If you’re on more than a few people’s email mailing lists, you’ve seen people do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. I want to shortcut your success by just telling you exactly what you should be doing with your autoresponder opt-in list and what you should be avoiding like the plaque, especially when it comes to promoting membership sites.
Do create free and paid lists, separate free and paid lists. It’s really going to help if you only market within one specific niche and your different offer and your list are in sub-niches related to that, but the idea is that if somebody is on one list, you could try to upsell them to some other offer. So, for every product you have, for every membership that you have, create a paid list for updates and a prospect list for free promotions. This way, you can mail to just one or a small group of sublists or you could mail to the entire bunch of sublists. It’s up to you. But this should go without saying what I see all kinds of marketers trying to get by on just one list for everything and it simply does not work.
Do update regularly and be consistent. Again, a big tragedy is marketers build up a giant mailing list and then they let it go for two, three, or even six months. If your mailing list is neglected for even a couple of weeks, it will very clearly wither away and die. People forget. They forget that they know you, that they signed up for your list, even if they bought from you. So, it’s up to you to be interfaced and in their mailbox as often as possible.
So, send messages to your email list. If you’re good at writing follow-up sequences, do that. If you have a lot of say and you want to simply broadcast everyday, do that. Here is a secret. If you broadcast on a regular basis – let’s say a few times a week or even once per day, you can later on save those sent messages and schedule them as follow-up sequences in a specific list. So, you think of the message now, send it out now, but then see save that for later. So, anyone new coming onto your list gets those emails as well.
And it’s also important that when you do update, you update on a very regular basis. If you’re the kind of person who updates every week, then always update every week – because if you change it to once a day or once a month, you’re going to have people either overwhelmed or forgetting about you. I personally prefer everyday. So if you can manage it, email your list every single day, at least until they purchase.
Don’t try to announce to all the different lists separately – because if you’re a good marketer, if you have upsells and follow-ups in place, then people should be on multiple lists of yours. So, when you send out a broadcast, your autoresponder should have a D duplication feature. This means that if someone is on the list for products 1, 2, and 3 and you send an email to all the lists at once, they only get one email and not three copies of the same email. So, when you go and try to send a different message to each list, not only is it time consuming, but somebody might get the same email multiple times just because they are on this different list.
Don’t chicken out and limit yourself in the terms and conditions when somebody signs up. I see all the time in opt-in forms, “Oh don’t worry. I will only use this list to notify you of updates for this product. I will never try to upsell you.” Why not? You worked hard to get that sale, to get that opt-in, they’re on your list, let them know upfront that you will be giving them other offers in that same niche that they will be interested in. There’s nothing wrong with being a good marketer.
So, when building a list, when marketing to that list, make sure you create separate free and paid list, make sure you update regularly, but avoid announcing to small lists. If you want to announce something big, send it to all the lists and don’t chicken out, be a real marketer. Tell them upfront that you may be sending them future offers.
Build a list, get traffic, and get recurring income.