Spam hammer slam

Got some great predictions from readers about what happens when you send a series of 13 offers to 80,004 unresponsive email subscribers.

My favorite was:

As someone who sends a lot of emails, I love this practice. My guess is (1) your MailChimp account got banned because of the number of spams/complaints and (2) that you barely got any (if at all) sales or else you wouldn’t keep deleting subscribers it.

Going into this I was fully expecting the account to get suspended.

In the past I seen MailChimp slap accounts because of high unsubscribes or too many “bounces” from bad addresses.

To my surprise they turned a blind eye in this case.

So what kind of response did we get?

To recap briefly, here’s what we sent these pruned subscribers:

  • One email promoting our most popular lead magnet, with a “one-click subscribe” link.
  • A series of 6 emails offering a bundle of 5 courses with a real-world value of over $1000 at the fire-sale price of $99.
  • A series of 6 other emails with our most successful affiliate offers.

When the first email went out, the first thing that happened was we got a HUGE number of bounces—about 5% of the addresses no longer existed.

The next thing that happened was, we got HAMMERED with spam complaints—52 of them in total.

(The average for the active part of this list is maybe 2-3 per WEEK.)

Keep in mind that these subscribers had previously opted in—this wasn’t a cold email blast—and we were offering them a freebie.

When the dust settled on this first email, a grand total of 281 of the 80,004 subscribers we’d started with chose clicked the link to opt themselves back in.

That’s a rate of 0.35%.

Clicked a SINGLE link.

To get a valuable piece of content.

For FREE.

I can’t emphasize enough how low the bar was set here.

So what about sales?

Did we shake loose some buyers from this slew of slumbering subscribers?

Conclusion tomorrow.

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