2 builders who never spoke to each other

Send in waves, tightest segment first

Mailing everyone at once wastes the strongest audience on the same message as the coldest one and makes the whole day a single roll of the dice. Starting with the people who opted in for this product, then widening over hours or days, lets you read the response between waves and keeps the last reminder off the list that never asked for it.

The method

1. 01

   Segment every send by which topic the subscriber has shown interest in rather than mailing the whole list.

2. 02

   Restrict the first launch email sequence to the slice of your list that has already clicked on or bought related content, rather than mailing everyone.

3. 03

   Hold the larger, less targeted list back as a second wave rather than mailing everyone at once.

4. 04

   Break the mailing list into segments and stagger the sends across launch day so the votes trickle in instead of arriving as one suspicious spike.

5. 05

   Send your launch email to your list in batches rather than all at once, and expect wildly different reactions between segments.

What it returned

• 10

  Across 10 emails in one month, recipient counts ranged from 843 to 11,262 depending on segment

• 8,500

  First launch went to a design-interested subset of about 8,500-9,000 recipients; the second launch went to the full 16,000

• 1,800

  The 1,800-strong dedicated list got the launch email first; the 6,000-person main list was mailed at the end of day two

• 1,345

  1,345 emails sent, 633 opened (47%), 208 clicked through to the listing (15%).

Sources

• How I got 2,000 new subscribers from Product HuntHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · Step 5 - Leverage · undated
• $36,297 in 24 hours: behind the scenes of The App Design Handbook launchNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Let's talk about email · 2013-11-11
• Should you launch more than once? I’ve got $58,332 as evidence.Nathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Launch #1 – January 14th, 2014 · 2014-02-28
• How a music teacher used Authority to make $34,500Nathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · How were the revenue and sales from the book? · 2015-06-02
• An update on The Audience Building ChallengeNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · A few numbers · 2013-12-12
• The Indie Hackers "30 Days of Growth" challengeCory Zue · coryzue.com · Day 22 · 2019-07-01