This is going to be one of those stats based episodes, so I'm going to kind of run over where we're at like, do a little weekly update and a couple of things that I've done since we've last talked that seem to have helped. So, like you've heard the expression I watched, pot never boils. That's definitely the case in this DPT store. I feel like the more that I check my stats, the less that I sell, and then I forget about it for a little while. Then I'm going to sell something. So I went probably gosh. I went several, several days without a sale and then everything was so busy with launching RTA and everything that I just hadn't really checked anything. And I went after the weekend and I opened up my dashboard and realized that I had three days in a row of sales and one of those days I'd made three sales. So we're at, like, I think, $35 so far for the month of June, which I feel is pretty good. I'm really happy with that. And one of those came from an email, like an automated email that goes out whenever they download their freebie. So that was great. Another one came from my math list, which we'll talk about here in just a second. And then the rest came from TPT, so five sales. Two came from email marketing-ish Not entirely sure on the math thing, but I think probably so and then the other three came from TPT search. So that was pretty exciting.
Speaker 0:I think I'm going to slow down my Facebook ads now. I'm spending about $20 a day, which is quite a lot, but they're going so well that I really hate to stop them because I'm seeing a lot of opt-ins and I'm paying like very, very little for leads. So currently, with the number of people who have unsubscribed, which has been relatively low so far percentage wise, but I have a little over 1100 leads on my list, so I'm happy with that. But so far I just haven't seen like a lot of I want to say engagement from my audience. So I was sending my emails first thing in the morning, like 7am on a Monday, and then I would send another one on Friday in the morning. So I've learned for sure Friday morning is not a good time, even if I'm sending it out at like eight or 9 am. For my audience it's not a good time. I was having like open rates of high 30s, 37 to 40%, and I really like to see closer to that 50% mark, although I wasn't like shocked or anything, because so many of these leads are coming from Facebook ads. In fact, the vast majority of them are coming from Facebook ads, so I wasn't totally shocked by this. But I obviously want to see higher open rates, especially since I'm so new and I'm still establishing my sender reputation, like I really want to make sure that those open rates are high and I'm kind of setting myself up for success there. So I started experimenting with time of day to send things out in this last week and on Monday, rather than sending the email out at like 7am or 8am, I tried sending it out at 10am and I had about a 10% increase in open rates and it took me right up to 49.8%. So we can call that 50, right. So right up to 50%. Very low unsubscribe percentage. Very high 7% click rate. Basically, I have multiple different links for them to click on, and so there was like a link to a blog post, there was a link to a curriculum and in fact there was a link to two curriculums. So link to blog posts. So they had a couple of options to choose from and we got quite a few clicks through that. So I'm pretty happy with the results there.
Speaker 0:Today is Thursday as I'm recording this, and tomorrow would be my normal like five minute Friday email that would go out, but I'm gonna try sending it this afternoon and saying here's something you can try tomorrow or over the weekend with your child to help keep them engaged and busy while you're doing other things right. So some engagement strategies to like keep your little one playing independently. I'm going to test sending that out on the afternoon on a Thursday and just kind of see how that goes. My gut says it's not going to go well, but I feel like I have to try it because sending it out on Friday morning is not going well, and I even experimented with subject lines a little bit and I did that first and I think that that's a really good first step. If you're noticing that your open rates aren't really great, I would start with changing the subject line and experiment with something that is either a little bit more eye-catching, a little bit more engaging maybe try using emojis or, if that doesn't work, make sure that you are putting something that's relevant to your audience in the subject line. So like, if you are science, putting the word science or putting science teacher or something like that in the subject line and that's probably what I would try before changing the time, especially if your gut tells you that the time should be good.
Speaker 0:The other thing is that it's a Friday. I think ultimately like I'm going to try this afternoon, but I think ultimately it's going to be a Monday morning and Thursday morning email, because my target audience is moms who either work from home or stay at home. So I know that the chances it's not like they're going to work and sitting down at their desk at seven o'clock and checking their email before the kids come in. It's not like that. They're probably getting up, getting started on their day, getting breakfast for their kids, before they sit down and actually check their email. The other thing about that is that as a teacher, you kind of have to check your email on a regular basis. As a mom, you don't necessarily have to two days a week, because I feel like there's going to be a better chance that I'm going to catch them on one of those days or one of those times. Okay, so a couple of updates there for you, email wise and just how that's doing and how I'm kind of pivoting, I think probably here in the next, I keep saying, like I said originally, when I get 1000 subscribers I'm gonna like slow everything down, because I have two ads right now running on Facebook. I have one for summer pre-K and one for dinosaur pre-K. And I've said that I'm going to kind of slow it down when I hit a thousand subscribers but I kind of feel like I need to keep going because they're both doing so well when it hits 1500 or 2000,. That might be when I kind of slow it down, turn one of the ads off and just leave it at $10 a day until I really learn this audience.
Speaker 0:Another thing is this week Megan Wisdom is gonna help me write a really great welcome sequence. So I'm working on that this week with her and I'm really excited to have that. This is something that in the past I definitely would have written myself. But at this point where I have so many businesses, I feel like it's really hard to keep up with email marketing for three businesses, let alone finding the brain space to really write a welcome sequence to get to know me, know my brand and build that know like and trust factor. It takes a lot of brain power and right now, with so many things going on. We've got teacher seller summit coming up, we've got our mass summit coming up. We've got our sales coming up. With everything that's going on right now during the summer. I feel like I just need to outsource that. So I'm really excited to work with her on that this week and hopefully get that up and running within the next couple of weeks and so I might leave ads on for a little while longer or maybe increase, like if we write it for the summer when increase the ad spend on that, just to kind of get a really good idea for how that's performing before back to school season. So yeah, I'm really excited about that. So sales are up. Everything's looking good there, especially for it being summer. I'm feeling really good about where we're at there.
Speaker 0:Store rankings just came in and I'm pretty I don't want to say like pretty excited, honestly like I'm pretty not shocked, not surprised, but I'm in the 78th percentile ranking at 23,859 for the month of May. I feel like 78th percentile for your very first month sounds really impressive. Until you take into consideration that gosh, it just wasn't that great of a month. I made $36 last month, so that tells you that I'm making at $36, I'm making more than 78% of people on TPT and listen, if you're listening right now and you're like, yeah, that would be me, I'm not gonna say like, oh, this isn't that hard or any, that's not it at all. But I'm saying like there are strategies that you can utilize to help get more views on your resources. I don't think that you should expect that your business is going to explode right away, especially if you don't have the money to put into it, like what I'm doing right now with AppSpin and trying to. I know for sure that that's getting me more followers. I know for sure that I've gotten a couple of sales from that. So I know that not everybody has the ability to do that right away.
Speaker 0:But get scrappy. Get into Facebook groups, start posting your email opt-ins, start sharing your freebie on TPT. Start doing the things that are going to get you in front of the audience you want to get in front of. Chances are you know people who teach the topic or teach in the niche that you're selling for. Start advertising it to them. And I know that this can get a little bit uncomfortable, but people want to support you.
Speaker 0:We actually had somebody in a local mom group. We have like a text group for like moms at our church and she said, like I'm going to stay home with the boys this next year. She's a teacher and I'm going to start this new business to. It's not TPT, but it's something. It's like a consulting business. I think I'm starting this new business to help kind of supplement income, and if anyone could fill out this form for me to kind of help me get an idea of what it is people are looking for whether it's tutoring, consulting, whatever to help me decide which path I need to take in my business or how to like curate this, that'd be great. And everyone was so excited for her. It was like, yeah, absolutely, we will. You know, we'll help you, we'll do this Like way to go. Like that's amazing.
Speaker 0:And I think so many times we're kind of afraid that people are going to like judge us and be like oh, I don't really want to do that. You know that's a little scary, right, kind of putting myself out there, but if you have a really good tribe of people, they are going to want to support you and they would probably rather purchase something from you than purchase from someone else. So if you have a really cute activity for kids, even if it's just something that a parent that you know might want to do with their kid at home, it doesn't necessarily have to be another teacher like share it with them. And the other thing about this is those are going to be the people that you'd be like hey, I know you bought this or I know you downloaded that free resource. Could you maybe go and leave me a review? They're going to be happy to do that. They're going to be thrilled to do that. They're going to be thrilled to do that. And you can actually ask them in person like hey, would you mind doing it?
Speaker 0:I did this whenever I was teaching. I actually went, and y'all can judge me for this If you want to. I do not care. I think it was a smart way to go. I'm not going to lie. I think it was smart and there was nothing wrong with what I was doing.
Speaker 0:But I had a coworker that I wanted to give a resource to and I asked her. I was like hey, I will mark this down to like I don't know, like 25 cents or 50 cents or something like that. Like really, really low price for just like five minutes If you want to go grab it. Because she asked her she could have it. I'm like, yeah, let me mark it down super low for you. I gave her a quarter, like just go grab it real quick for 25 cents, and then, if you'll leave me a review, like you can have it and so, and like I just marked it down really fast for her and then put the price right back up. And then she went and left a review Again. You can judge me for that. If you think that that's not honest, that's fine with me. I think it's perfectly honest and I would absolutely do it again If I were starting over from scratch.
Speaker 0:I would absolutely give a gift card, a $5 gift card to a family member and be like, hey, I'm going to at 11 o'clock tonight. I'm going to mark all of these resources down to like 25 cents If you want to go, purchase them with this $5 gift card and then leave me a review. It's in my mind. It's the exact same thing as like someone going and leaving a Yelp review for your restaurant, the Tuno, and like you comped their meal because they're family, but like they still left a review for you. But you don't have to do it like that either. You could just ask them to leave reviews on your freebies or whatever. Okay, y'all, please don't email me any hate about that. Okay, I don't think anybody. I think we're all friends here, like we all. We're all just trying to do what's best for our business. I wouldn't do it now personally, just because I don't have to do it, but if I were starting all over again, I absolutely would not going to lie. I would definitely do it.
Speaker 0:Okay, so let's talk about the other thing that I did and this was actually a question that was asked me in the very beginning was are you going to announce this new TPT store to your existing audience? And originally I was like, no, I don't think I'm going to, but I ended up doing it. This last week I actually just needed to send out another email and I was like you know what? I, a pre-care, have a little one at home, because they're obviously math teachers. But if you have a little one at home and you are interested in getting some work for them, this summer we're doing some work with them at home. I have a couple of free resources that you can go grab and I sent them links to both of my lead magnets and I got about a hundred subscribers from doing that, so about 100 people who already have a know, like and trust relationship with me. I was able to move them over to my email list for this new business venture, and that that could have also been what helped my open rates this last week, because these were people who already knew me. I think it was pretty successful.
Speaker 0:When I did it, though, I also put like hey, if you don't fall into this category, like scroll down to the bottom of the email, because I still have something for you, and I sent them a link to go and attend our summer math summit, so you're thinking about opening a second business. I feel like that's a pretty great way to do it. Like hey, this might be a long shot, but if you are also interested in this kind of thing, you can check this out. I've done the same thing with my math business. Usually, once a year, I'll send an email like hey, are you interested in selling your resources on TPT? I have a course for this, and I'll pitch selling one-on-one to them, and then I'll tell them, like at the bottom by the way, only send this email out once a year, so if you're not interested in that, don't worry. It's really just math content from here on out, and usually I get a pretty good response from that. I usually get several sales from that for that selling 101 course. So I think that there's always a chance that there's going to be some good overlap.
Speaker 0:Just make sure you're not like burning them out on that or and make sure you're letting them know like, hey, this is kind of a one-time thing, like I'm not going to send you a whole bunch of emails about this, but if you are interested, then check this out. That's our weekly update. That's where we are. Things are going pretty well so far in the month of June and I'm feeling really happy and really hopeful. I would really like to hit a hundred dollars this month. That's kind of my goal and I feel like it's doable. Yeah, that's that's where we are for this month. So I'm going to see you guys next week and I'll give you guys another update.