RhebaReaux
Regular Member
- Mar 12, 2022
- 264
- 205
Prompted by another thread about cold email, I thought I'd give this a go using Fiverr vendors. Don't expect a tale of great riches and success.
THE CONCEPT
Nothing radical here but maybe it may stimulate some ideas.
I sell stuff on Gumroad, and one of the great features is the workflow function: essentially you can set up a chain of programmed emails, rather like an automated sequence in an autoresponder. These workflows are triggered by sales, so once an item is sold, you can continue to stay in touch with buyers. It's not as comprehensive as paid-for autoresponder services but it's free and it works, and there are limited analytics.
So the plan was to get people onto a new workflow (email list) by giving them a 100% discount voucher to a product I created that would be relevant to them. I could have made the item price $0, but I wanted to make it look like they were getting a special deal.
The traffic would come from cold emails sent by a Fiverr vendor, to a list scraped by another Fiverr vendor. I spent $7.28 per gig to test this.
THE DETAILS
The giveaway eBook was sourced from PLR - rewrote some of it, and changed the graphics (using Canva) - and I was quite pleased with it in the end: over 140 pages of good information. You're not supposed to sell PLR on Gumroad, but this was modified so I justify it that way. The topic was Google My Business, and I added in a few affiliate links to GMB-related vendors on Fiverr. I've found the Fiverr Affiliate program to work pretty well - made over $1k in the past few months with it.
I priced the book at $25 and then created a 100% discount voucher and that was my magnet.
I then found a Fiverr vendor who would scrape businesses off of Google in the US. I used restaurants but am unsure whether this was a good idea in retrospect. Anyway, for $5+ I received 5k emails.
I filtered out the obviously large businesses (because I was aiming for small business owners), and then ran the list through desktop verification software (sourced from h-supertools). By the time I'd finished I had around 3k emails. I sprinkled some of my own emails in the list
It was time to find someone to do a cold email blast. The first guy I chose promised 3k emails for $5+ but after several days he came back with some obviously fake results and it was clear he'd done absolutely nothing and was trying to rip me off. I'm glad I included my own emails. I reported him to Fiverr and got my money back.
Then tried again with a guy who offered to send 1k emails for the same price. In this second case, I received around 40 opens and 11 clicks. Of the emails sent to my own addresses, only 25% went into the inbox, the rest went into spam or the promotions tab. And no sales. So, meh.
CONCLUSIONS
The reason why I wanted to try Fiverr was the hope that inboxing would be less of a problem than having to sort out my own email, warming it up etc. Evidently that failed as a strategy - the Fiverr vendor who actually did something had no better success than I would have expected for myself.
The scraping gig was reasonable for what it was, although there are free tools you could use if you have the patience.
The moral of the story? Shortcuts via Fiverr may not be shortcuts - sometimes you have to do the hard yards yourself.
I think the concept is still OK but ultimately the execution wasn't good enough
Anyone have any suggestions or comments?
THE CONCEPT
Nothing radical here but maybe it may stimulate some ideas.
I sell stuff on Gumroad, and one of the great features is the workflow function: essentially you can set up a chain of programmed emails, rather like an automated sequence in an autoresponder. These workflows are triggered by sales, so once an item is sold, you can continue to stay in touch with buyers. It's not as comprehensive as paid-for autoresponder services but it's free and it works, and there are limited analytics.
So the plan was to get people onto a new workflow (email list) by giving them a 100% discount voucher to a product I created that would be relevant to them. I could have made the item price $0, but I wanted to make it look like they were getting a special deal.
The traffic would come from cold emails sent by a Fiverr vendor, to a list scraped by another Fiverr vendor. I spent $7.28 per gig to test this.
THE DETAILS
The giveaway eBook was sourced from PLR - rewrote some of it, and changed the graphics (using Canva) - and I was quite pleased with it in the end: over 140 pages of good information. You're not supposed to sell PLR on Gumroad, but this was modified so I justify it that way. The topic was Google My Business, and I added in a few affiliate links to GMB-related vendors on Fiverr. I've found the Fiverr Affiliate program to work pretty well - made over $1k in the past few months with it.
I priced the book at $25 and then created a 100% discount voucher and that was my magnet.
I then found a Fiverr vendor who would scrape businesses off of Google in the US. I used restaurants but am unsure whether this was a good idea in retrospect. Anyway, for $5+ I received 5k emails.
I filtered out the obviously large businesses (because I was aiming for small business owners), and then ran the list through desktop verification software (sourced from h-supertools). By the time I'd finished I had around 3k emails. I sprinkled some of my own emails in the list
It was time to find someone to do a cold email blast. The first guy I chose promised 3k emails for $5+ but after several days he came back with some obviously fake results and it was clear he'd done absolutely nothing and was trying to rip me off. I'm glad I included my own emails. I reported him to Fiverr and got my money back.
Then tried again with a guy who offered to send 1k emails for the same price. In this second case, I received around 40 opens and 11 clicks. Of the emails sent to my own addresses, only 25% went into the inbox, the rest went into spam or the promotions tab. And no sales. So, meh.
CONCLUSIONS
The reason why I wanted to try Fiverr was the hope that inboxing would be less of a problem than having to sort out my own email, warming it up etc. Evidently that failed as a strategy - the Fiverr vendor who actually did something had no better success than I would have expected for myself.
The scraping gig was reasonable for what it was, although there are free tools you could use if you have the patience.
The moral of the story? Shortcuts via Fiverr may not be shortcuts - sometimes you have to do the hard yards yourself.
I think the concept is still OK but ultimately the execution wasn't good enough
Anyone have any suggestions or comments?
