Hey, welcome back to Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders, the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin. And if you are tuning into this right now, but you have not yet listened to our interview case study with Kirsten Roldan, that dropped on Monday, pause this episode right now scroll below to the show notes, click on that link and give that a listen first, because that kind of sets up the entire context for this bonus episode.
So if you did listen, then you know that during my interview with Kirsten, I, you know, was very impressed with her strong conviction that millionaires write emails and how she's not afraid to email her list up to 10 times a day. Now, that's much higher of a volume than I have ever personally tried with our list. But at the time of the recording, we were right in the middle of our launch for paid to create, we were enrolling our 10th cohort. And I thought, You know what, why not give this concept a test in real time, so that I could report back to you guys, what it actually looks like to email your list more frequently than you are used to.
So like I said, I didn't opt for the extreme of 10 emails a day. But I did increase our frequency from what would normally be one email a day, up to three emails a day during the last 48 hours. So our closed cart was, I mean, technically, we didn't take down the buy buttons until Monday. But Saturday and Sunday, were our last full days of the launch. So that was just this past weekend. This is a very recent launch.
This was our biggest cohort ever. So we enrolled 441 participants total, which is more than double what our largest cohort prior to this was, was this all due to the last two days and the increase in emails? I personally don't think so there are some other factors at play that resulted in such an amazing outcome. But the two days that we did send increased frequency of emails, there was a positive outcome. And I'm going to share what that looks like with you here.
So like I said, we're talking about Saturday and Sunday, October 21st, and October 22nd. So on October 21, a Saturday, I decided to send three emails that day, the first one went out at 12:53pm. The second one went out at 4:16pm. And the third one went out at 9:09pm. Now I know some of you listening who are detail oriented are probably going to wonder, is there a specific reason you chose these times? Especially with the odd numbers, like why 9:09pm instead of 9pm? Exact right? I actually did not purposely choose these random times. What I believe happened is, oh, actually, I think that might have been Sunday.
So on Saturday, I knew I wanted to send an email, kind of like early afternoon, then late afternoon, and then you know, later towards the end of the day at nighttime. And you know, with email deliverability, sometimes you'll schedule an email to go out at say, nine o'clock. But not everybody receives the email exactly at nine o'clock, right, because of the deliverability. Some people get it in their inbox, and I know ones, some people at 9:02, 9:05. So it's as close as possible to that time, but it's not going to be exact. So that's why I think that these numbers seem a little arbitrary. But there was no strategic thought process behind this. So I'm just going to clarify that for you upfront. In case you were wondering.
Now, these three emails, and the next day's three emails. So on Sunday, October 22. I also sent three emails, I started my first email earlier in the day, I sent that first one out at 6:31am, the second one at 1:32pm. And then I had my last and final email scheduled for 10:31pm. But what I chose to do last minute is in between the second and the third email sent that day, I decided to resend one of my emails that I sent on Saturday to people who had not opened it yet. So I took one of the Saturday emails and just resend it to unopened. So technically, you could say that I sent four emails on Sunday, though it was really only three new emails to my full list.
So back to you know, the three emails from Saturday. And then now bringing in the three emails from Sunday. I looked through the open rates. And again, if you listen to my interview with Kirsten, then you know that one of her other hot takes is that she doesn't really closely track open rates or click rates, at least not during a launch. Because sometimes in the moment just because someone doesn't open it or doesn't click on it or does click on it. It doesn't necessarily translate into an immediate sale. She brought up really great point during our case study interview. And again, this is why you should go listen to it if you haven't yet, that sometimes during a launch, especially if you're emailing your list every single day, sometimes just the mere act of appearing in someone's inbox.
Like if I've had my eye on a product or a program that I haven't, you know, followed through to buy yet, but I've been watching the launch up and paying attention. And let's say I've been meaning to buy, it's on my to do list, right, I just haven't followed through and taken action yet. Sometimes when a person will email me, their email shows up in my inbox, and just by me seeing that email present in my inbox, my mind is reminded that I am supposed to go buy that product or program like I had it on my to do list, I've been meaning to do it. And it's just a good visual reminder, like, oh, yeah, bringing it you know, back to the forefront of your mind. And she brought that point up that sometimes someone may then go buy the product, or buy your offer, because they already had the link bookmarked, or whatever it may be from a prior email. And they might buy right then and there, but not even click on that email that prompted them to remember this thing, right.
So if you were just purely using click rates and open rates as the only metric to determine which emails were most successful, you might not be able to capture that interaction that happened right there because they didn't technically click or open that email. But it's because of that email, that they were reminded to go back and do the thing that they had been meaning to do. So I bring this up, because that was one of my favorite nuggets from our conversation. And I just again, think it was a great insight into human behavior. So I'm not too concerned, I guess, is what I'm saying about getting into the nitty gritty of each individual emails, open rates or click rates.
But I what I will tell you is that we did have a very high open rate across all six of these emails, which I didn't know what to expect, because like I said, I normally don't email my list more than once a day. And the only times that we do even email them daily, is during the launch, most of the times, if we're not in the middle of a launch, or not in the middle of a brand campaign, then we mostly are emailing our list about once a week with our weekly newsletter. So we're very consistent about emailing our list, but not usually at these volumes. So I wasn't sure I wasn't sure if the drop off or the open rate was going to be steep. Because people would just, you know, see that I'm consistently emailing them throughout the entire weekend and think, oh, I don't need to open that email. It's probably about the launch.
However, that proved to not be true. We averaged a 41% open rate across all six emails, the highest open rate was actually 47.9%. I believe that was the email that I re sent to an open. So that probably is why, but the lowest open rate throughout the entire six emails, the entire weekend was 37%, which is still a pretty great open rate. So I was pleasantly surprised. And what's interesting is that 37% open rate was actually the very first email I sent in this sequence of six emails. So it was at first like 12:53pm email that I sent on Saturday, and the open rates actually only went up from there. So there's something to be said about maybe grabbing someone's attention during the weekend, when they're less inundated with other work emails that they're actually paying more attention.
So now let's get into the actual numbers of the sales. I looked back at the last three rounds of Paid to Create. So our May 2023 cohort, our November 2022 cohort, and our September 2022 cohort. Those were our three most recent rounds prior to this one that's happening in real time, as I'm recording it this week, which is our October 2023 cohort. I wanted to look at the last three rounds to have like a more fair comparison of how how the sales during the last 48 hours were in those rounds compared to this one.
So for May 2023. In the last 48 hours, we had 31 new people sign up for the challenge. For November 2022, we had 64 people sign up in the last 48 hours. And then for September 2022, we had 58 people sign up in the last 48 hours. Now for October, again, the primary difference between this round and other rounds as far as the last 48 hours, though, is that we up to the frequency of our emails, right? We didn't change that much about our ad spend. In fact, I think our ad spend was lower than past rounds. There were again, like I said some other factors that influenced why this cohort was especially large. But in relation to the last 48 hours of the launch. There really was no difference outside of just sending more emails and I wanted to kind of Keep that for the sake of the experiment, right? You don't want to change too many factors at once, when you're trying to test a new strategy and see what the results are.
So, on Saturday on October 21, we had 32 people sign up for the challenge. On Sunday, October 22, we had 45 people sign up for the challenge. So if we just look at those two things in a vacuum, that's already 77 sales that happened over the course of Saturday and Sunday, right, which is higher than any of the other three previous rounds for the final 48 hours. However, I decided to also look at what sales came through on Monday.
So if you're not familiar with our Paid to Create Challenge, it's a live course creation challenge, we usually host once or twice a year. In 2022, we did host it quite a few more times than that. But for the last, you know, I would say a year and a half, we've been pretty consistent about spacing them out every six months. And it's a three day challenge where we help you turn the idea in your head into a profitable, high converting course outline that you can pre sell and enroll paying students for before you ever actually create your course. So it's all about pre selling an online course validating your idea and making sure you get paid to create it hence the name of the challenge. And this challenge always kicks off on a Monday at 11am Pacific Daylight Time on the west coast in the United States where we're based.
So typically speaking, we will keep the sales page open until we literally start the challenge at 11am. Sometimes we'll keep it open for even the first two hours during day one, because our sessions are usually two hours each. So from 11am to 1pm, Pacific Daylight Time we were running our day one live training, we might still keep that cart open. Because if someone let's say joins in the middle of day one, they still are early enough where they could easily catch up that evening, right, they could watch the replay that afternoon or evening. But we generally have a pretty hard cut off at 1pm. At the latest, it could be earlier but at the latest 1pm on the day, the challenge starts because we really don't want people to be coming in, you know, late night on Monday or in the morning on Tuesday, and feeling very behind. We want everyone to have a fair opportunity to actually go through the challenge and participate live.
So with that in mind on Monday, which was today actually, as I'm recording this in real time on Monday night, we did not send out any sales emails. So we didn't promote the challenge through email on Monday morning. But there were still residual sales, I'm assuming from people coming back to work on Monday logging into their work inbox, and seeing our emails from over the weekend. So we still ended up with 29 additional sales new sales on Monday before we closed the cart and removed all the sales buttons. So in total, if you count those 29 sales that trickled in Monday morning, before we closed the cart, it was 106 sales that we got in those final hours the launch from those six emails. And like I shared from the previous three rounds, the numbers were 3164 and 58. So if you compare that to 106, we nearly doubled the amount of new sales new participants that we had sign up in the final hours.
And I think that this was such a fun test for me, not only to see how this impacted our sales in a positive way, but it really did reshift my perspective on the volume or frequency that you email someone, especially during a launch, because what I realized is by allowing myself to write more emails, by writing six emails over the course of two days versus my normal two to three, it gave me twice as many or three times as many opportunities to address different aspects of our challenge that might be still confusing for someone or a hesitation that someone might have that's really specific that normally I would have to either gloss over, ignore entirely or just, you know, insert a line or two in a bigger email.
But because I had so many more opportunities to reach out to our community and talk to them over the weekend, I felt a lot more freedom and flexibility and like being way more specific with one email because it wasn't the only email that I could send that day. Right. So I could, let's say address an entire email to one specific challenge that I know someone might be feeling around joining the course. Or I could dedicate one entire email to talking about how amazing our popup community for this challenge is and how when you join, it's like instantly gaining a network of hundreds of people who want to see you succeed and who want to support you and give you feedback and amplify your business and refer you business. It is so cool it is unlike anything I've ever seen. That's why I love hosting these live cohorts, the relationship building is off the charts.
And I normally don't get to spend an entire email, talking about just that one aspect of what it's like to experience the challenge. But again, like I said, because I had more email volume, more more more opportunities to work with, I was able to dedicate an entire email to just that one aspect of the experience.
So I guess what I'm saying here is next time you have a live launch, or even if you are an evergreen queen, which normally outside of Paid to Create I mostly am, then I would just encourage you to think differently about emailing your people, not from the perspective of Oh, am I bugging someone? Am I emailing them too much? But instead thinking about who are all the different types of people who are in my community that may have different questions, different concerns, different hesitations? Or things that they just need clarified, to help them decide if what I'm offering is a good fit for them or not? And how can I break that down into more specific emails and take more opportunities to actually address each of them individually.
I feel like if you want to give this a go for your next launch, or like I said, if you just want to test this during a random week in your business, and just see what the results are, I would be very curious for you to put this idea of emailing your list more to the test as well. And then report back let me know what you find when you do this test. Also keep Kirsten in the loop. She's the one who inspired this entire experiment. So I would love for you to also keep her in mind. If you decide to do this, make sure you send her a message to thank her for the inspiration. And let us know how it turns out for you. So that's all I have for you today. I promised during that interview that I would come back to you all and report and you guys know I follow through on my word. So here I am sharing transparently everything that happened in the last 48 hours. I hope this was helpful. I hope this was insightful. Thank you as always for tuning in. And I'll catch you guys in the next episode.
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