Shocking Saturday / Happy Monday

I logged on to my emails on Saturday morning and had a very pleasant shock. There was an email message from someone whose product I had mentioned to my subscriber list on Friday.

Before I explain what was shocking, let me say what I thought had gone on.

When I send out emails I always test them and I'd sent out this email to a selection of my subscribers to make sure it was interesting and relevant to them. Result: a negligibly small number of orders for the product. Consequently I didn't send the email to anyone else because it seemed clear to me that the product wasn't right for them. Fair enough.

I made this determination on the basis of the number of sales emails I received from the associated affiliate manager system.

But the email I got from the product owner on Saturday told me I'd sold a much much higher number and this was a wake up call. So I logged into my stats and could see what he meant. It was shockingly more than I thought.

So I quickly droppped another reminder email to everyone on my list and then went away for the weekend.

And today is a Happy Monday because there is nothing like starting the week with a successful weekend behind you. The lesson is of course not to rely on email notifications of product sales and to go back to the raw stats when making any assessment of how good a product really is.

In other words make absolutely sure you are measuring the right thing!