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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Rina figure out what to do with her email autoresponder even though she doesn’t have a product to sell.
Here’s a hint – Have your autoresponder set up from the very beginning.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question from Rina at rinaorellanaflamenco.com/
- Podcast on Sales Funnel
- Aweber
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Our question today comes from Flip Your Life community member, Rina Orellana and I cannot pronounce that name, I am not sure what that is. Her website is rinaorellanaflamenco.com; not flamingo like the pink things you put in your front yard but the flamenco dancing.
JOCELYN: Sounds like fun.
SHANE: Flamenco dancing. And her question is, “I am working on my product right now, dance lesson videos and I have a small email list of less than 500 people. I am working on my lead magnet as well. My question is, should I have an email list and an autoresponder series at all if I don’t have a product to sell yet? What should that look like? I have heard your podcast on sales funnels and I thought it was fantastic, but I’m wondering how to apply it to myself when I don’t even have a product to sell?”
JOCELYN: All right, so I think that you should definitely go ahead and have an email autoresponder series even if you don’t have your product quite ready yet. The reason for this is to get people just more acquainted with you, and get them to know you, and when you do have your product ready to sell, you’ll already have your email list there and you would already have been talking to them. In the meantime, what you can do is just introduce yourself and give a summary of what all is included on your website and where people could find it. And then also you can communicate with them and get them to tell you more about themselves; what they are doing in the dance world, what they need help with, what are their pain points that you could possibly solve with a paid product.
SHANE: Yeah, one of the very first things that you should do when you are starting an online business is start collecting emails whether you have anything or not. Even if it’s just the old, ‘Sign up for my newsletter’ or email list or anything – and you are going to get an opt-in done fast, we want you to do a lead magnet, we want you to have a product mentality first and get something up there that you can exchange for an email address. But you’ve got to have something on the other end of that email collection that’s going to happen over time. Even if it’s just – this is not a great way to do it, but even if you are just broadcasting every week, ‘Hey, here’s my new blog post’, or like Jocelyn said, if you are just asking them a question like, you know, ‘What is the one dance step you have the most problem with?’ I’m not exactly sure, anything about flamenco dancing, but something where you could open that dialogue, keep people coming back, you definitely don’t want to get people’s emails and then never talk to them again until you have something ready which might be months down the road because if you do, those leads are warm, that’s why they gave you their email address in the first place, but they do cool off over time. So your email autoresponder can also include things like, ‘Hey, here’s my Facebook page, follow me there’ or ‘Hey, here’s my Twitter account, come follow me on Twitter’ but you do need something in that email autoresponder account even if it’s just broadcasting weekly, or you’re gonna have people disappear and lose interest on you.
JOCELYN: And it might be a really good opportunity for you to just take a little break in your content schedule and take some time and just batch some emails. Figure out what you want to say in each one, take a little bit of time to write those, and then you won’t have to worry about it going forward if you have things for the people in your email list to get.
SHANE: And it only takes about a month to create a good lead magnet or two or three weeks. So, if you would just take time now, maybe stop everything you are doing for the next week, like Jocelyn said, and get four emails done; maybe the first one is just a welcome, the second one is ‘Here’s my Facebook page and my Twitter account’ the third one is, ‘What are you struggling with now?’ and then ‘Pick your best blog post’ or something that you have written in the past, something that people seem to comment on or maybe resonated with, and just go ahead and make one simple autoresponder now. And then that way you can take the next month and then you know that every one that is going to sign up on the list is at least going to get messages for four weeks. And that way, at the end of period, you’ll have maybe some kind of product that you can sell them, or you’ll have something that lead into, or you’ll have four or five blog posts. Just add those to the end of your autoresponder forever. Once you welcome people, once you’ve showed them your initial offerings, there’s no reason to keep pitching them. Just get them to come back to your site. Every time you create a blog post or a podcast, add that to the end of your autoresponder or start broadcasting to everybody once a week. Say you’re gonna do a newsletter, which just says, ‘Hey this is what’s going on in my flamenco dance studio and here’s my new video, or blog post/YouTube video that I created.’ And you should be on your way.
JOCELYN: All right guys, I hope that helps to answer some of your questions about email. We’re gonna be answering lots of email questions this month so join us for our Q&As and also our long podcast on Tuesdays.
SHANE: We would also love to personally help you with any kind of email problems or autoresponder questions that you have over in our Flip Your Life community. We log in every single day for our Flip Your Life forums, we check out members’ requests, we help them, we check out their email autoresponders, you know, a lot of times, people will even post an email in there if they want the community to look at it, and everybody kinda chimes in and helps them move forward in your online business. We love doing that and if you’d like to learn more about our Flip Your Life community, head on over to fliplifestyle.com/flipyourlife. Until next time guys, get out there, take action and we will see you on the podcast.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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