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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Melissa figure out how quickly she can pitch a product to her email list using an autoresponder.
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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 the Q&A with S&J. We got a great question today for you from Melissa Harley. Melissa is a member of our Flip Your Life membership community; we get to work with Melissa quite a bit in our forums over at flipyourlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and Melissa’s question today is, “My question is, when do I send my list an ad for my product in the email if they’ve signed up for my blog post or my newsletter? Should there just be a link to it in every single email? How often or when should I sell people something?” And we get this question quite a bit. I think people are scared they are gonna jump in and make that pitch too early, and all of our questions this month are about email marketing, so this is a great and timely question for what we are talking about. Jocelyn, what do you think about that? How soon or often should people sell in their email list?
JOCELYN: All right Melissa, I think that there are actually a couple of answers here because there’s selling in an autoresponder, and then there’s selling in like a normal broadcast, which I think is what you are asking about. But as far as an autoresponder goes, I don’t really like to put a sales link in the first couple of emails. I really want to, kind of, overwhelm people with value and what they are getting from me instead of asking for something from them right away. I don’t have a problem with in the email autoresponder, if you maybe put like a PS link and let people know that you have something for sale, in say maybe the third email or the fourth email something like that. Some people even do it in the first couple of emails and if that’s what you choose to do, I mean, you could certainly test that out, see if it’s working for your audience, but I personally just don’t like to do that right away. Now as far as the broadcasts goes, I think that you really could do it a lot of different ways; what do you think?
SHANE: Okay, I think with broadcasts, that’s where you probably should be selling. Like Jocelyn was saying, the autoresponder, there’s going to be a pitch that’s for sure, but like she said, the first email is to kinda introduce yourself and deliver that thing you promised them, the second, third, and fourth emails are pretty much just to train them to open your emails. So Jocelyn said earlier that she wants to really overload them with value in those first few emails. If people don’t get used to opening your emails, they’re never going to click the link inside them anyway so you got to make sure they know that opening your email is like a Christmas gift. So make sure you are giving a lot of stuff away in those first couple of emails. Train them to click links though, they got to go to your website to get those, and then maybe in your autoresponder, you could sell something, maybe a quick offer around the fifth or sixth email, is that too early you think or –
JOCELYN: No, I think that’s probably reasonable; just depending on your audience and your niche, you just have to test it and see what is working for you.
SHANE: But really after that, maybe initial pitch in your autoresponder to make sure they do have an offer, you want to use your autoresponder to keep delivering value over time, keep announcing new things. You don’t have to broadcast every week, you could schedule all of your old stuff into your autoresponder to make it really long, and just make sure people keep coming back to your site. Once a week or so, keep interacting with your brand, and then maybe your broadcast and when you have something to sell. That’s usually what Jocelyn and I do. We just deliver massive value as much as possible most of the time, but then when we have a live event, like we’re gonna have a live event in Tampa in October, we’re gonna broadcast that and sell it. I mean, we’re gonna obviously say, ‘Hey we are selling our live event tickets, open this and see if you’d like to come’ and don’t sugar-coat it. Don’t try to be sneaky and hide it, or sneak it in, you know, just use those broadcasts when you are ready to sell something.
JOCELYN: And in your broadcast – Shane mentioned bringing people back to your website and I think that’s important because what I do a lot of times on broadcast is that I will bring people back, and then I’ll have an ad to my own product on my own site. I think a lot of times, people overlook that you can do that, and that’s something that’s really important. You can get tons of sales that way by advertising your own stuff on your own site.
SHANE: So basically, I think the best advice we can give is yes. In your autoresponder, there needs to be an initial pitch around the fifth, the seventh email; broadcast stuff when you got something for sale but don’t do it every week, you know, maybe that’s a once every other month if you are doing something as a special. But in general, use your autoresponder and your broadcast to deliver value. Get people to click back to your site, give them content that is awesome, and then have your products mixed in with that content. They will buy eventually. You don’t have to do sales letters and sales pitches all the time in your email list. In fact, I think it’s better not to. I think that you should just probably just give as much value as you can in your email list and maybe never sell. We try to only PS stuff, that’s our kind of thing we do, or our broadcast when we got something special. We try not to pitch too much in our autoresponder outside of the PS and then we want the people to come back to our site, give them cool content, new podcast, but then we have ads up, like ‘Buy our lesson plans’ or ‘Join the Flip Your Life community’ those things that are around our content, all of our stuff will lead to that point eventually but your email list is not just send a sales letter every Monday. That would be bad.
JOCELYN: All right Melissa, I hope that that helps to answer your question about when should you sell stuff in your email list, and also anyone else out there who is listening who has the same question.
SHANE: And we take all of these questions from our Flip Your Life forums; if you would like to learn more about becoming a member of our Flip Your Life community so we could feature your question on the show, you can go over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. All right guys, that is all the time we have for the day, so until next time, you all get out there, take action and flip your life. We’ll see you soon, bye!
JOCELYN: Bye!
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