Was gonna write about something else entirely – Mrs. Maisel – but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
So last week a prospect reached out to me for some email copy.
The brief would be to create a text-only, direct response-style email flow for abandoned checkout which we will be split testing against a ‘designed’ abandoned checkout flow. happy to hear counter points to best number / type of emails in the flow with any data you have. Looking for a quote for this please!
Sounds reasonable?
Sure it does…
If you’re retarded.
Now I already knew the answer to this question but I asked him anyway before telling him what I thought of his brief (don’t worry, I was nice.)
How many sales are you getting daily? How many abandoned carts are you getting daily?
His reply:
0 and 0. This is a new brand we haven’t launched yet.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
I’m gonna spell it out for ya anyway.
The main problem is he’s got his priorities ass-backwards.
All of his energy and investment should go into customer acquisition until he hits is first million in sales.
Spending even one braincell of thought on A/B testing rich text vs designed cart abandonment emails…
When you haven’t launched the goddamn brand yet…
Is a waste of fucking time.
The secondary problem is statistical significance.
Now I’m no nerd in a labcoat but in order to run a successful A/B test you have to understand a bunch of statistical shit like…
Hypotheses, sampling, p-values, etcetera, etcetera.
Long story short, this is why the vast majority of marketing testing is bullshit…
Because barring a few professionals, most people don’t understand this stuff.
Pop quiz:
How long will it take you to get to statistical significance on an A/B test when you have zero traffic?
Infinity hours that’s how long.
So here was my response to said prospect.
A/B testing your abandoned cart isn’t a good use of your time or money.
See? Told you I was nice.
Good thing I have this email list.
So what can we learn from this prospect Reader?
Here’s what you can learn if you’re a business
- Don’t waste your time and money A/B testing anything until you’ve gotten to $1 million in revenue.
- Designed vs rich-text is a stupid test to bother with in the first place. Just pick one and stick to it because…
- You don’t need to send perfect emails (you can’t even if you tried.) You need to send a lot of emails. You need a lot of copy, period. All this hair splitting and pedantry will do nothing but slow you down and make you less money.
The more copy you can write and the faster you can publish it, the more money you’ll make.
Here’s what you can learn if you’re a copywriter:
- If you don’t know them and are unsure of their competence, never take the prospect’s question at face value. In many cases they have no idea what the hell they’re doing and it’s up to you to be the adult in the room. Always ask follow-up questions.
- Not always, but often, stupid inquiries like these are a red flag and you should be wary of taking people like this on as clients. If you’re new and can’t afford to lost the prospect, do what you have to do but keep it transactional and don’t make any concessions.
- It takes time and experience to develop your intuition so you know when to push back. That’s why it helps to have someone more experienced in your corner to guide you.
On the third point, I had office hours this morning for CopySkills™ and one of our members had a specific pricing question for a prospect.
We worked through the pricing and we also role-played how to have the sales conversation.
Tomorrow, I’ll be giving our members’ feedback on their copy during our copy critique office hours.
On Wednesday, we have cold outreach office hours.
Plus if you can’t make the office hours you can ask any question or submit any copy for critique in our Circle community.
Just make sure you ask good questions, because I call out stupidity in the community.
– Nabeel