Milk Road Email Test

A story about how Shaan and his team discovered fake subscribers through a simple email test.

"We had this philosophy with Milk Road that we should eventually cut out all advertisers and only promote our own products in the newsletter. That's the only way to hold yourself accountable to not acquiring shitty subscribers.

We started this new growth channel and tried it out for a week. The numbers looked pretty good - we were getting cheap sign ups and they were opening the email. I told Ben to email all those people who signed up and just ask them a simple one-line question, because if they're reading it daily, surely they would reply to an email from the owner.

There were a couple thousand people on the list. When I asked Ben how many people replied, I guessed maybe 100 or 500. He said we got 2 replies total. We immediately turned off that marketing channel. I know other people are still buying from this traffic source and they're just dumping money down the drain."