After a while longer than expected all the emails have been sent and the feedback is very positive, although the number of subscriptions are not that big.

Super Positive Emails

The best thing I’ve gotten out of this email blast are a lot of positive emails from people I have not spoken to in a while. They’ve been motivating and great to catch up with. Some of them have ended up in lunches and meetings that have just been great. I got a lot of love!

One of the most unexpected and motivating emails came from my father in law, Graziano. This is the first time that one of my elders really digs what I’m doing. You can not imagine the great feeling I got when I read it. It is so good that I’ve been showing it to some friends and I ended up asking for permission to share a translated extract here:

Hello Ramon, I have carefully read your thoughts on your professional research and I find your approach of public exposure very interesting : you put your guts on the table…

I particularly share your approach to lifelong learning that not only promotes openness of mind but also stimuli for intellectual faculties.

As [Bernard] Werber said in his books about ants: “Happiness is in the motion”.

It must also be known that sometimes happiness lies less in the goal to be achieved than in the approach to achieve it.

You have my moral support for your search for the trigger spark.

I’ve gotten more feedback about my entrepreneurship challenge through replies to this emails that in comments in this blog or in social media. I also got somme interesting and funny comments in the Other section of the survey.

Stats

  • 11236 emails sent
  • 44% opened
  • 106 more subscribers to the blog
  • 292 more subscribers to the three lists
  • Domain NOT blacklisted as a spammer 🙂
  • Only one person complained. A few asked to be unsubscribed, although the message clearly stated that I was not going to use the emails any more. I even added an unsubscribe link and added “ this list will self destroy” to the original text to make it clearer.
  • A whole lot of undeliverable and automatic replies. The report on the Mail Merge Add-on does not really work and I’m not looking forward to dig through the emails to find out

There have also been 1193 visits to the blog since I got back and I have to guess that most of those are thanks to the email. Unfortunately the Mail Merge and WordPress.com stats are not that good to figure this out exactly. Of those, 427 have been to the signup page (no way to know the source).

As I said, not impressive numbers but infinitely better than zero. There’s some momentum to build on and some compound interests accruing towards the future 🙂

List & Add-On Problems: Email Verifier App & Mail Merge with Attachments

The service I used to clean up the list (twice) did not really do a good job. Email Verifier App gave me a guaranteed delivery list that had plenty of undeliverable messages and generic emails that should have been cleaned out. On top of this, because I misunderstood the credits left in my account I ended up paying $105 for extra credits that I did not need and that I’m never going to use. Even though I contacted them immediately through their chatbot and latter on via email they rejected to reimburse. If you need to clean up 80000 emails I have cheap credits for you!

The Mail Merge Add-on got me in trouble with Google because the sending limits are based on rolling 24h and do not reset at a specific time. The bounce report does not reflect the reality of my inbox, it is overly under representative. I never heard back from its creator about my support questions.

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