The reason is that it's not a blog entry. It's the "read in a browser" version of Patrick's amazing email course.
Lots of people signed up for it when it was new, and even though Patrick specifically asked that it not be submitted here, every mail was. Now we get the occasional repost from people who are just now working their way through the course.
That it is occasionally updated and has no date stamp should therefore not come as a surprise.
A tip if you already use lifecycle programs: Set up your marketing automation tool to automatically unsubscribe your recipients from the program, if they are not opening the first 2-3 emails (thereby showing a lack of interest in the specific program). This allows you to keep a higher percentage of email permissions, which you can use for less frequent communication.
Otherwise a large part of the uninterested segment will end up revoking their email permission, i.e. Unsubscribing from your permission base entirely.
On the other hand, measuring email opens is far from perfect - the user can have images off - and you could unsubscribe users who are actually reading your stuff.
That's very true, you'd be unsubscribing some false positives. Usually this is marginal though, and it's a tradeoff worth taking except if your recipient group have an abnormally high use of image off. Also, you can decrease the percentage by hosting content on a landing page since in most tools, a click will also register an open.
Not sure it's possible to automate easily since mailchimp is a rather simple esp. I might be mistaken though, it's been a while since I used them. You could probably solve it through the API or at least through a bit of recurring manual work.
I tried the "WPEngine speed report" link described in this, and got back a slightly humorous result:
> What If WP Engine Were Your WordPress Hosting Company?
> 0% faster total page-load time!
> Using the techniques detailed below, moving your blog to
> WP Engine would shave 0.0 seconds off your page-load time..
Not meaning to belittle the service, which I'm sure is excellent, but there's a lesson there about preparing automatic reports...
For any WPEngine employees reading: I now trust you almost completely on the subject of website speed.
This is the perfect opposite of e.g. the A/B testing company that will show a statistically significant improvement from no change at all -- if I see that you aren't overstating the case, I care about the results and trust they are valid.
Actually it looked more like a possible bug. WPEngine's report gave me an "F" grade on 4 of its 6 result categories (my site is just wordpress out of the box), plus it reported a great many metrics to many significant digits, so it'd be odd if everything came out precisely equal to their offering. (There was no detail on where the "0%" came from, though.)
1. You could be on us already so we'd say "Hey, can't be faster than us, on us"
2. The speed test API could have gotten wonky and not returned a result.
3. Could be a bug
I'll check on if any of those are true and thanks for the heads up.
I don't quite get the supposed-earnings math on the "$200-an-email" example. Sure, you get cash up front - but at the cost of one month's fees (the prepay discount).
Whether that's a win would seem to depend on other variables never discussed, for example what your cost of cash is from other sources, and whether the year-prepay has other benefits (like preventing mid-year lapses due to payment problems or customer second thoughts).
The answers to these questions, and why they're not addressed at length there, is:
1) The typical SaaS company has no meaningful ability to raise capital at cheaper terms than pre-pays offer. If you could get a bank loan for 5% a year, then you actually have to do math here, but you can't get a bank loan for 5% a year as a SaaS company. It's virtually impossible. Not only can my business not get a bank loan, large, successful SaaS companies find it difficult to raise meaningful amounts of money on the terms that e.g. a restaurant would get if they pledged the real estate as collateral.
If you speak to more specialized lenders, you can get them to loan you money based on your existing revenue, but the cost is typically > 10% on an APR basis. If you speak to less-specialized alternative small business lenders, you can easily end up in the 30% region. (OnDeck, for example.) Or you could do merchant cash advantages, which are up their with payday loans, except company-sized.
2) A rule-of-thumb for churn rates on month-to-month SaaS is +/- 5% before you start really working on it, 3% after you've done significant work on that, and 2% if you're among the most successful in the industry. This implies that you expect to lose between ~22% and ~46% of customers in the first 12 months. The yearly discount costs you ~8% and locks in those first 12 months of revenue. Assuming people willing to accept that deal are not a-prior wildly better customers than the median customer at the best month-to-month SaaS companies, it's net-beneficial virtually every time.
I see how "$200" works strictly as a cash-in-door number – though at the expense of later profits.
Toy setup matching the post's parameters:
STARTING SITUATION:
10 customers at $200/month
= $2,000 cash this month and next 11 months
over 12 months = $24,000 expected revenue
BUT INSTEAD:
send 10 emails, 1 customer prepays $2200 (instead of $200)
= $4,000 cash this month
then $1800/month next 11 months
over 12 months = $23,800 revenue
So, this month, the 10 emails brought in $2,000 extra cash – hence, "$200-per-email".
But of course it's just pulling revenue forward (borrowing from customers). And, it's at a rather steep effective interest rate: over 17% per year.
So while it's cash-flow positive, it's only profitable if there's some combination of (1) productive places to invest that money; and (2) improved mid-year retention of the prepaid customers – that together return more than the ~17% cost.
It actually leaves you with more money, due to churn being reduced to 0 for that customer for a year. Assuming a somewhat idealized 5% churn, you'll get numbers floating in this ballpark:
This works for churn = 2% and churn = 3% as well, but the difference is smaller (still favors the yearly discount, though). If you have a churn of 1%, then the yearly discount costs you money, but you still get the cash immediately, which is so useful I'd do still do it.
EDIT: It should be noted that the churn rate you care about here is the churn rate of people who would be willing to make a year-long precommit (more loyal customers in general), but I don't see them as being 1% churn level, as 'patio11 alluded to above.
This comment is complete BS. If this isn't your thing, that's fine, but Patio11 is generous with his time, advice, and best practices. Moreover, unlike most of the marketing types out there, he has put all of his suggestions into practice.
Comments like this represent everything wrong with our community. It was not constructive in any way, and it was not meant to help the author. Rather, it was meant to be spiteful and mean.
If you have ever successfully done internet (and in particular, email) marketing, you would know that this is not BS.
Targeted emailing works. Your potential customers are engaging with you for a reason, they often need some kind of activation energy (that speaks to their situation) in order to enter their credit card information.
HN users have traditionally been very interested in sharing their experiences in the software business (among, obviously, many other interests). If that doesn't interest you, that's quite alright, but it's not "hucksterism".
Also, 'patio11 is one of HN's most valued contributors (as evidenced by his position on the leaderboard). That doesn't mean that he should be exempted from any criticism, but I think in any healthy community it would at least merit a level of respect that your comment lacks.
> 'patio11 is one of HN's most valued contributors (as evidenced by his position on the leaderboard). That […] would at least merit a level of respect that your comment lacks.
No. Being a person is what should afford him due respect, but being a celebrity (or “most valued contributor”) should emphatically not grant him any privileges.
EDIT: Please note that I am agreeing with the fact that patio11 deserves more respect, and that username223 was disrespectful. (I am merely disagreeing with napoleond’s stated reasons for why username223 should have been more respectful.)
That is neither a description of how the world works nor is it a description of how the world should work. In human communities, social structures evolve around concepts like respect. It's anti-social for newcomers (or anyone else) to disregard those structures, regardless of whether or not it would otherwise be logical to do so.
In theory, HN allows a short-cut past all the social stuff by requiring disagreements to be stated in terms of facts. Of course it doesn't always work out that way in practice, but this is not such an instance because the comment that started this sub-thread didn't provide any substance at all behind its assertions and basically amounted to name-calling.
EDIT to add: Of course I agree that there is a basic level of respect that every person deserves. I'm just pointing out that it's possible to "level up" on that.
I think two issues are being conflated here – the issue of whether one should be reasonably respectful, and the issue of whether social or other status should garner increasing respect. I only meant to disagree with you on the latter, not on the former.
From the TV series Kung Fu, episode Sun and Cloud Shadow (season 1, episode 8, 1972):
Master Po: “In the pond there are some lotuses which stand above the water. And though their roots feed, they are themselves untouched by it. Some others have risen only to the water's level. And others, are still under water.”
Young Caine: “Shall I seek to measure these differences, Master, that I may treat them differently, each according to his growth?”
Master Po: “Examine the flower. Is not the flower, in each position, yet a flower?”
Young Caine: “Shall I then treat each man the same?”
Master Po: “As far as possible, without surrender. Be on good terms with all.”
> Also, 'patio11 is one of HN's most valued contributors...
I'm guessing "kalzumeus.com" and/or "zeeshanm" is "'patio11", but I'm not plugged into the community enough to recognize this august citizen. The article reads like a sleazy, low-grade sales pitch, so I don't see why it deserves any particular respect.
Then I realised it is just a duplicate of https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/lifecycle....
Its almost the exact same content - just a slightly newer version with 2-3 small typo changes, and is a couple of years old