The Aardvark’s Tongue

Faced with the cold hard reality of the actual newsletter - the actual humor from the book - the sickness that is this twisted publication the unsubscribe rate has risen to 3.6%. Does that make us sad? No actually, it’s better than anticipated.

We began with just under 800 friends and acquaintances on the mailing list. We were anticipating an unsubscribe rate of something more like 20 to 25%. Plus we have picked up a few subscribers to the newsletter along the way so we are at 98% of our original numbers.

Book sales are slow (10 books) but hey, the email newsletter is still the only form of marketing, and it has only gone out twice.

So the stats:

• 800 subscribers to start
• 29 people dropped off the list (3.6%)
• 14 new subscribers (2%)
• 10 book sales (one sale for every 100 subscribers)

And we are only 2 weeks in. Not a landslide by any means, but not too shabby either.

Oh, and our bad…on the newsletter we have forgotten to add that it is powered by poMMo (which is awesome). That omission will be remedied in the next mailing.

From the initial newsletter mailing announcing our intentions and inviting people to unsubscribe we have had only a 1.4% unsubscribe rate. Very low indeed. Plus we actually picked up a few new subscribers in the process .4% giving us a net 1% unsubscribe.

We will see if we fare as well once people have a chance to read tonight’s newsletter with the actual book content. Here’s hoping.

So the launch of the website, via the newsletter, got off to a herkey-jerkey start today. While I don’t have very many people in my personal database apparently I sent out emails at too brisk a pace for my web-host - so they shut me down. Waaaaat? Lesson learned - spoke to the host and learned the rules. Let’s hope the rest of the campaign is a bit more successful.

Lots of excited emails from friends and acquaintances however. I think we are all looking forward to this experiment.

It is 1:07 AM, Tuesday February 5th. The site went live 7 minutes ago.

I finished recording the audio at midnight. Burned a CD. Verified that it worked. Printed the label. Checked the PayPal shipping rates. All is all good. Ready to roll.
Now, bring on the orders.