What was the bounce rate, avg visit time and conversion rate (email signup) between people who came from the non-designed vs. designed ad though?
A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.
One of the most useful design-related tools I've found is this color picker which generates complimentary colors for you based on model of your choice (triadic, analogous, etc.):
I always struggled with picking complimentary colors and found this worked a lot better than most of the pre-defined color palette suggestions out there.
What made the biggest difference for me was using a text to speech reader to proofread and edit. You are able to catch a lot of phrasing that looks ok but sounds wrong or awkward this way.
Also, the message and approach should be very different depending on who you're reaching out to and for what reason (example: getting a job versus getting a client).
Providing value is important, but the goal of the first email is simply to get someone to reply, not overload them with info upfront (like what was suggested as one of the examples, a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis).
I find providing 1-2 specific concrete ideas related to your product, service or ask and tailored for your prospect's business is enough to get an interested reply. Some good templates for this here: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.
Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.
It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.
Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.
Search Engine Roundtable conducted a survey after the medic update, here are the
categories of websites that were affected: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-medi... (Health accounted for the biggest percentage but there were many other verticals that were impacted as well.)
There has also been several core algorithm updates since then that have caused ranking drops and volatility across the board.
As other people have already commented, Gumroad raised venture capital (https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build...) before. Sahil had to revert Gumroad to a solo lifestyle business after it didn't grow fast enough to raise another round.
My question is, without having been venture funded for a period of time, would Gumroad still be able to $350k/mo now?
During the time Gumroad had a team of engineers, designers, etc., they shipped a lot of features, made improvements and presumably had a decent advertising / marketing budget. Gumroad likely wouldn't have reached the point where it is today product and awareness wise if it had just been one 'indie hacker' grinding away.
Their "gross revenue" is $5m a month. Their part of that is 350 000$ a month (which is still their gross revenue, but I feel like that's what you meant).
> So I built Gumroad. Fast-forward over seven years and we're doing about $350,000 in revenue monthly, helping creators earn over $5,000,000 a month.
The $5m they process is not gross revenue to Gum Road since they're not the beneficial or legal owners of the $5m in payments received. Their X% share of that $5m is their gross revenue.
I would actually look up mid-size businesses you'd like to work with (who can use your skills) and email the owner or manager who works in an area related to your services.
Let's say you're a developer. In this email, briefly describe a few specific ideas or improvements you can implement for them using your skills. For example, maybe you can create standalone landing pages for all of their lead magnets or set up A/B testing on their key pages.
It's ok if you can't share your previous work, you can simply mention 2 relevant projects you've worked on and specific results you helped them achieve.
A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.