What Exactly Is 10X Email?

How is your social media engagement? Are you getting enough shares, traffic, and leads to justify your social promotion strategy? Or, are you scratching your head, wondering how you’re going to win the uphill battle that is social media reach today? According to a recent study by BuzzSumo, Facebook reach alone has fallen 20% for brands in 2017.

Note also, that this is even before Facebook’s recent News Feed overhaul. To me, rather than panicking about abysmal organic (and sometimes paid) social media performance, it’s time to invest even more in email. It’s time for 10x Email.

I'm reading What Exactly Is 10X Email? by @garrett_moon via @CoSchedule

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Why Invest In Email Marketing?

Have you heard the stats surrounding email ROI?

Email is 40x more effective than social media for customer acquisition.
Email averages a 3800% return on investment.
Email inboxes are home to 13 hours of employee’s time per week.

For CoSchedule, our email marketing program has been the biggest driver of marketing success, at an average 300% return. Our experience mirrors the numbers experienced by other companies. And if good data is truth, then it’s time every marketer embraces it as a mainstay of their efforts. So, how can you get the most from email marketing?

How To 10x Your Email Marketing Results

Email marketing is such an integral part of CoSchedule’s marketing I devoted an entire chapter to doing it right in my book, 10x Marketing Formula. If you get a chance to pick up the book, awesome. But have no fear, I’ll give you an insider’s look at 10x Email Promotion by sharing an excerpt: To monetize an email list requires that you reverse engineer from paying customer to email subscriber. At CoSchedule, the leading indicator, and most important metric for our marketing team to track for success, is trial signups. We know our trial signups will convert to paid customers at a certain rate. We also know that the more email subscribers we get, the more trial signups we get. And because we meticulously measure all conversions back to their source, we know exactly how many trial signups every email we send should generate. This is important because it’s debunked a marketing myth. Too many marketers are scared of their email lists. They don’t want to send too many emails for fear their audience will unsubscribe. They believe that audiences are fickle and get scared off easily. However, our experience shows that your audience will tolerate daily emails from you if they’re the right fit. And because you’re a 10x marketer creating competition-free content smack dab in the center of your content core, sending fewer emails is simply poor advice. Here’s how we’ve come to see it. To keep the math simple, let’s say we’ve discovered each email will generate ten trial signups so long as we don’t send more than one email per day. Because we’ve measured extensively, we also know that there’s no major uptick in per-email trial signups by sending fewer emails than one per day. So, for us to send any fewer emails would be a huge waste of this major asset. Now, the reason so many marketers are scared of sending too many emails is because they worry about their unsubscribe rates. But here’s a newsflash: unsubscribe rates don’t matter; revenue matters!

Also, our data showed that the increase in unsubscribes due to a greater frequency of daily emails was virtually non-existent. Your email sending frequency should be directly linked to what generates the most revenue. So, when it comes to our email list, we’ve learned to value new subscribers above all else. The more new subscribers we have, the more new customers we have. We believe you’ll find this holds true for you, as well. The real trick is how to build an email list filled with the right audience. And that’s exactly what this stage in the 10x Marketing Formula is all about.

From 0 to 250,000 Subscribers

In the past four years, we’ve worked hard to figure out what works and what doesn’t in email list building. Through copious testing, plenty of failure, and eventual hockey-stick growth, we’ve learned exactly what’s worked for us. The following strategies have helped us go from zero subscribers to more than 250,000 since our first blog post in March of 2013.

Today, we routinely grow by 4,000-plus subscribers each week. We’ve generated these results because, one, every email is extremely relevant to the problems our audience is trying to solve. And two, each email is directly connected to the value CoSchedule itself provides. This means we can quickly grow a list filled with exactly the right people. It grows fast because the content is so damn good—and it’s monetizable because they’re content consumers who will actually turn into customers. It’s worked for the two reasons prior. And we’ve also found a few tactics that consistently amplify our results to the 10x level:

Content upgrades for every blog post
Free tools to help solve major marketing problems that intersect with our product
Competition-free content people are desperate not to miss

Now, let’s dig into how we use each tactic, what makes them work, and how you can use them in your marketing context.

Content Upgrades

A content upgrade is a companion resource to content like blog posts. Often, they are things like templates, calculators, worksheets, or any other document that helps your audience put what you’re teaching them into practice. To use them to build an email list, we gate them behind an email opt-in form. So, they get the resource by paying with an email address. This has become pretty standard practice in content marketing. However, at CoSchedule, we routinely craft such comprehensive content upgrades that we believe people would be willing to pay for them. For example, here’s an example of an eight-piece content upgrade bundle for a single blog post. It’s filled with PDFs, spreadsheet templates, and editable worksheets:

[PDF] Email list building tips template to help beginners get started
[PDF] Email list building guide to help you implement every tactic you learn throughout this blog post.
[Worksheet] Email subject line guide to help you increase your open rates
[PDF] 500 words to use in your blog titles (and therefore, your email subject lines)
[Spreadsheet] Email subject line A/B test spreadsheet template to help you continually improve your subject lines
[PDF] Best time to send email guide to help you reach most of your subscribers according to best practices
[PDF] Best day to send email Google Analytics custom report to help you use your own data to know the days of the week when your audience opens your email
[Custom Report] Best time to send email Google Analytics custom report to help you send emails at the absolute best times when your audience clicks through to read your content

These included guides, spreadsheets, templates, and custom Google Analytics reports are dedicated to helping our readers do absolutely everything we’re about to teach them.

A Content Upgrade Bundle

As of writing this, we have more than 220 content upgrades available in our blog posts. Our content upgrades are a core component of meeting our standard of performance of actionability. They’re always custom designed to contour the content we’re creating. And in total, our content upgrades are responsible for well over one hundred thousand email subscribers. The best part about killer content upgrades is that as long as you’re actually showing people how to solve real problems, the upgrades practically write themselves. All you need to do is format your how-to solutions in a spreadsheet, editable document, or even a printable PDF. If you’re providing actionable value, a content upgrade is a natural result. I know what you're thinking: “I barely have time to write a blog post, much less create a content upgrade.” But what if you just created one fewer post per week and used that time to create a content upgrade? That trade would be worth it, because your list will grow faster even though you’re publishing one less piece per week. That’s a pretty great deal. You could even follow Pat Flynn’s lead and create one content upgrade per month that’s incorporated into every post. This is super efficient, super smart, and undeniably effective. The bottom line here is you should weigh content upgrades as heavily important in your content mix. They allow your value to travel farther, make your content more actionable, and help grow email lists. They’re well worth the investment, and too important to skip.

Content upgrades are well worth the investment, and too important to skip. #10xEmail

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Tools

After content upgrades, our most effective list-building drivers have been free tools. Our top three tools for list building have been

Here are the email subscribers each tool has produced.

Headline Analyzer Studio

In just twenty-four months, the Headline Analyzer tool has contributed about 20 percent of our total list growth. Subscribers Generated: 55,040 Timeframe: 24 months

Click To Tweet WordPress Plugin

In 2013, we built a social sharing plugin called “Click To Tweet” for WordPress. It’s a smart little tool that allows anyone with a WordPress blog to craft readymade tweets for their readers to share with just a click or tap. We gave it away for free, and today, it’s used on over ten thousand websites. This has also helped build our email list, because when you give away stuff that’s this good, people want to know what else you have to offer. Subscribers Generated: 7,407 Timeframe: 4 months

Social Message Optimizer

Our Social Message Optimizer is a free tool that helps marketers write better messages that boost engagement, build trust, drive traffic, and spark conversions. It allows users to type in their message, select which social network it’s written for, and then let our sophisticated algorithm score it. It helps them capture more eyeballs with their messages, getting even more likes, comments, shares, and clicks. It does all this by optimizing according to proven best practices and real data from 6.9 million social media messages analyzed by our team. Subscribers Generated: 1,806 Timeframe: 8 months

Bonus: Email Subject Line Tester

As a bonus, our free Email Subject Line Tester recently launched! Just like our Headline Analyzer Studio, the Email Subject Line Tester is rocket-fueled by real-world data to analyze, score, and suggest optimization for your email subject lines. This means you can write click-worthy subject lines every single time — for free! With this free tool, you can:

Drive more opens
Get more clicks
Enjoy more conversions

Supercharge your subject lines today with this amazing tool.

Have you seen the new Email Subject Line Tester from @CoSchedule?

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Competition-Free Content

Next, we’ve also invested heavily in competition-free content outside of blogging and tools. We have created free courses, an ultimate indexable guide, webinars, and an ebook. Free Marketing Courses (today called CoSchedule Academy)

Here’s the deal: we’ve shared a lot of actionable marketing advice and in-depth how-to content over the years. Our team has published hundreds of articles, hosted scores of webinars, recorded videos, and hosted sixty-plus podcast episodes packed with marketing wisdom. The millions of visitors, downloads, and views tell the story of an audience that craves our content. So, at the beginning of 2017, we asked ourselves, “What’s the next step?” Thus, our free online Marketing Strategy and Social Media Strategy courses were born. Each course offers six lessons packed with worksheets, templates, videos, and guides to create a marketing or social media strategy from scratch in just two weeks. Each student exchanges an email address for access to the course. Subscribers Generated: 14,732 Timeframe: 10 months Live Webinars We’ve offered webinars for everything from marketing strategy to influencer partnerships to product demonstrations. While they’re not a unique platform, the numbers make them worth considering. According to a 2016 “Webinar Benchmarks Report” that analyzed 12,780 webinars:

Webinars attract an average of 233 attendees
Webinar viewers watch an average of 50 minutes
Watchtime has increased by 31.5 percent since 2010
Of global attendees, 20 percent downloaded content, 7 percent submitted questions, and 31 percent responded to polls

Our results have mirrored those of the study. Subscribers Generated: 3,395 Timeframe: 14 months Social Media Strategy Ebook

For us, social media strategy is a content core topic. So, we curated our very best content on the subject, wrote some brand new stuff, and packaged it into a 114-page ebook called Social Media Strategy. It’s a guide to help marketers:

Get organized and take control of their social media strategy
Listen to and connect with their audience’s needs to create content that boosts engagement
Figure out a social media editorial calendar that will quadruple traffic

It’s available as a free download in exchange for an email address. Subscribers Generated: 2,473 Timeframe: 16 months Marketing Strategy Ultimate Guide

Like social media strategy, marketing strategy as a whole is a perennially popular topic. So, our demand generation team laid out their framework for crafting a marketing strategy that includes everything from measuring ROI to results-based budgeting. It’s a goldmine for marketing managers tasked with creating a lean strategy that will get results. This ultimate guide is a microsite organized in ten chapters. The content itself is 100 percent free and ungated—meaning you don’t even have to enter an email address to read it. However, we have multiple worksheets and templates throughout that help marketers put their newfound knowledge into action. We give them access to these resources in exchange for an email address. What’s most impressive is that this guide generated 1,042 email signups in just ten days. Subscribers Generated: 1,587 Timeframe: 2 months

Begin Your Journey To 10x Email Promotion Results Today!

Now, those ideas are just an appetizer for what’s inside of the 10x Email Promotion chapter. If you want to achieve tenfold results, but you don’t want to wait another minute, you can get started right now. For free. Get in on the exlusive access list for exclusive content like… …thought-leader interviews with marketers like Jeff Goins, Noah Kagan, Pat Flynn, Joanna Wiebe, and more! …more detailed insight into the formula. …access to our private 10x Marketing LinkedIn group. …and the first chapter of the book sent straight to you.