I’ve been making some changes to my marketing email list. I read something yesterday that inspired me to change.
I’ve been excited about the fact that so many people open my emails. Average is about 33% which is high for marketing emails. I’m a good writer. I’m entertaining. People like what I’m writing. But open rates are really a vanity metric if there is no commerce tied to it.
What really matters is people buying, or starting conversations, or even them doing something like clicking a link. So I decided to start focusing on clicks.
So the emails can be more about linking to articles that I summarize some compelling part of and the “game”, such as it is, is whether I can convince people to click on the link at some rate. Yesterday was for a marketing article. Tomorrow will be a recipe for rendering your own lard.
Lard? Yes, subject line will be “The Impeachment of Lard”. It seemed timely. And pertinent since it was the marketing of Crisco by Proctor & Gamble which first tarnished lard as a perfectly good cooking fat. Of course it turns out Crisco is full of trans-fats. But they didn’t know that then. And P&G had a cotton seed oil business to prop up.
I was also intrigued that the word “Canola” as in Canola Oil comes from “Canada oil, low acid”. Get it? Can+OLA. There isn’t a canola plant. There is rapeseed which comes from turnips, cabbage, mustard and other plants. It is a highly processed oil. I would stick with extra virgin, first pressed olive oil.
Or butter.
Or lard.
(Oh right, lard. Chris has some frozen pork leaf fat in her freezer from the last pig she had processed and I’m finally getting around to rendering it into lard. And one of the things I’ll do with the lard is to make pork belly confit which is lightly cured pork belly poached in the lard with spices. You then dig the pieces of pork belly out of the lard, fry them in a pan, and eat them. The result is delicious. It’s been some years since I’ve made it. Yes, there is a lot of fat and frying involved. Fried pork fat tastes soooo good.)