Hi Drew,

I get asked questions like this a fair amount and it's always very difficult to answer from the other side of a forum post or email. there are so many variables and each one offers the potential for something to be off. It could be targeting, it could be your copy (it could be both combined), it could be something technical, it could be that you haven't given things long enough, it could be that you are already giving music away for free on Spotify, and it could always be the music. It's really hard to guess without spending a good hour sorting through all of your stats.

But the super simple answer is that when subscribers are coming in but no one is buying, I start by looking at my open and click through rates on the email campaign and see if I can spot an engagement problem.

If everything looks good, I often survey my list. This lesson goes over that: https://www.mmmanifesto.com/in.....your-fans/

On the surface of it, if you are marketing to musicians then I think that could be part of the problem. If you are a guitar virtuoso, then you'd likely have more luck marketing to people who are fans of other guitar virtuoso of a similar vein.

But you also want to make sure everyone on your list has completed your funnel before coming to any conclusions. Most sales will happen during the LTO at the end of the funnel. With only 125 subscribers (which is a statistically small group to begin with) you may find that very few have completed the funnel. Those open and CTR rates on the campaign should tell you a lot more.

Hope that helps.

Hi Drew,

Sorry to hear you haven't seen any sales yet. First thing you want to do is run a search to see how many of your ACTIVE subscribers have finished the actual funnel. I do this by applying a tag once people have finished the funnel and search for active subscribers that have that tag. But you can also do it by searching by date. Often I get messages like this only to find that 60% of the subs are still within the funnel. 

Another problematic stat that you've listed is that the open rate on the first email is only 62%. That is too low and needs to be looked at. Do you have confirmed opt in on or off? If off, I would try switching to on, and reset your email stats at that time. You can do this by cloning the emails and deleting the old ones or just creating a new campaign and swapping out your triggers on the opt in forms.

At the end of the day, if people are signing up but not buying then something isn't grabbing them within the funnel. It could be the music, it could be the content, or it could be that the targeting isn't quite right and you are attracting the wrong prospects. Often it is really hard to know.

I recommend surveying your list (but only after everyone has completed the funnel). Here is a lesson on how to do that: https://www.mmmanifesto.com/in.....your-fans/

Thanks for chiming in Mark! Always great to get additional perspective and all valid points.

Good pointabout grammar. 

However, 9 times out of 10 a smiling straight-forward photo will out perform the cool brooding one. People just respond subconsciously to likable, happy people, that are not demonstrating ego. But of course there are many exceptions and it has a lot to do with the USP.

There is a lot of stuff that is done traditionally that is done for no other reason than it's what everyone else does. It's true that most musicians (especially rock musicians) want to broadcast a more serious too cool for school kind of image. But the reality is that smiling faces out perform those images 9 out of 10 times. 

Same is true for a squeeze page. Ask 100 people if they like my plain squeeze page better than the latest tricked out site from shoppify or bandzoogle. They will almost all pick the fancier site. But then look at the tracking and you'll see that mine out performs theirs almost every time.

That's the whole thing about direct response marketing. We let the numbers guide us more than anything. That doesn't mean we should do things that violate our USP or our artistic integrity just because of numbers, but so long as those things are in check, then the numbers will tell us which path to take. And smiling images, and up beat energy almost always work best.

It's funny... not that this proves anything, but I just googled "rock bands 2020" and "Rock bands 1990" and got a much higher proportion of smiling images in 2020. 

It's always worth adding one to the mix. It doesn't mean you absolutely need one. But it's one of those rules that I often repeat: "smiling faces tend to work best".