Showing posts with label Autoresponder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Autoresponder. Show all posts

Tuesday 2 November 2021

What You Need To Know About Email Deliverability


You’re spending a lot of time each week crafting emails to your subscribers, but none of that will do you any good if you don’t have a decent delivery rate. If those emails land in your potential customers’ spam folders, you don’t have much of a chance of making a sale or building a relationship with them. Here are three tips that will help ensure that your emails make it to your subscribers’ inboxes. 

 

Use A Reputable Auto Responder Service 

 

Using a reputable auto responder service is the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of avoiding spam folders. Companies like Aweber, Mail Chimp and Get Response work hard at making sure they are white listed with the big Internet Service Providers and email providers like Gmail. 

 

Most auto responder companies will list their delivery stats. In addition, the good ones will make sure your emails are compliant and keep you out of hot water. 

 

Set Expectations and Keep Them 

 

Your chances of staying in the main inbox are high when your subscribers regularly open your email. The best way to insure that – outside of providing great content that your subscribers are looking for – is to set expectations from the beginning. Let your subscribers know early on when and how often they can expect an email from you. 

 

You can even use “foreshadowing” in your messages. For example, toward the end of your current broadcast email, mention that they can look for another email from you next Tuesday. 

 

Once you’ve set those expectations do what you can to meet them. Yes, things happen every once in a while. In general, though, do your best to keep your promise and email when your readers expect it. 

 

Doing this regularly will improve your open rates and thus your overall deliverability. 

 

Clean Up Your List Regularly 

 

Another good habit is to clean up your list regularly. If subscribers haven’t been opening your emails for the past six month, chances are good they are no longer interested in what you have to offer. 

 

Check your auto responder services manual or help files to see how you can go about deleting anyone that hasn’t opened an email from you in the past six months. If that freaks you out, or you have a seasonal business, start by deleting anyone that hasn’t looked at your emails in the past year. 

 

Following these tips and keeping an eye on email deliverability in general will make sure your emails are being read by your subscribers and that’s the point of email marketing, isn’t it? 



Sunday 31 October 2021

Make Cross Sales And Consider Higher Priced Products


The hardest part of selling online is finding customers and getting them to make that first purchase with you. It takes the most time, effort, and nurturing. You have to work hard to build a relationship with these people so they start to like, know, and trust you. Once that’s done, and they buy the product, the hard part is over. Provided your products are good, they’ll be happy to buy from you again and again. Yet so many of us are solely focused on market to new potential customers, when could be increasing our profit margins greatly by making offers to existing customers. 

 

Of course, this is hard when you are first starting out. If you only have one product, you can’t really get your customers to buy something else from you. That’s ok. We all have to start somewhere. I do however encourage you to set aside a little time each week to work on developing a related product. Think about what your customers need next, or what else they could use to help them reach their ultimate goal. Keep adding new related products to the mix while also focusing on bringing in new customers on a regular basis. That’s where steady growth and income happens. 

 

As you launch each new product, you will make more and more cross sales. At least a portion of people who bought product A will also buy product B. Then as you start to market product B outside your current customer list, new people will join the mix and they may be interested in product A. The end result is more sales and more sales per customer with each product you launch. 

 

But that’s not the only thing you can do. If you’re ready to really step up your income, consider adding some high-ticket products. One of the easiest one to put together is a bundle. Once you have a handful of products launched, bundle them together and offer that as your first higher-priced product. Even people who’ve bought one or two of them will jump on the bundle sale when you price it right and especially if you include a couple of exclusive bonuses. 

 

Another great option is to offer coaching or training. This works particularly well for “how-to” products. The initial offer is the eBook or training course. The high-ticket product is time with you where you answer questions and guide them through consuming the information. This can be in the form of emails or instant messages, phone calls, or video conferences. You can set it up as a group coaching where you work with a handful of people at the same time, or individual coaching. 

 

Last but not least, you may want to consider “done for your” services. If your info product is about installing a particular software for example, you can offer an upsell or high-ticket service of installing and customizing it for them. The idea is that your customers go into it with the idea of doing it themselves and once they read your info, they realize they’d rather pay someone to do it for them. 

 

Think about this today and come up with at least one high-ticked priced idea that you can implement over the coming month. Then get it up for sale and start profiting big from your customer list. 



Two Emails You Should Send To Every Customer


As an online marketer, you spend a lot of time and effort writing emails. You email your list, you email your customers, you email affiliates, you email potential JV partners, the list goes on and on. In short, a big part of your online marketing efforts is writing emails. It’s always been that way and it will continue to work that way. Today I want to take a minute to briefly go over two different types of emails that I always send to my customers, and I think you should too. Let’s see if you agree with me by the end of this blog post. 

 

Email #1 – Request Feedback & Testimonials 

 

I like to check in with my customers after a few days to make sure they were able to download the product ok and to see if they have any questions. From there, it’s easy to transition into another follow up email about feedback and finally requesting a testimonial. I find that my customers are more than happy to provide feedback and suggest future improvements. Sometimes that results in an updated product, but more often than not it gives me ideas for additional products to launch in the future. 

 

Now let’s talk about testimonials. You know this type of social proof is important and good testimonials can greatly improve your sales conversions. It took me a while to learn this, but you can’t wait for people to just send you a testimonial out of the blue. You have to ask for it. The best way to do this is face to face. The next best way is to ask for it via email. Write up that email and send it out to your customers. The responses you get back will make your day. 

 

Email #2 – Invitation To Promote

 

A few days after asking my customers for feedback and testimonials, I like to invite them to my affiliate program. Depending on your niche, you may want to tweak the wording on this, but particularly in the business-to-business niche, it’s a no-brainer to try to turn your customers into affiliates. This can work even if you don’t have an affiliate program. Simply ask your loyal customers to help you spread the word. In this age of social media, everyone has an online presence and the ability to send free traffic your way. Why not tap into that? Of course, this works even better with an affiliate program set up so you can pay your audience when they send new customers your way. 

 

Do you agree with me? Are these emails you’re already sending? If not, I hope it’s something you consider adding to the mix. Here’s a quick pro tip. You can create a simple little autoresponder series that goes out as soon as someone purchases your product. You probably already have an email going out that delivers the product. Why not add these two emails? It automates the whole process and you only need to write these emails once but will benefit from them for months and years to come. 



The Benefit Of Making Affiliate Offers To Your Customers


You put a lot of time and effort into growing your customer list. Why would you use it to promote other people’s products? I get it. We can feel pretty protective of our hard-won buyers, and we should be. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t promote other people’s products and profit from it. Let me explain. 

 

Think back on a time when you got into a new hobby, or when you first started building your online business. You didn’t learn from just one person, did you? You didn’t buy just one book on woodworking, or classic car restoration. You didn’t subscribe to just one magazine or YouTube channel. Instead, you bought a bunch of stuff. You bookmarked a ton of great sites, blogs, and forums. You subscribed to various newsletters and magazines. In short, you tried to learn as much as you could from as many different people or sources as possible. We all do this, including our customers. Why not help your people find what they need and benefit from it financially? Done right, it’s a good thing for all involved. 

 

It Benefits Your Customers 

 

Making affiliate offers to your list can be beneficial to your customers, provided you do your job to research the products, make sure they are high quality, and pay attention to your audiences’ need. Think of it as vetting or screening the products and services they are considering already anyway, and preventing them with the best options. You can even take it a step further by adding special bonuses or “how-to” instructions as a bonus when they buy through your affiliate link. Another fun option is to approach the product creators to see if they are willing to set up a special coupon for your customers. 

 

It Benefits You 

 

This one is pretty obvious. You are going to make more money. Think about it this way. Your customers are going to buy from other people anyway. You may as well take a cut in the form of an affiliate commission. Think about how it benefits the people who buy through your link if you’re feeling weird about taking money for a product you didn’t create. You’ll quickly get over those thoughts when you start to see the affiliate commissions coming in. 

 

It Benefits The People You Promote 

 

The nice thing about mailing out for a product of another online marketer like yourself is that you’re helping this person out. If you have an affiliate program yourself, you know how nice it is when those surprise sales start coming in. It helps them grow their reach and gets the word out about the work they do. Ideally it will complement yours, making this a win-win situation. 

 

Since you’re helping these fellow online business owners out by promoting them, they are more likely to recommend you and your products and services to their audience. That in turn benefits you again. Don’t you love how that works out? 



Promote New Offers To Your Customers First


Your customer list is a valuable asset. These are the people whose trust you’ve already earned. Keep that in mind as you promote and be protective of your loyal fans. When you are coming out with a new product, they will be your first stop. In other words, make sure you always promote new offers to your customers first. In fact, I like to keep my existing customers in mind when I’m starting to think about a new product to create. What else do they need? How can I help them on the next step on their journey toward their end goal? 

 

By asking yourself those types of questions, you’ll not only please your customers and make them feel included in the process, you are also giving yourself a much better chance of creating products that will sell well. But that’s not the only big benefit of promoting your offers to your customer list first. Yes, it’s nice to feel confident about your new offer before you start promoting it, but there are two more great reasons for starting with your customers. 

 

Curious what those two reasons are? The first is that it gives you a chance to work out your sales process and test your copy with a group of people who like you and are more willing to forgive you if there are some little bugs like part of a download not working. You can get those worked out and then focus on split testing and optimizing your sales copy so you know it converts well when you start approaching affiliates or paying for traffic. Having conversion rates can be a huge plus when you’re convincing others to mail for your new product, and it can be a huge help when you’re trying to figure out how much you can afford to spend on advertising. Make sure you have good tracking in place and then use your customer list to start sending traffic to the new offer. 

 

The second and probably biggest reason why I like to promote new offers to my customers first is because it makes them feel special. They get first dips and often a special deal or an extra bonus. Your relationship with your loyal customer base is important. I can’t stress that enough. You want to take every opportunity to make them feel special and valued. Each product launch is a perfect opportunity to do just that. It helps you deepen that relationship and continue to grow goodwill with your loyal fans. They in return will reward you with amazing testimonials and priceless word-of-mouth advertising by talking about you and recommending you and what you have to offer to their circle of influence. They will share the results they are getting. They will share your social media posts. They will post a link to your latest video or blog post on Facebook. In short, they will become an important part of your overall business growth. That’s why I make it a point to ALWAYS launch a new product exclusively to my list of customers first. 



Make Backend Sales On Autopilot


How would you like to wake up to sales notifications every morning, or have them pop up in your inbox throughout the day, whether you’re working or not? Today I’m going to share with you how to make that happen without hardly any more work on your end. Best of all, this is a system you’ll be setting up once that continues to work for you going forward with only minor upkeep. 

 

To make this happen, we’re going to take advantage of the fact that people are more likely to buy from you again after the initial purchase. Your job is to simply give them more opportunities to buy. It’s called making backend sales. After the initial sale, the customer heads to the download page, and ideally, he will also receive an email with the purchase and download information. These are the first two places you want to take advantage of to make more sales. 

 

Start with the download page. Before sharing the link where they can download the product they just purchased, present them with a great offer for a related product. This could be something you’ve created, or it could be something you’re an affiliate for. The important part is that it is related to the original purchase and that it’s a good value. Promote it on the download page. 

 

Next, you promote the same offer in the download email and in a follow up email or two. Those emails don’t have to be pushy. Share a great tip for using the product they already purchased, or remind them to download it and put it to good use. Then casually mention the additional offer. 

 

If you don’t do anything else, make it a point to put these two strategies in place and start watching the additional sales come in. From there the sky is the limit. You can extend the auto responder sequence your customers receive indefinitely. Create a combination of helpful content to share and offers. Some of these offers will go out as solo emails, while others work well within the content or in the P.S. of one of your emails. The offers can be a combination of your own product offerings and affiliate promotions. Keep adding to this series of auto responder emails to expand your “backend” and continue to make more sales per customer. 

 

Remember the minor upkeep that will be required to keep this running smoothly for years and months to come that I mentioned in the beginning of the blog post? It simply means that you take some time every few months to look through those auto-responder messages and download pages to make sure the offers you’re promoting are still available and still a good fit for your target audience. Spend a few minutes at the end of your workday here and there to fix and improve part of your backend. If you’re feeling ambitious, you could even add a few more emails to make even more sales going forward. It’s time well spent. 



Create An OTO To Instantly Boost Sales


In the previous blog post, I shared my thoughts on the value of a customer list with you. Today I want to share a simple but oh-so powerful strategy with you to start taking advantage of the fact that your existing customers are your most valuable assets. To grow your bottom line, you only have a few options. You can cut expenses, you can get more customers, or you can increase how much money each customer spends with you. Getting customers to spend more with you without having to raise prices (and often lower conversion) is what the remainder of this 7-day series is all about. 

 

The hardest part of making money online is to get people to spend those first few dollars with you. Once they’ve done that, they are more likely to spend money with you again and again. One of the best times to get them to buy from you is right after they’ve made a purchase. That’s where one time offers or OTOs come in. 

 

The idea is to present your customer with a great deal on a complementary product as soon as they finish buying. This could be a bigger version of the same product (so if you sold them 10 blue widgets on the initial sale, offer them 50 more widgets at a great price), it could be something related (an offer for 10 yellow widgets to go with the blue ones), or something that helps them make better use of what they’ve bought (a book on how to install those blue widgets). 

 

The best place to start adding OTOs to your funnel is with your best-selling products. What’s making you the most consistent sales right now? Or maybe there’s something you’re thinking of launching in the next few weeks that could benefit from an upsell offer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lower priced product. The volume of sales is more important than your actual profit on the initial offer, since customers won’t see the OTO unless they buy the first product. 


There are two reasons why one time offers work so well. The first is because people are already in a shopping mindset and comfortable buying from you. They just bought one of your products when they are presented with this upsell offer. The second reason is fear of missing out. The whole point of a “One Time Offer” is that it is only available “right now”. Once they leave the sales page, the opportunity to take you up on the offer is gone. This creates urgency and scarcity and with it the fear of missing out. Try it by creating an OTO for some of your best-selling products and see for yourself how much you can increase your bottom line by adding this to your overall sales funnel. 

 


Your Customers Make Up Your Most Valuable List


You’ve heard the phrase “the money is in the list”. In other words, your subscribers have value. Today I want to share one particular type of list with you that’s a lot more valuable than any other. That list is your customer list. These are the people that have spent money with you already. And guess what, they are the most likely to do so again and again and again. That’s what makes them one of your most valuable business assets. 

 

Over the course of the next seven days, we take a look at this sub-group of your subscribers, figure out how to get more of the, and I challenge you to look through your site, your emails, and your funnel and work on more opportunities to mail them regularly going forward. First though, let’s take a quick look at what makes these people so special to you and your bottom line. 

 

Customers are people that already trust you. If your product provides great value to them (which is should), they also like you. Over the course of consuming the product and being part of your funnel, they also get to know you better. In short, these are the people that know, like, and trust you the most when it comes to your business. This means that are more likely to buy something else you recommend. This could be your own product or something you’re promoting as an affiliate. 

 

When you mail an offer to your customer list, you can expect a much higher conversion than with any other list. With a regular offer, a 2% conversion of visitors to sales is often what you expect. When mailing to your list of subscribers, you can often double or even triple that conversion. With a customer list, you can expect to see conversions of 30% or higher depending on how targeted the product is. That’s a huge bump in conversion. It doesn’t take a lot of customers to make a food number of sales. That’s why this is the list you should work on growing the most. 

 

And the benefits don’t stop there. Customers are your most loyal audience. They are more likely to spread the word about you and defend you online. They aren’t afraid to sing your praises. Treat them well and you’ll have a steady supply of word-of-mouth advertising and testimonials to create valuable social proof. 

 

How do you get more customers? By adding a low-cost product to your funnel and constantly promoting it to the rest of your list. Make it your #1 goal to grow your customer list. Create something of value that relates to your opt-in offer and promote it on your “thank you page”, in your first few emails and occasionally throughout. Work on converting a portion of your email subscribers into customers right away. 

 

What can you do today to work on growing your very own customer list? 



Saturday 30 October 2021

Develop A Game Plan For The Future


We touched a little at the end of yesterday’s blog post on the whole idea of moving forward and continuing to improve our email marketing game. Trust me, there’s always room for improvement, for anyone, including me. While an audit like this is a great way to update and improve things, it’s just as important to keep an eye on things and tweak them more regularly going forward. At the same time, it’s easy to put this task on the back burner and focus on new and exciting or more urgent tasks instead. That’s why it’s important to make a plan to keep improving your auto-responder going forward. 

 

Let’s start by looking at some of the things we already talked about. It’s a good idea to review your lead magnet and consider changing it out every three to six months. Go ahead and put that on the calendar. As previously mentioned, you also want to continue to add new auto-responder messages to the list. You can either set aside a particular day of the week to do that, or work on it in larger batches. Let’s say you’re going to add one new email message per week. You could put it on the calendar as a weekly activity that gets done every Tuesday morning for example. Or, if you prefer to work in batches, you could set aside a day every couple of months where you write and add 3 months’ worth of emails. Find a rhythm that works for you and then get in the habit of doing it regularly. 

 

Next, I want to share three other tasks related to list building and email marketing that you want to plan on doing regularly going forward. They are all important as is everything we’ve talked about so far. Make them a priority, put them on the calendar and get it done. Your list and your business will grow that much faster when you do. 

 

The first thing is to make it a habit to look at your opt-in stats. We talked in earlier posts about how much you can learn from them. Look at open rates and unsubscribes in particular. The most important stat for your bottom line is of course how many people take you up on your offers. Study any email offers or solo emails that are converting well for you and try to do more along those lines. 

 

Next, you want to look at your opt-in conversion rates. Play around with your opt-in forms and pages, the placement of the forms, the copy etc. and see if you can get that percentage to go up. Most auto-responder services give you the ability to split test your forms and pages. Take advantage of that. Set up tests and always have one running. Continue to try to beat your previous conversion rate. 

 

Last but not least consider setting up different opt-in funnels. You can target specific subsets of your target audience with special funnels designed just for them. This allows you to speak directly to them and their particular needs. Of course, you could also go wide by setting up a funnel on a related topic that your current readers may also be interested in. Continue to grow your list by setting up new funnels and new auto responders on a regular basis. 



Are Your Messages Serving You And Making You Money?

 

In the last blog post, we looked at the messages in the auto-responder sequence to make sure they are serving our audience. Today we’re going to go through that list again, but this time we’re making sure they also serve us and help us make money. Remember what I mentioned yesterday about taking care of our audience and only providing offers that add value to ensure long-term growth. Today is all about getting more people to look at those quality offers and taking us up on them. 

 

Your best friend here is the analytics data from your auto-responder service and anything else you measure like click through on affiliate links etc. You may even want to dig around Google Analytics and see what helpful data you can find there. Setting up goals for example is a good idea to see what’s working and where in a funnel you’re losing people. 

 

I find it helps to track three different metrics when it comes to this. The first if of course the open rate. If your subscribers don’t even bother to open your emails, you need to do something. Start by looking at the subject line and see what you can do to improve it. If that doesn’t work, it may be a problem with the subject matter. In that case, I suggest replacing the message with something different. 

 

The second metric you want to keep an eye on is click through rate for any links in your email messages. If you’re not getting clicks, chances are that you’re either not writing a strong enough call to action or that the content and/or offer isn’t all that interesting to your readers. In either case that’s something you want to fix. Go back to what you’ve learned about your audience and what interests them and what they need to solve their problems. Craft the offers and content with them in mind. Keep going back to the questions of what they need to know and what they need next that we talked about in yesterday’s post. 

 

The third metric you want to take a look at is unsubscribes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you panic and delete messages anytime you see someone unsubscribe. Instead, I want you to look at the big picture here. You will always have some people unsubscribe from your list at various points in the message sequence. What you want to look for is spikes in unsubscribes at a particular message. Look at those emails. Is the topic different from what you usually share? Did you try to sell your readers too hard on a product you love? Rework those messages, toning down the copy, or even replacing it with something that’s better suited (either product or content) to your target audience and see if you can improve those stats. 

 

There’s a lot you can learn from your stats and from what your readers tell you. Start to pay attention, start to listen, and start to take action going forward. You’ll find yourself becoming a better and better email marketer as time goes by. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s really about isn’t it? It’s about finding your audience, serving them, and making a comfortable living in the process. 



Are Your Messages Serving Your Customers?


We started to audit our auto-responder messages yesterday by reworking the welcome email. Now it’s time to tackle the rest of them. If you followed my advice of signing up for your own list with a separate email account, you can edit and work through them as they hit your inbox. Another option is to open them and edit them one at a time as time permits in your auto-responder dashboard. Either options works, just make sure it gets done sooner rather than later. 

 

Today we going to look at each of those messages from the point of view of our subscribers and customers. You want to look at both the content and the offers you are presenting them with. Let’s run through some questions you may want to ask yourself as you read through each of the email messages. 

 

First though, spend a few minutes defining your target audience and your ideal subscriber. The more you know about this person, the easier it will become to edit these messages and craft new ones going forward. Picture your ideal customer and subscriber as a fictional character. Be as detailed and clear as possible. This will be the person you’re writing to as you work on all your email marketing. 

 

Does The Subject Line Grab Their Attention? 

 

Start by examining the subject line of each message. It’s what determines whether or not your subscribers open your email. It can be helpful to look at the stats in you auto-responder software to find out what emails have high open rates and which ones don’t. Rework the subject lines of underperformers and see if you can’t find a way to grab your readers’ attention. 

 

Are You Serving Them With The Content You’re Sharing? 

 

Next, take a look at the content you’re sharing in your emails as well as the content you’re pointing them to in your messages. Maybe you’re linking to a blog post or a video. Examine each piece of content and ask yourself if it serves your audience. Are you helping your readers? Are you answering their questions, addressing their concerns, or entertaining them? Keep your ideal subscriber in mind as you work through the content. If something doesn’t serve them, take it out of the auto-responder sequence or edit and change as needed. 

 

Remember, you’re building a relationship here and you have to earn your subscribers’ trust before they will become an integral part of your customer base and your online business. 

 

Do The Order Of Messages Make Sense? 

 

As you are working your way through your auto-responder messages, it’s also a good idea to review the order of your messages. Is it making sense and is it presenting your readers with information, tips and offers in progressive order that makes sense? You don’t want to present the solution to a problem you haven’t discussed with them yet for example. 

 

Review the order and timing of your auto-responder emails and tweak it as needed. You’ll be surprised how much difference a simple switch in emails can make when it comes to open rates, and sales from your product recommendations. 

 

What Do They Need or Need To Know Next? 

 

Another way to look at this as you’re editing your a/r sequence is to ask yourself what else your readers need and what they need to know next. Not only does this help with the order of messages, asking yourself this question continuously will also help you to come up with more and more messages to add to your auto-responder. That’s something you want to continue doing going forward. In fact, now is the perfect time to put that on the calendar to make sure it happens. 

 

Is This The Best Product To Recommend? 

 

Last but not least, let’s talk about monetizing your list. Yes, you want to make offers and start earning a nice little income from your list. At the same time though, you should also have your subscribers’ best interest in mind. Are the products you’re recommending worth the money? Are they a good fit for your readers? Don’t make offers for offers sake. Make offers because you know this is something that will provide value to your audience. 

 

Go through the messages one at a time and improve what you can. Don’t be afraid to delete entire emails if they don’t serve your customers and subscribers and replace them with something else. Quality always trumps quantity here and you should be protective of your readers. Nothing kills a list faster than hitting them up with a bunch of crappy offers to make a quick buck. You’re in this for the long run and that means taking care of your people and your tribe. 



How Welcoming Is Your Welcome Email?


Today it’s time to rework the welcome email. I have yet to come across one that couldn’t use some improvement. More often than not, we write it up quickly during the process of setting up our list and then never look at it again. That’s really a shame, because it is the email that has the highest open rate of anything you send and is seen by just about every single person that signs up for your list. More importantly, those readers are hot leads. They just found you and signed up for your list and your lead magnet. They are very interested in what you have to say and what you can do to help them. In short, you have their full attention. Don’t waste that. Instead, use it wisely. 

 

By using their attention wisely, you can continue to nurture and grow the relationship with your readers, you can set expectations, and you can pre-sell them on the offer you present them with on the download or thank you page that we talked about in yesterday’s blog post. Let’s quickly go over the different components of a good welcome email. 

 

The subject line should be to the point and let them know exactly what this is about. Reference your site or your lead magnet in there. Next you want to give your readers a warm welcome. Tell them a little about you and your site. This is also a great place to set expectations. You can greatly improve your future email open rates if you let them know what’s coming and why they don’t want to miss it. 

 

If you publish a weekly newsletter, share a little bit about what’s in those newsletters, what day of the week they usually arrive in their email inbox, and what tag to look for in the subject line. Let’s say you publish a weekly newsletter for young parents. You may choose a tag like [Parenting News] as part of your subject line for each issue. Mention that in your welcome email so your readers can start looking for it. 

 

If you have an auto-responder sequence set up, tease them about what’s coming in the first email of the sequence and let them know when to look for it. You can also hint at exclusive content, coupons and the likes that are coming in the coming weeks and months. 

 

Last but not least, encourage your subscribers to hit reply and email you. Ask them a question, suggest that they share a tip etc. Get them to reply to you. Not only does this allow you to take the relationship to the next level and give you a chance to get to know your audience better, it also greatly improves your overall list delivery rates. 

 

Use this as a guideline to rework your own email, keeping your target audience in mind along the way. Try it out and see how well it’s working for you. As your understanding of your niche and your target audience grows, you may want to revisit and tweak the message. Make it a point to look at it every six months or so to make sure it still serves you and your readers well. 



Review Your Download Page


Yesterday we spent a lot of time on the lead magnet. I’m sure you have some great plans for the future, and maybe even started to tweak your existing offer or creating something new and awesome from scratch. Today it’s time to tackle another important piece of the puzzle… the download or thank you page. This is the page your subscribers land on after they confirm their opt-in. It’s also typically the page where they pick up their lead magnet offer. This means it is prime real estate on your site. 

 

Why do I consider the thank you or download page such a valuable page? For two reasons. The first is that just about every single subscriber visits that page. They want their opt-in freebie, right? So they will click through to the download page to pick it up. In short, this will likely be one of your most visited pages. The second reason is just as important and it’s about the quality of website visitor. These are “red-hot” leads. They are very interested in what you have to say and they trust you enough to hand over their email address. Take advantage of that fact and present them with an offer right on the download page while they are open to taking you up on it. 

 

With all that said, it’s time to audit your download page and see if there’s room for improvement. At the very least, you want the following on your download or thank you page: 

 

Thank Your Subscribers: Not only is it a nice thing to do, it also lets them know that their subscription was successful. This is also one of the first impressions you make, so make it a good one. 

 

Access To The Lead Magnet: Next, it’s time to keep your promise and deliver the lead magnet. This could be a PDF download, an imbedded video, or the information they need to access a course. Make it easy to get the lead magnet, and provide help on how to access it. Not only does this avoid frustrated subscribers, it also saves you on quite a few support emails. 

 

A Way To Get In Touch With You: No matter how much information you provide or how thorough you are with the help you provide on the pages, people will have questions. Make it easy to get in touch with you by providing your email and links to your social media accounts. Getting emails from subscribers is actually a good thing. It allows you to continue to build that relationship one-on-one. 

 

Optional – But Highly Recommended! 


With the basics covered, let’s talk about my favorite addition to the thank you or download page that has made a huge difference in my own business. It’s to make an offer right there for a paid product. Ideally this will be your own product, but in a pinch, you can also make an offer for an affiliate product.

 

The idea is to move your readers from subscriber to paying customer as quickly as possible. A customer is a much more valuable lead than a freebie subscriber. Right after they sign up, you have their full attention and you know exactly what they want and need. Come up with an info product that’s closely related to the lead magnet they just signed up for. Earlier in this series, we used potty training as an example and talked about creating a lead magnet about the signs that a child is ready to potty train. The perfect product for the download page would be a short guide on how to potty train your child in 48 hours. 

 

Keep this information product highly targeted and inexpensive. You don’t want to offer a high-ticket item here. This is the very beginning of your product funnel. Offer something anywhere from $7 - $37 here depending on your target market. Make it a no-brainer offer and get them on that customer list. 

 

The list you’re building will be more valuable and as an added bonus, you can use the income you’re generating from your thank you page to buy advertising to continue to grow your list even faster. 



Take A Closer Look At Your Lead Magnet

 

The previous post gave you a pretty good overview over where your opt-in and auto-responder are right now. Now that you have a general overview, and a list of things you want to fix and change, it’s time to take a closer look at the first piece of the puzzle… your lead magnet. This is the “thing” you are giving away as a thank you when people join your list. It’s the carrot you dangle in front of them and how you invite them to become a subscriber. 

 

It’s a good idea to change the lead magnet from time to time, and even more important that you make sure it’s something of value that’s interesting to your readers. That’s why it’s a good idea to start with your target audience in mind. You don’t necessarily want to appeal to the largest audience. Instead, you want to attract the right people who will love your products and recommendations. In short, you want your free list to be made up of future customers. Do you know who those people are? If not, now is a great time to figure that out and get it clear in your mind. 

 

Once you know who your ideal customer is, think about where they are at right now. I’m not talking about location here. Think about where they are at in live, pertaining to what you have to offer and where they want to go. For example, you could build an audience of parents of toddlers who are just starting to potty train. Their goal is of course to get the kid out of diapers for good and that can pose quite the challenge. Think about what some of the early questions these people ask themselves or what problems they face. In this example, the parent may be wondering when the right time to start potty training is and if there are signs that their child is ready. 

 

Spend a little time today to brainstorm some ideas for questions and solutions around this whole concept for your own target audience. Along the way, think about how your existing lead magnet fits into that picture. Is it a good fit? If not, it may be time to come up with a new lead magnet. Think about format as well. Is a short report that’s downloadable as a pdf attractive to your market? Or would they prefer a video course or interactive quiz? Look at what your competition or others who target the same audience are doing and consider going a similar route. 

 

In the end, don’t be afraid to create multiple new lead magnets and test them out to see which one performs best for you. It’s time well spent when you find the opt-in offer that helps explode your list growth. 



Sign Up For Your Own List And Review The Process


Are you ready to audit your list and find out what’s working, what isn’t, and where there’s room for improvement? If you ask me, it’s one of the most productive and rewarding tasks you can tackle this week. It all starts by taking a closer look at what you have in place right now. 

 

Be honest. When is the last time you’ve really taken a look at your opt-in form? How about your welcome email? Do you know what it says and how you’re welcoming your new subscribers? How about the lead magnet you’re using? It’s time to take stock of all that and the first step is to sign up for your own list. 

 

You can sign up with any email and it will work just fine. I prefer a Gmail account that I’ve set up just for this purpose. It allows me to see all my auto-responder emails for various lists in one place. The reason I chose Gmail (aside from the fact that it’s free and easy to access anytime, anywhere), is that it’s very searchable. This comes in handy when you’re trying to find one particular email that needs changing or updating. You can search for it in your Gmail using a keyword instead of digging through your auto-responder series trying to find it. 

 

Keep pen and paper next to you as you get ready to sign up for your own list. We’ll address some of these things in more detail this week, but start to pay attention and try to look at each piece of the process from your subscribers’ point of few. How attractive is the opt-in offer? Is the headline catchy? Do you help your readers solve a problem with your lead magnet and the content you provide in your emails? Are you hitting on pain points in your copy? How attractive is the graphic? 

 

As you’re signing up, look at how easy and smooth the process is. Look at and reevaluate how much information you’re asking for. Are the landing page and opt-in email making sense? Are there things you could improve or clarify? Does it fit with the overall look and feel of the rest of your site? Do you have any distractions on the opt-in confirmation page and email? Do your readers know what to expect? 

 

Once you confirm your opt-in, you should land on a Thank You or download page. Make sure you have it set up and are using it to your advantage. It should be easy to find the lead magnet download file, but this isn’t the only thing you can do here. Start to think about using this space to create a relationship with your readers and to turn them into customers. We’ll go into more detail on this in a subsequent post. Of course, you should make sure all the links on this page work. You don’t want to make a bad first impression. 

 

Last but not least, head to your email account and review the welcome email you received. Going forward, look at each message in your auto-responder sequence as it comes in. Make sure the links are working, the offers are still valid and the messages make sense. Change and tweak as needed. 

 

That’s it for the first post. In the next post, we take a closer look at the lead magnet and how well it’s working when it comes to drawing new subscribers into your funnel.