The List Structure That Gets Vic Strizheus Up to 80 Percent Open Rates

You join someone’s list for a free download, and within a week you’re deleting their emails unopened. Not because the content is bad. Because there’s too much of it, landing too often, until their name in your inbox stops registering as anything worth stopping for. Vic Strizheus says this happened to him early in his own career: he’d subscribed to a marketer who was putting out genuinely good material, several times a day, and within about a week he’d gone numb to all of it. That memory is the starting point for the list communication structure he lays out in this session, and it has almost nothing to do with how often you hit send.

How do you get people to actually open your emails?

Vic points out that he’s able to get 40, 50, 60, sometimes up to 80 percent of his list to open a given broadcast. That number isn’t the product of a subject-line trick. It’s the result of positioning your sequence so the reader is, in his words, on the edge of their chair waiting for the next piece to land. Email daily and you train people to tune you out the same way he tuned out the marketer who buried his inbox. Email with a reason, on a rhythm your reader can’t quite predict, and the opposite happens: they start watching for you.

What happens in the first two weeks after someone joins your list?

The moment a new subscriber opts in for a lead magnet, Vic runs what he calls his authority building sequence. It’s simple on paper: three to five pieces of pure content, each one easy to follow and each one built to make deposits into what he calls his goodwill bank account, followed by one pitch. The content isn’t random. If the eventual offer teaches people how to make money, he isn’t sending an email about losing weight in between. Every piece supports the thing he’s about to sell.

That pitch, when it lands, carries a real deadline: a bonus or a special deal tied to a countdown timer, not an evergreen link that will still be sitting there next month. He runs this whole sequence, content into pitch, across roughly ten to twelve days, and it’s fully loaded into an autoresponder so it fires with or without him at his desk.

As Vic Strizheus puts it, “You want to make sure you have more Goodwill and value sent to your list than pitches.” The ratio matters more than the exact day count. Get the ratio backwards and the same list that would have converted well above the industry average starts unsubscribing instead.

What do you send the people who don’t buy?

Anyone who doesn’t buy inside that first sequence keeps hearing from Vic, just differently. Instead of another direct pitch, he sends a recorded interview or testimonial from someone who already bought and already got the result, someone the prospect can see himself in. The video runs roughly 90 percent training and 10 percent mention of the offer. A second pitch follows a few pieces later, usually with a different hook (he’s used a small, time-limited group coaching call as the bonus before), and the sequence closes out with more straight content.

The logic underneath all of it: if two weeks of genuinely useful material didn’t convert someone, the problem probably isn’t a missing follow-up email. It might be the offer itself, or a message that didn’t land for that particular person. Either way, burning through more direct pitches on someone who’s already said no with their inbox behavior just spends down the goodwill you spent two weeks building.

Why does staying unpredictable beat a content calendar?

Once someone exits that funnel, buyer or not, Vic moves them onto his ongoing broadcast list, and here the structure loosens on purpose. He emails roughly twice a week, sometimes less, with no fixed day and no fixed format: a Google Hangout invite, a survey asking what their biggest challenge is, a customer interview, or nothing about marketing at all.

I don’t want to be predictable in my marketing.

He tells a story about forwarding a random, purely emotional video he found on YouTube, one with nothing to do with business, and getting more warm replies from that single send than from almost any pitch he’s ever mailed. People wrote back saying it lifted their mood during a hard week. That response is the whole argument for the unpredictable pacing: a list that can’t guess what Tuesday’s email will be actually opens it.

Put the two halves together and the structure looks like this:

• New subscriber sequence: three to five content pieces building goodwill, then one pitch with a real deadline, repeated with a second pitch and a different bonus for anyone who didn’t buy, spread across ten to twelve days on autoresponder.
• Ongoing broadcast list: no fixed schedule, mostly value with the occasional pitch, and enough variety (surveys, interviews, live Hangouts, even content that has nothing to do with the business) that your name in the inbox stays worth opening.

As Vic Strizheus puts it, “This business is about bringing value and building relationship with your list.” That line is really the whole session compressed into one sentence. The sequencing, the timers, the bonuses, all of it sits on top of that one habit of making deposits before you ever ask for a withdrawal.

The full session walks through how Vic actually built out both of these sequences step by step, including what he puts in each email. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

You know, a lot of people have been asking me how I communicate with my list. And, you know, in case you're wondering that, you know, you're like, Vic, how many times do you email your list? When should I email my list? What are some good practices?

I don't know, you know, what you should do for your niche, for your industry, for your subscribers. What I would like to do with this video, though, is I'm just going to share with you what I do in my business. Okay? And the whole strategy for me is this.

I don't think it matters how often you email your list or, like, what your ultimate list communication strategy is, right? I think you'll need to find whatever is going to work for you, okay? But I think at the end of the day, here's my big outcome for this particular thing, right? Like how I communicate with my list.

The way I want to structure the communication with my list, is I want them to simply anticipate. I want them to wait and be kind of like on the edge of their chair, waiting for my next piece to come out. Make sense? How do you orchestrate?

I mean, earlier in this module, I showed you how, you know, I'm able to get 40, 50, 60, up to 80% emails to get opened, right? When I send out an email broadcast to my list, I get emails to open. I get people to open my emails, right? How do you do that?

Well, you do that by strategically positioning your email sequences or broadcasts in a way that people wait for your next email to come out. You know, I know some marketers and I talk to some marketers that teach, you know, strategies that supposedly work for them. I don't know how, you know, how true that is, but, you know, they say you got to email your list every single day. You got to email your list five times a day, ten times a day.

Somebody says, I email my list 20 times a day, you know, and me as a marketer, I mean, immediately, here's what I think. I think through that process logically, right? Think about it. If you are on somebody's list and they're emailing you like 20 times a day or five times a day or even once a day, you know, but they're emailing you like every single day, okay, how long are you going to be opening those emails?

Before you just get kind of, you know, before you just kind of start ignoring those emails, okay? I tell you from my personal experience, I was up to, you know, I was up to somebody in this marketer's list when I was just getting started in the industry. And he was giving out really good content. I mean, the content was really, actually really good content.

You know, but just because he was emailing multiple times a day, to me, at that time, you know, after like a week or so, I just kept seeing his emails, you know, his name in my inbox just like jammed, right, my inbox. And before I knew it, I mean, like a week later or something like that, you know, I just became blinded to his emails. I just simply did not have the time, you know, to go through every one of his emails because there was just so many of them. You know what I mean?

And most people, a lot of people don't check their emails on a daily basis, you know. So as a marketer, whatever it is. Whatever is going to work for you, I can tell you my personal strategy that works for me. But I want to be very careful not to impose this on you and say, okay, this is the ultimate way to go.

Okay? But I can just share with you what I do. Is that cool? Is that cool with you?

All right. So I implement two, actually a strategy that consists of two parts. Okay? The number one part is my authority building method.

Strategy. Okay? This is when somebody opts in. Okay?

This prospect right here, they opt in, okay, to my list. And if we can just kind of draw this timeline here. Okay? This is my authority building method strategy.

Okay? What I do is I have them opt in for some kind of lead magnet. Okay? We covered that in the Capture Mastery.

So if you don't know what I, when I say lead magnet, if you don't know what that means, all right, or what that is, I suggest you go back to Capture Mastery and watch those trainings. Okay? So first email will be content. Okay?

Most likely it's going to be some kind of lead magnet that I deliver to them free of charge. Okay? Second, okay, content. Third, content.

Okay? Fourth, it can be a content or it can be a pitch. Okay? A lot of times it's going to be a content.

And then I do my big pitch over here for whatever I'm selling. Okay? Make sense? So I will generally have three or at least three, a lot of times four or five pieces of content.

Okay? That do this. That position me as an authority figure in my marketplace that at the same time giving them value, which does a couple of things for me as a marketer. I want to fill up my goodwill bank account.

Okay? As much as possible during this process right here. Okay? The stuff we've been talking about up to this point, if you've been watching these videos in order.

Right? So I want this content to be simple to understand. I want it to have that positive expectancy in each one of these pieces. Okay?

But if I know my product that I'm selling here and what this prospect opted in for, right, ultimately what this product is going to do for him and these are like my milestones, right, the stuff that I explained in one of the previous videos, I will make sure that these pieces, okay, are congruent with what my pitch is going to be about. In other words, if I'm selling here on here's how to make money, right, formula or whatever, right, I'm not going to send them emails about how to get skinny. That would be silly, wouldn't it?

Right? So these pieces of content need to be congruent with your big pitch at the end. Okay? So this stuff needs to support this big product offer.

Make sense? So this is where you make the money. A lot of your conversions are going to be here. Okay?

Now, not everybody is going to, let's say if you send a list, you know, if you're building your listing, if you have a list of like, you know, whatever, 10,000 people, right, or 1,000 people. Well, you have 1,000 people go through this list. You have 1,000 people go through this process. Not, I mean, you might have 20%, you know, 15 to 20% depending on how you structured it, to buy, which is still significantly higher than the average industry's average 2%.

You know, I think the industry's average is like 1.5 or 2% max conversion rate. By structuring my stuff like this, I typically get anywhere from 15 to 20%, sometimes even higher, conversion rate. Okay? I'll give you another tip.

Okay? I'll give you another tip that made me millions of dollars. When I do this pitch right here, okay, I will put this pitch and I will put some kind of special price or some kind of special offer or some kind of special bonus. And I'm going to put it on, make it available for a certain period of time.

In other words, I'm going to have a timer. All right? Pitch with timer. Okay?

I want to have some kind of timer on the page that says, hey, if you buy this within the next 24 hours, 48 hours, whatever, right, I'll give you this special either a price, a special bonus, special something. Okay? Give them another reason to buy your stuff. Make sense?

This strategy works really, really awesome for me personally. Okay? Now, people that buy here, great. They get taken off from this autoresponder sequence.

And by the way, this is all set up on the autoresponder sequence. These emails go out automatically. All right? So I don't have to manually send these out.

I just load them up in this sequence and they just go out. Okay? Now, people that did not buy, okay, will continue to get my emails. For the next, let's see, I want to have this authority building method campaign to be going on for about 10 to 12 days.

So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 maybe. Okay? Maybe 12. Maybe 12 days.

Okay? Two weeks. All right? Roughly.

So if somebody didn't buy here, I will continue to send them content. Okay? More content. Over here, and the content I'm going to send, you might say, Vic, what kind of content do you send them after the pitch has been made?

Here's what I'm going to do. This content could be a video featuring a testimonial or a review from somebody who has purchased this product right here, and they're just raving about it. Make sense? So I will have a core message in that video that would benefit that subscriber regardless if they buy or not.

Very, very important. Again, what is your main why? See, everything you do has a strategy, and everything you do supports your main reason why you exist. You know, my company doesn't exist just to make money.

That's not my main why. Right? My main why is I want to make something, I want to change how people are perceiving marketing. Right?

I want to set a new standard in the industry. I want to change people's lives. That's really what my why is. Right?

So everything I do here is going to support that. So a lot of times, I would record a testimonial or an interview with one of my customers, and I'm going to send this as a content. And in that interview, I will try to pull some ideas. Because this person who just purchased my product, maybe he's brand new.

Right? Or maybe I'm going to interview one of my previous clients or customers or somebody I know. And I'm just going to talk about what this prospect's ultimate desired outcome is. Does that make sense?

So right now, I can have this content be, it's not Vic selling him, but it's somebody else who was in his shoes. Talking about how he got my stuff and how my stuff made a difference that this guy can relate to. You follow? All right?

So this can be an interview. Let's draw it up. All right? And again, this is just, it doesn't have to be this exact thing, but this can be an interview.

Okay? We'll just say I. This content, it can be another interview. Okay?

Again, a different person. And then I can do another content video from me. Okay? Okay?

So this can be revealing something else, right, that's related to this product, but giving that as a free content. So I might say, hey, I just wanted to give you a preview of what this product is, and I think it's really going to help you, but I'm not sure why you didn't purchase it. Maybe because of the money. Maybe you didn't have the ability to do that at this time.

What I would like to do for you is I would like to give you one free module from this product. I would like you to do that. Pull it out. Give it to him.

Okay? Or if you don't own the product, let's say if you're promoting an affiliate product, make sure that you go through the product that you're promoting, okay? And then you can just take a concept from whatever the product is about and just relay the concept to him in this content video. Okay?

So make the content to be 90% training, all right, and then 10% pitch. And the pitch is going to be, hey, if you like this kind of stuff, go back. Go back and check this out. It's really going to help you.

Make sense? And so for the next couple of weeks, this is going to be basically my thing, right? I'm going to do interviews. I'm going to mix with content.

And the content, again, is going to be centered around value, okay, keeping your Goodwill bank account high. And then I'm going to do that for another three or four emails, and then this is going to be another pitch, okay, with added bonus. Here's what I do. I want to have a reason for emailing my list, okay?

I never, ever email my list just because I think I need to email my list for the sake of emailing my list. Every single email I send out has a reason for it, okay? And so especially with pitches, see, you want to keep your Goodwill ratio to your pitch ratio, right? You want to make sure you have more Goodwill and value sent to your list than pitches.

If it's the other way around, you're screwed. Okay? So you've got to be very careful with pitches, and you've still got to pitch, right, because you don't make money when you don't sell stuff. But you've got to sell stuff in a way that's cool, okay?

And the way I do that is, you know, the next pitch I'm going to do, this one had a special bonus, you know, a timer with something special, okay? This next pitch, after these content pieces, right, this one would have an added bonus. I would say, you know what, I just decided to do something awesome for the next 50 people, the next 10 people. The next 10 people who get this, we're going to jump on a private Google Hangout and we're going to have a mastermind, okay?

Another reason for you to mail the product and make an offer, okay? And the reason has to be strong enough. Again, I'm just talking about how I run my business, okay? And then I'm going to finish it up with another content pieces with about 90% content and 10% pitch, okay?

So this would be right here, okay? This would be my… What's loaded up in the autoresponder, okay? This whole thing has been positioned to make myself stand out from the crowd, okay? And at the same time, it's all automatic.

It goes out on my behalf whether I'm there or not, okay? This is like when I have something new to promote when somebody enters my funnel for a particular product, okay? What happens after they get to the end of this, okay, is I set up my autoresponder in a way, so that they get taken out from this list, okay? And they are now in my other list, okay, that is just a free broadcast, okay?

So this would be one funnel, hopefully I'm not confusing you here. And then I'll just put them onto the broadcasting list, okay? And how I broadcast is… That can actually go indefinitely until, you know… Okay. Okay.

So when they enter here, this is going to be very sporadic, very unpredictable, okay? I don't want to be predictable in my marketing. I found this, and this works for me, okay? I'm not sure if it's going to work for you, you just have to check it out, you know?

But I don't want to be predictable. The reason I don't want to be predictable in my marketing is because I don't want people to say, okay, it comes Monday, Vic is going to send me an email. And they just kind of expect that and, you know, if the email shows up, they just kind of get blinded by, you know, by the email. I mean, they just kind of, they don't see that.

Because it shows up, you know, at the same time, at the same, you know, on the exact same day of the week or whatever, you see what I'm saying here? People can get complacent, okay? I'm not saying this is what you should do. I'm not saying this is right or wrong.

I'm just telling you what's working for me. Okay? You have to try it out for yourself. In my broadcast emails, I want to email my list.

I usually email my list about, I don't know, twice a week or something like that, right? Sometimes I even go longer between emails, okay? But when I email my list, these are just, you know, regular, stand-alone broadcast emails. When I email my list, I want to email them value-based emails.

Value-based content. Okay? So the content is still going to be centered around what I'm promoting, my main offer, okay? But you know what?

Maybe somebody, maybe the prospect did not resonate with this particular offer, okay? And if this funnel didn't do the job in two weeks, if I didn't convert him in two weeks, you know what? Maybe it's just not me. Maybe it's the offer.

Maybe he, especially if you're in an affiliate marketing world, maybe if you're promoting somebody else's product. Maybe that guy, that prospect right there, maybe he just doesn't resonate with the whole pitch that the product owner is positioned. Okay? Make sense?

So it kind of depends. In that case, what I would do here is I will continue to bring value, okay, that's centered around that same main core outcome, but this value I'm going to insert, all right, I'm going to insert. I'm going to insert and kind of recommend additional products that is similar to this one, okay? Still in the same category, okay, but similar, okay?

Different products, maybe a different pitch. I might do a Google Hangout here, and this is where actually I get to interact with my list live. You know, I do quite a bit of Google Hangouts. I might do a teleconference call.

I might post something on my blog and just say, hey, check this out, right? There was really no structure to my, like, specifically, like, okay, I'm going to send three emails and I'm going to send a pitch, okay? It just kind of, you just go with the flow. A lot of times what I would do here is I would just send out random stuff.

I went to YouTube. This was, I don't know, quite a bit ago, okay? I went to YouTube and I saw this video by, I think it's called 3D.com. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe the little bird or something like that, you know, with the little girl singing, and everything's going to be all right. Don't worry, you know, everything's going to be all right.

And I just thought it was a cool video. You know, it was watched by millions and millions of people. It got tons of great reviews. It has nothing to do with marketing, right?

So I just took that video URL from YouTube and just shared it. I just emailed my list. I just said hey, this has nothing to do with marketing. Hope it serves you today.

I hope it helps you. Boom, there's a link, right? Had nothing to do with marketing. I've got more positive responses.

responses from my list by sending that video out than any other piece I send out. People emailed me saying, Vig, that was awesome. I was actually going through some hard times and that video helped me kind of shift things around a little bit by just changing the focus. It lifted my mood, whatever, right?

And just people appreciated that. See most marketers were not willing to do that. Most marketers, they're just pitching, pitching, pitching, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. No wonder the email open rates are down the toilet.

My email open rates are going like that. When your prospect gets on your list, I want them to, over time, to get more engaged with me. I want them to get to know me better. I want them to know what I stand for.

I want them to know what my values are. I want them to know what I want to accomplish as a marketer, why I exist. I want them to know my, and really not just me going out there and saying it. I want them to really see me through the pre-frame of what my core why is as a marketer.

Does that make sense? Again, I'm trying to explain this to you in a way so that it would make sense to you, right? I would mix it up. I would do a survey.

I would send out a survey saying, hey, what is your number one challenge in your business? Let them answer that survey. Then based on what they tell me in the survey, I would give them content based on that. Just kind of go with the flow.

The main thing is, for my business, my friend, is I want to make sure that my goodwill bank account stays as full as possible. As full as possible. I'm still pitching, but I'm pitching in a cool way. This business is not about traffic.

This business is not about, it's not even about making money. This business is about bringing value and building relationship with your list. That's really your business, and I don't care what you do. This day and age, whether you're an offline business or you're online, you're a network marketer.

You're a multi-level marketing distributor or whatever. You are in business to engage with your list through building relationship by providing value. My friend, if you can do that, you will never have to worry about money. You will never have to worry about nothing.

What I suggest you do is study other marketers who are successful, and you model. You get on their list. See what they're doing. Follow them on Facebook.

See how they are talking with their prospects, with their followers, and then see what you can model from what they're doing. Does that make sense? In doing so, you will get better. The main thing is this.

Know your game. Know your stuff better than anybody else in your industry. Be the student of the industry. Be the student of what you do, and share your knowledge freely with the world.

The more you share, the more you will have. My friend, it's been great. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I hope you got a lot of value from this module.

I hope it serves you. I look forward to seeing you live on live calls and in person at the events, shaking your hand, get to know you better. See you. Have a good one.

Bye.