opened the email. Create a new segment folder for those people. Import the “opened” list to that folder. Then duplicate the original email, send it again and exclude that segment. The duplicate email would have an automatic second send 72 hours later that excludes those who opened. That would be 4 sends and no one who opened would get any of the subsequent sends. That process could be repeated as many times as you want.
What I discovered was that sends 3 through 8 increased my engagement by around 50%! That's engagement, not opens. Many people open but do not engage. 50% more people clicked on a link in the email by sending it 8 times instead of 2. My guy was right. And remember, no one who opens, whether they engage or not, gets any subsequent sends.
If anyone unsubscribes because they keep getting these multiple identical emails that they don’t open, well…I don’t want them on my list anyway, they’re dead weight.
That's why I prefer a flat monthly fee with unlimited emails, rather than paying by the email.
I have close to 5,000 on the list, but will send a single email 25,000 times.
The number I'm primarily interested in is engagement - and the multiple sends increase that significantly.
So that's what I've been doing with Mad Mimi.
The negative side of Mad Mimi is that there is no way to scrub the list. Scrubbing a list entails removing anyone who hasn't opened an email in, say, 6 months. Those people are not engaged.
You create a segment for those folks and run an email campaign targeting them to try and get them to re-engage. If they don't, you delete them. There are list-scrubbing services, but you have to pay to scrub your list. Then you delete your Mad Mimi list and upload the smaller, scrubbed list. It's a hassle.
A scrubbed list has way higher open and engagement rates for obvious reasons. Smaller lists are more engaged lists.
Obviously, Mad Mimi doesn't want you to scrub your list because their fee is based on your list size. Even unsubscribed and bounced emails are counted, though excluded in sends. In their defense, when I talked to the tech support guy about this issue he told me that, if I wanted to scrub the list, to let him know and he would do it for me manually. I never took him up on that, but was recently getting ready to do it because my list size was approaching the next trigger point (5,000) at which my monthly fee would go up. Then this happened:
They gave their customers a couple of months notice, and that was it. All gone.
Just to be safe I downloaded all my list segment folders. I didn’t really need to, I have all the data elsewhere but you can’t be too careful. In this world, the list is everything!
Based on Mad Mimi's referral I signed up at GoDaddy and migrated all my Mad Mimi data.
Short story, I sent one email newsletter to my main list on August 13 through GoDaddy. I couldn't figure out how, or if, I could automate a second send, never mind multiple sends (I can’t imagine them not having that feature but I couldn’t figure it out).
They charged a flat rate but there was an upper limit (100,000) on how many emails you could send a month. At my current list size and activity, that limit would be ok for a while but I could foresee paying more and more as my list grew and kept bumping me up to the next level payment plan.
Maybe I’m just old, but the interface was generally confusing and I was very frustrated. I deleted the GoDaddy account before the free trial period ended.
I did a bunch of research and found FloDesk. It looked very promising. I signed up for a month-long free trial and dived in. I immediately got the hang of it. The learning curve to functionality was quick. Maybe I’m not so old, maybe it was GoDaddy.
FloDesk is similar to Mad Mimi, only better!
I pay a flat-rate monthly fee (it's about 25% more expensive than what I was paying at Mad Mimi but that’s still tolerable) and I get unlimited emails, unlimited subscribers, and access to all email features - list segmentation, in-depth stats etc.
Note: unlimited subscribers. Unlike Mad Mimi, the fee does not go up as my list grows! I think that’s amazing! I'm very happy with that! That’s why the monthly fee is “still tolerable.”
There is a second-send option that automatically excludes any previous opens. So far, so good. I contacted tech support about multiple sends. The response time was a little over 24 hours. I was satisfied with the response although it was not as quick as Mad Mimi.
Unfortunately, I have to do it manually the same way I was doing it at Mad Mimi.
HELLO FLODESK!
I would love to have at least 8 sends, 72 hours apart, on a single email that could be automated and would automatically exclude all previous opens.
But get this; FloDesk enables list-scrubbing at no extra cost! That is sweet! That’s another reason the increased monthly fee is “still tolerable.”
I sent out an email as a test (including several resends) and offered my Main List a bunch of free downloads.
In the interest of transparency; if you go to that email link above AND download any of the free lessons there, you will be on my list, if you’re not already!
Based on that test, the tech support response, and the similarity to Mad Mimi, I committed to FloDesk and paid for my first month.
I was just getting ready to launch Unit 7: 9th Chords of my guitar method, Vertical Truth: Chordal Mechanisms for the Guitar when I got the notice that Mad Mimi was going away.
I'm going to wait a month or two and make sure FloDesk works for me before committing to an important launch, like that one is going to be. At this point, all indications are positive - we'll see.
I intend to use FloDesk until further notice. After six or seven months I’m going to scrub my list and continue on from there.
I’ve been told by one of my current students that he doesn’t open every email but he wants to stay on the list.
The best way to ensure that you don’t get scrubbed is to OPEN at least one email from Master Guitar School every month. There are many months where the Main List only gets one email anyway (if you’re a Site Member you’ll get notified whenever a new blog is published, which can be as much as 4 times a month).
You don’t have to engage; you don’t have to click on a link, you don’t have to download anything - simply open the email. If you don’t open an email in six months, odds are you’ll get scrubbed!
Make sure that emails from Master Guitar School aren’t being relegated to your spam folder. I follow all Best Practices to avoid the spam folder but sometimes it happens anyway.
Now, in spite of all the detail in this post, having to do all this maneuvering just to be able to stay in touch with the folks who are interested in what I do really irritates me! Why?
Because it takes time away from what I really love to do, which is to just play the guitar.
All day. Every day.
P.S. After this blog was published I notified FloDesk about it. They said,
“Thanks for letting us know! We loved the article. We see that you didn't use a discount or affiliate code to sign up. We added one for you, so you'll get 50% off the next 12 months.”
That makes my monthly fee for the next 12 months over 30% cheaper than what I was paying at Mad Mimi!
Which illustrates THE core principle of my own business:
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS EVERYTHING!
P.P.S. The situation with Mad Mimi illustrates one of the reasons I also release the newsletter as a blog. If my followers want to reference past newsletters for any reason, well…all those Mad Mimi newsletters are gone. But the blogs are still there, because the blogs are hosted by MasterGuitarSchool.com, not Mad Mimi.
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