This weekend I ran a sponsored ad in one of my favorite email newsletters.

(btw, welcome, if you’re one of the new subscribers!)

But…

I messed the whole thing up.

And by that I mean, I could have gotten way more out of it.

Admittedly, I’ve been lazy. My family is visiting and I let the ball drop.

What went wrong? Just a few things I should have planned for and worked on, but didn’t:

• My landing page sucks. It’s not descriptive, it doesn’t set the proper expectations or value upfront, and a lot more…
• I don’t really have a welcome email sequence in place, just a simple welcome email…
• I still don’t have any sort of analytics installed on my site…
• I don’t do anything to keep people on the site in case they are about to leave…
• I don’t have an incentive, or small, actionable product people can download when subscribing…

Talk about practicing what I preach, ha?

The thing is, I still managed to get a handful of subscribers from the sponsorship, which is great.

But it also makes me wonder, what if…

Anyway, this is also GREAT because I can use these mistakes as learning opportunities and, most importantly, to hopefully teach you something in the process – through real world examples.

And that’s why this week will be all about…

…drum roll please…

…. email funnel optimization! 🎉

That’s right my nerdy friends, together we’ll look at how I plan on improving my email newsletter sign up flow, copy and overall experience.

Then, I’ll run another sponsored ad and we’ll compare the results.

I love accountability.

So here’s what we’ll work on in this week’s sprint and in what order:

1. My landing page sucks. 👉🏻 I’ll rewrite it, expand it and walk you through the exact process. So you can do the same with any landing page – coming tomorrow
2. I don’t really have a welcome email sequence in place 👉🏻 I’ll select my favorite past newsletter issues and design a nice little sequence new subscribers will receive automatically. So we curate their experience better and offer more value right away – to do Wednesday 14th
3. I still don’t have any sort of analytics installed on my site 👉🏻 I’ll install Google Analytics and Hotjar on my site so we can look at what people do on the site when they land from the sponsored ad. And we can adjust for anything that’s not working – to do Thursday 15th
4. I don’t do anything to keep people on the site in case they are about to leave 👉🏻 to brainstorm next week
5. I don’t have an incentive, or small, actionable product people can download when subscribing 👉🏻 to brainstorm next week

I’m keeping the last two items for next week because we first, need to orient ourselves a bit around the initial optimization work, and take it from there.

And you’ll get all the exact steps and walkthroughs – in just 2-5 minutes of reading each day.

Straight to the juice, no fluff.

That’s all for today, hope you’re ready.

It’s going to be fun.

If you want to spread the word, just share this link with your friends (and just tell them we’re about to make that page convert 10x more, right before their very eyes).

Quote and reflection of the day:

“If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first.” – Seth Godin, The practice

It’s easy to blame ourselves or think others are special when we see we don’t have what it takes. But only because we don’t go through the hard work and we don’t experience the rejection, the failure – and the learnings that go with those. We’re afraid of losing parts or ourselves, our identity. When in reality that’s exactly the weight that’s holding us back.