– The author built a community from paid traffic, achieving high sign-up and form completion rates.
– The first weekly email had a decent open rate and click-through rate without segmentation.
– The author plans to optimize the content to decrease costs and improve open and click-through rates, and believes this approach is the future of publishing and community building.The key action item is to optimize the content to match what the audience is asking for, in order to decrease costs and improve open and click through rates.I decided to build a community from paid traffic. We had an 80%+ sign-up rate with an 86%+ form completion rate. The first weekly email took over a month to send out, but still had a 28.8% open rate and a 5% click-through rate without segmentation. My cost per subscriber was better than expected, and it came with the following information: 1. How often they do this activity 2. What skill level they are 3. How much they spend on the activity in a year 4. What they most commonly buy 5. How often they buy products for this activity 6. What they were most interested in for the community. I haven’t optimized this yet. With some optimizations, I should be able to decrease my costs and, over time, improve my open and click-through rates just by creating content that matches what people asked for. I haven’t built in automated organic loops yet either, but they are in progress. The best part is, I can reuse this asset over and over again, and it will keep growing and gaining value. I have an evergreen amount of new content for this audience being piped in as well. I’ll never run out, and eventually, it will be mostly automated. I can build this for any lifestyle segment following the same or a similar format. When I think about the future of online experiences, I’ve always been focused on Distribution and Discovery. This is the future of publishing. This is the future of community building. This is the future of owned media. Where things get really interesting, though, is a brand can invest in this and offset their advertising costs while building an income-producing asset at the same time. They can double dip. They can make money off other brands while arbitraging an industry in terms of narrative. This is what happens when you understand market dynamics. This is also why Formtoro was never only about e-commerce. Are you in publishing? Do you run a blog? I’d love to chat. There are things we can do for you that are plug and play to unlock these kinds of insights from your subscribers. #marketing #community #datahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco