Email Opt-In Funnels for Books… and why they’re awful

Online gurus often pedal the email opt-in method for selling books. It goes something like this:

1. Run ads on Facebook to an ‘opt-in’ page
2. Email the ‘opt-in’ bribe
3. Build an email list
4. Email your list and promote your book to them

The Reasoning Behind The Madness

It sounds good in principle. The gurus usually pedal this under the guide of ‘build a list and you can keep selling to that list for life’. And it’s sort of true. But not really.

I’ve built two email lists over the years:

• One of nearly 5,000 people, using the above method but with free articles. I would guest post articles on a website, advertise a freebie at the end of the article, people would click through, sign up for my freebie then I could email them.
• One of 9,000 people (and counting) that is built by my book sales on autopilot.
• I’m building a second free email list using a pop-up on a blog I run, mainly as a way to test ideas and show how flawed this approach is (but hey, maybe I’ll eat my hat).

I’ve done a bit of selling to both of them, so I have some experience in this field. All the lists are in the same niche.

To the first list, I promoted an online info product. Out of my list of nearly 5,000 people, I sold three copies. Not great. I made maybe $200. I couldn’t keep up with the weekly article writing and eventually let the list ‘go cold’.

To the second list I’ve sold several hundred copies of various products and courses, amounting to over $20,000, in 18-24 months. Not huge amounts by internet marketing standards, but I’ll take it.

Why One List Is Much More Productive

Now this isn’t an entirely fair comparison, I was selling very different things, and my second list of buyers have been emailed much more frequently. Maybe comparing the first promotion to each list would be a slightly fairer comparison?

The first and only promotion to the list of 5,000 was about $200. The first promotion to the list of 9,000 was around $2,700 in sales. Still a big disparity.

Here’s the thing. People that sign up for free stuff like free stuff. People that pay for something are willing to pay for something.

It’s that simple.

If you build a giant list of freebie hunters, selling to them is going to be a lot harder.

The Maths Behind The List

There is another serious flaw in the ‘build a list first’ method - the maths are not favourable.

At every stage of the process the user moves through, there is going to be an attrition rate:

• Only some people who see your ads will click through to the landing page
• Only some people who see the landing page will opt-in
• Only some people who opt-in will open your emails
• Only some people who read your emails will click the sales link
• Only some people who click the sales link will read the landing page
• Only some people who read the landing page will checkout your product

And we can probably find more steps that we’ve skipped through for brevity. The more steps we put between first seeing your ads and buying something, the less people will complete the process. It’s pretty simple.

Let’s compare that to offering your paid product first:

• Only some people who see your ads click on them
• Only some people who see your sales page will read it
• Only some people who read your sales page will buy the product

A lot fewer steps… and a lot more sales.

Some Numbers

We can run some numbers on this.

On a good day, I can sell a book for £4.50, by having ads that point directly to my sales page.

In order to sell a book for £4.50, how would an opt-in funnel have to perform? Let’s run through the steps backwards, using numbers I’ve seen from my various endeavours over the years:

• Checkout completion: 40%
• Sales page conversion: A generous 15%
• Clicking the link in the email: 3%
• Opt-in page conversion: 50% (this is for the very best)

In order to sell a book for £4.50, we need to get a cost per lead of £0.0041.

Considering you have to run ads to developed countries in the first place (sorry but no-one in Africa or Southern Asia is buying your book), this is a completely unrealistic number.

This type of funnel might work if you have the absolute best funnel in the game… but you don’t.

Why not make it easy for yourself and just sell the book?

The Alternative

So what’s the alternative? Here’s what I’ve been doing to sell over 14,000 copies of my books:

1. Facebook ad
2. User lands on sales page
3. User clicks through to Shopify checkout, using Buy Now button app
4. User buys
5. Book is delivered by Digital Downloads Shopify app, or I post it to them

Pretty simple.