So the situation is that you built up some kind of mailing list from your buyers, but you let it go for too long. You forgot about that list; you stopped marketing to them; or maybe you just were working on other stuff. But whatever happened, you went for too long without e-mailing them. If you go for more than a month without mailing people, it really hurts you. They’re really going to drop off, which is why I don’t really recommend marketing to multiple niches; because if you have all of your products and all your sub-lists in similar niches, then you can broadcast your launches and your blog posts and stuff to everybody. And for when you don’t do that, you can build up a few follow-ups. But if you’re in totally different niches, you have to run over to this list and run over to that list. It really sucks.
So my point of view is that if you go for more than a month without mailing, it really hurts you. If you go three months or more without mailing, then at least 25 percent of those people are just gone forever. And if you go for more than six months, at least 50 percent are gone forever. And if you go further than that, it just gets more and more. I’d say after maybe a year — maybe even nine months — nine months to a year, then they are almost all completely worthless.
I heard a guy once talk about how proud he was of his list marketing. Usually when you think of list marketing, you think that you hit them every day or hit them a few times a week. But this guy was bragging about mailing to his list once a month, and he was like “I only mail once a month, but when I do send that mailing, then it converts really well.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, that’s great, but what are the chances that a ton of your list is going to miss out on your e-mails? Just won’t see it, and then those people will think that you haven’t e-mailed in a few months, forget about you; and when they finally do see your messages, they will unsubscribe or they’ll forget to update their address, and the address will bounce. Or they won’t buy anything new from you, and they’ll be much less responsive.”
I would rather have a small hyper-responsive list than a big unresponsive list. So if you have a big unresponsive list that’s become unresponsive — either because the traffic sucks or because you sold them all low-ticket items — you got them trained to buy your $1 offers or if you just have forgotten to talk to them, then you’re going to have a big unresponsive list.
You need to think of marketing to that list in terms of weeding out the people who will never buy from you so that all that’s left are the really, really good prospects and the really good repeat customers.
Because if you market to a smaller list, you have less spam complaints; because if you have just 100 people on a list and they all buy your $1,000-product, you only have to worry about 100 people accidentally clicking on the spam complaint. It’s a much more personal list, and they will have a better chance of remembering you, especially if you do things like survey your list, ask questions, or make products just for your list.
Whereas if you have a list of 50,000 people and most of them have never bought anything from you, and then you have them even forgot that they opted in, you’re going to have a much greater chance that they will report your message as spam.
And having a bigger list means that you probably have higher ticket buyers, because that’s how you get away with having just a few people on your list and still have a decent income is you have your high-tickets buyers — your people who join your coaching and your e-classes and go to your seminars and are on your recurring membership sites.
And it means there’s less customer support. There’s less people who forget the download link or want a fresh download link. There’s less people who just couldn’t get the e-book to open or couldn’t get the zip file to unzip. There’s just a lot less of that because there’s less people to deal with. So that means you can spend more time coaching some of them one-on-one. And because they’re high-ticket buyers, they’re much more open to that.
So basically with e-mail marketing, you don’t want to send too many bad offers. You don’t want to mail them every day with some new affiliate offer that they won’t care about. So instead I like to build people up.
So if I am going to launch a new product, I send a couple of e-mails beforehand just really quick giving them some benefits or sharing with them tips. I like to blend the content with the selling. I don’t like to say “All right. Here’s all content, and here’s all selling.” I like to have it so you can’t really tell if an e-mail is content or selling, because there’s both types of things.
So you don’t want to mail too often or not often enough. You don’t want to mail multiple times a day, but you don’t want to let it go so that you’re only mailing one time a month or less.
You can train your subscribers to respond to getting a lot of e-mail, but don’t send them bad offers. Don’t keep hitting them with ad after ad after ad for somebody else’s product. Make it for your product, or make it so if you’re at least giving someone else’s stuff, you’re offering your unique slant, your unique selling point, giving them your own bonuses. Just be different pretty much.
So if your list is damaged, if you let it go for too long and you need to reactivate it — you need to revive those dead customers to get them to buy something else. So maybe you haven’t e-mailed them or you have e-mailed them but you’ve been giving them too much content, and most of your people have not bought within the last few months. It’s time to start a reactivation campaign.
I think thinking of your list in terms of your doing a reactivation campaign will get you more motivated towards writing messages and putting more effort into getting these people to buy more stuff. So just think about three small gifts you can make them. They can be quick videos, quick reports, quick checklists, worksheets. Just really simple gifts.
So make three of these, three small gifts — just whatever three things you can make in under an hour total. So spend 20 minutes on each gift. So maybe you record three 20-minute videos, or you’ll make a 20-minute video; you’ll spend 20 minutes making a checklist and 20 minutes making a worksheet. Just make these three small gifts. And you upload them and set up the URL’s, and then schedule them to be sent to your autoresponder every other day.
So send them out on Monday, on Wednesday, on Friday — yeah, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So that’ll fill up this whole week. So this whole week you will be showering them with gifts. And make sure that when you give them the gifts that you’re also giving them your URL — check you out on your blog or whatever solution you have that will help them out if they like this. You just want to get them used to hearing about your URL’s again. Not really with a hard sell. You’re just saying “Here’s this gift. By the way, if all you care about is the gifts, that’s fine. If you care about this URL, go there too.” So just that on its own will really help.
If you want to go the extra mile, record a personal talking-head video of you. Most people who market using e-mail will stick with just the text, but if you take a flip camera or a digital camera or whatever video camera you have, point it at yourself, and just talk for about a minute of what you’ve been up to, why you have not contacted them in a while, and what’s coming up next in the next week or so — what are you working on.
Then you just take that video, upload it, and put it on a web page and make it autoplay, and then mail it to your list after the three small gifts with the URL to that video. So they’ve already got these gifts; they’re used to hearing from you; they’re used to getting your offers. Then you’re going to send them to this video of you talking.
If you want to plug a URL of yours at the end, that’s fine. If you want to have a live link from that video to a URL of yours, that’s fine. Don’t apologize for selling them stuff. Your job is to give people solutions. Sometimes that’ll be free; sometimes that’ll cost money.
So if you really want to give them solutions, schedule a webinar where they can all join and ask questions for free. Just make it a 30-minute or 1-hour webinar. Nobody cares if you stutter or if you go “um,” just as long as they can understand you, people will join if you get enough people on your list. If you don’t have a big enough list, do some advertising. Joint venture with people, post on forums, and get them to join that webinar.
So it’s just a webinar where you have already planned what you want to say, just in case nobody has any questions. Maybe you want to teach them some new method or tell them what you’ve been trying, but you want them to ask questions.
So they join the webinar, and even if you get five people, that’s totally fine because you can record the webinar and then that will be a video you can give to your list later. So you keep generating more content to give to your list.
So hopefully somebody will ask a question, or you can say “Give me your URL so that you can have some free exposure.” You look at their sales letter, and you look at their product if they give it to you. And you just say “What’s holding you up right now?” Maybe it’s not even internet marketing. Maybe it’s in some other niche. You do the same exact thing.
So if you’re in the niche of how to soup up your car and make your car five times as loud and five times as fast, you can say “What kind of car are you working on? What are you trying to do to it?” He says “Oh, I’m trying to make the light that appears under the car, but I can’t get the connections right.” Maybe you know something about hooking up the lights, and you can have something to share about that.
Don’t be afraid to get stumped. If you’re in that niche of souping up your car — maybe all you know is the engine or maybe all you know is the electronics, and you say “I don’t really know anything about having the lights at the bottom of your car, but thanks for letting me know that this is an issue people want to know about. I’m going to go back and I’m going to do my research. I’m going to try a little bit on my own, and then next week I’ll have a video for you on how to install lights underneath your car so that when you drive it lights up the street underneath you.”
So you’ve got these webinars where either you can answer right away or just say I don’t know and jot that down and, as soon as the webinar’s over, record a video for that or do the research for that.
And when you do a reactivation campaign, you will lose subscribers. It’s a fact because people just aren’t used to hearing from you. Those are subscribers that you were going to lose anyway; so it’s okay.
What you want to do is promote your list to replace those dropouts with new subscribers. So launch a new product or get some more traffic to your squeeze page. Just replace those people.
It also helps very much if you start announcing your intentions. I think early on when I was list marketing, something that really hurt me was not announcing my intentions. If I had a new product launch, I would just drop it on them. Now if I launch a product, I’ll at least say “By the way, I’ll have this coming out in two days so be ready for it .” Or “Look out for this blog post from me tomorrow,” so that they will know to check their e-mail and look for an e-mail message from me instead of just wading through all the messages they get. When you get new messages, you might get 50 or 100, and you’ll delete 90 percent of them. I don’t want them to accidentally delete mine. I want them to be on the lookout for mine and make sure to set that one aside so that they don’t delete it.
So tell them what deals are coming out, so what’s your next product coming out in the next week or so, and tell them how often you’ll be e-mailing them. So you might e-mail them once a week or you might e-mail them once a day. Or you might get really busy and have a lot of launches going. You might change it to once a day. So you’ll say “For the next week I’ll be e-mailing you every day just so you know, just so you don’t get angry, but after that I’ll move back to once a week.”
And the reason I like to schedule my e-mails — because first I write maybe a week or two worth of e-mails, schedule them all in. Then I can go back and tell them when the next e-mail is coming. I can say “I talked about this right now, but can you check your e-mail again in two days, and I’ll have one more tip for you. I’ll just give you this tip, so can you check your e-mail tomorrow, and I’ll show you a solution that will allow you to use this tip to the fullest.”
So just announcing your intention, just adding in that little bit of when to expect the next e-mail, helps.
Get them involved. So instead of always talking to them, post on a blog sometimes. If you have a really good or a really long e-mail, sometimes it’ll get filtered. If you have short e-mails, by all means send them. But if you have a really long or really thoughtful message that you always want to have archived that you want other people to see on the web, post it on your blog and send people to your blog to comment.
I know some internet marketers who always do this. They would never send text over e-mail. They would always post to the blog and send traffic to the blog. So you could say “I need your help with this. I need your help deciding this or that. I have this question: What’s your biggest hang-up in the souping up your car niche? What are you really good at when you soup up your car and what are you really bad at that you want to improve on, and we’ll discuss it on the blog.”
Just getting people to respond in some way — if it’s on the blog or if it’s to hit reply and talk to you — gets them more responsive because it’s like they’re talking to a real person. And so few people do that. So many people will just get their subscribers on a list and just send them all kinds of automated stuff and never make it personal. So you can be different and unique by making it personal.
So when you send them a survey like this, you can ask one of these three questions: Which of these products should I make next? So you could have four ideas for products, and you don’t know which one you want to work on; so you say “Which of these four should I do?”
And I know some sneaky marketers who will have all four finished or just about finished, and the question will really be “Which should I launch next?” This doesn’t even have to be new products. This could be re-launches. This could be “Which of these products should I improve to version 2.0?”
So that first question might work for you, but I’m more of the kind of person where I don’t like to reveal what I’m working on because I don’t want people to go and copy it. So I’ll ask more “What is your biggest bottleneck? What causes you to come to a screeching halt every single day, and you just wish there was a way around it?” A lot of this ends up being self-help, time management, “I can’t even get started,” “I can’t get motivated to do stuff.” And some niches it could be technical stuff like “I can’t get my car to set off everybody else’s car alarms as I’m driving down the street, so my bottleneck is my car is too quiet. Please help me to make my muffler louder.” Or “What’s the easiest way to get this thing accomplished? There are many ways to make your car louder. What’s your favorite way to make it louder?”
Me personally, with surveys, if it’s more of “What should I do?” then I’ll put it on the blog, but if it’s more of “What should I do for you?” I’ll make it into a survey just because I don’t want people to steal my product ideas. So for the blog, if I need advice — things like should I quit my day job or should I switch my affiliate program to this service or something — I’ll put that on the blog because that encourages discussion and debate. But if I just want to know people’s bottlenecks, I will ask them to reply to me just so I can total up everything on my own and not share with my competition.
Always keep that in mind. You want to have people discuss stuff if you have a blog entry, but is it going to be something your competition can use against you. So if you say “Give me ideas for my next product,” and people post comments and give you 20 good inside, guess what? You’ve also broadcasted that to everybody else on the internet. Your competition can run in there and find 20 good ideas as well. There’s a balance. There’s a balance between having a discussion and giving too much information away.
So with the survey idea, what this does is it makes you focus on solutions, and you respond to what the market really wants instead of what you think they want. And we’re not trying to make the biggest product ever. So if we’re working on souping up your car, maybe you’ll work on a report about how to make your car louder.
So we have small questions and small products, and depending on how they sell, we’ll develop more complex ones. So if the “How to make your car louder” report sells really, really well, then we can go into different sub-topics. Like if you have a motorcycle, you’ve got “How to make any motorcycle sound louder than a Harley Davidson” and “How to make small cars really loud” and “How to make big cars really loud.”
A few months ago I was on the freeway once, and there was this humongous monster truck — the biggest truck I’ve ever seen. It had wheels higher than the roof of my car, and this guy was driving. I heard a train whistle, and I was like “What the heck is that?” It was his horn. This guy hooked up a train whistle to his car. So the crazy stuff like that are little sub-topics. So not just “How to make your car louder,” but “How to make small cars louder,” “How to make big cars louder,” “How to make motorcycles louder,” “How to make your grandma’s car louder.” So that’s something you would make if just the small how to make any car louder report sold well. You could go into more detail.
If you hang out on the forums for these niches or you just keep in touch with your coaching clients or the people on your list, you end up having total market immersion. You can get an idea and decide if it’s something people would want.
If you hang out on forums to get ideas, that really helps. If you quickly act on an idea and reduce the number of ideas you are exposed to, you can very quickly make a report — like the how to make your car louder report — and see within a day or two how good of an idea is that, if that idea is worth pursuing.
So market on forums just to socialize and talk to your list to socialize to get an idea, but don’t forget about the call to action. Don’t forget that anytime you send an e-mail message or have a video posted on a forum, always have a way for people to get to a page where they can buy something from you just because some people are going to want to do that.
Watch your statistics. I’m not a big fan of e-mail open rates, but I’ll check them sometimes. They’re really unreliable, but just to see at least who clicks through your links tells you how your e-mails are going to respond.
If you send one e-mail that you think is really good but only a few people click through, and then you send an e-mail that you think is really sucky but a lot of people click on that link, then you know that you should focus more on what you thought was the sucky e-mail — just keep doing that because that’s generating more clicks.
It doesn’t matter if you think it’s great. Any e-mail that gets a lot of good responses or lots of click-throughs or, more importantly, lots of sales is going to be the stuff you want to work on.
And look at your unsubscribe rates after each e-mail. Maybe if you waited too long before sending an e-mail, if you waited for a couple of months and then sent your e-mail, you got a lot of unsubscriptions. Or if you had a lot of short e-mails and then you sent a big, long one and you had a lot of unsubscriptions, maybe you should stick to the short e-mails. Or if you sent a lot of regular e-mails and then had a really offensive or controversial e-mail and got some unsubscribers, maybe you should look at that.
And also think about who unsubscribed. A lot of the times the people who will unsubscribe easily, who you can shake out easily, are the freebie people. If you get a lot of unsubscribes, don’t go crying. Look at are these people who’ve bought multiple products from you, or are these people who just want something for free from you, and they’re quitting because you’re not giving them enough freebies; you’re not giving them enough handouts. You’re making them buy stuff. Those are not really the kinds of people you want on your list. It’s all about weeding out the crappy people who never would have bought from you in the first place.
And look at if you have a really good blog post or a really good e-mail, does that give you a lot of blog comments. Look at the replies people send you. If you send stuff that just gets huge numbers of replies, then maybe that’s something you should try repeating in the future.
Something else you could do is give your list members a reward so they are reminded subconsciously why it’s beneficial for them to stay on your list. Maybe you’ll give them an exclusive discount to your product. So you say “My e-book normally costs 20 bucks, but because you’re on my list, I’ll give it to you for 10 bucks for the next couple of days.” So they say “Well, now I just saved $10 by being on this guy’s list.”
Or maybe you can give a service that you would normally give for a paid amount, and you just give it for free. So maybe you do copywriting critiques, and you say “I will critique the sales letters of the first three people to respond.” Or “I will make web site graphics for the first three people to respond.”
Or if you have a lot to say, then write a quick 5- to 10-page PDF report and post it on a private blog that only they can get to.
You don’t want to reward too much. You want to weed them out. So make it extremely easy for them to leave if they don’t want to stay. I know a guy who was a very good list-builder. One day he sent an e-mail saying nothing other than “If you want to unsubscribe, click the link below.” He had the link below, and that was it. I’m not that ballsy, but your job is to recommend and present offers and not be their best buddy. So if people complain too much, or they try to get you to give them too much information, or if they get mad that you e-mail too often, click the unsubscribe link for them. You don’t want people like that on your list. You want people who are glad to hear from you, who are glad to hear your offers, and who are glad to see how you market stuff.
And stop this from happening again. So if your list became dead in some way — maybe you didn’t e-mail them often enough — don’t let it happen again. Make sure you e-mail them several times a week or a month. Schedule an appointment with yourself for 20 minutes a week to write out a couple of e-mails and schedule them in advance just so that on those days when you don’t feel like sending out e-mails, it’ll happen automatically.
Just have a steady stream of blog posts going, articles, and cool URL’s. And I’ll do that. So if I write a blog post, sometimes I’ll be in the mood to write two or three blog posts in one sitting. So instead of writing them all at once, I’ll schedule them out maybe a week apart, and then go and schedule it in my autoresponder about a week apart, e-mailing them, telling them to go comment. Or I’ll take a really good article that got good responses, and I’ll send it to my list. Or I’ll find a good URL and I’ll schedule an e-mail to my list for three weeks from now saying “By the way, if you want to do __________, go to this URL because it’s really cool.”
Something that will really help improve your confirmation rates when people sign up is to add in white list instructions to your thank you page. So on your thank you page, even just having the text saying “Once you add me, make sure to add this e-mail address to your white list and add them to your contacts so that it will not get filtered.”
Another good thing is have a personal autoplay talking head video as a thank you for signing up. So just like you recorded a video by pointing the camera at yourself and uploading it to YouTube or uploading it as a Camtasia file or whatever. When you did that to try to tell your list why you’ve been gone for so long, just do this in general. Say “Thanks for signing up to my list. Here is the stuff that I do. Here’s some of my URL’s. Here’s a free gift for signing up.” So instead of just having an impersonal web page saying “Here’s a free gift for signing up,” you have this video of you saying to their face “Here’s a free gift for signing up.”
So here’s how to reactivate a dead list.
Have your reactivation campaign, where you come up with three simple gifts, and give it to them every other day for a week so that they’re used to hearing from you for an entire week.
Announce your intentions. Tell them when your next e-mail’s coming, when your next product launch is coming, and how often you will be e-mailing them.
And get them involved. So if you can send a survey to solve their problems or have a webinar or have them reply to a blog post, do it. Get them involved.
But you need to think you’re not in the habit of hanging on to as many subscribers as possible for dear life. You’re hanging on to the good subscribers and getting rid of the bad subscribers. You’re weeding them out.
So change your strategy, and don’t focus on the number of people on your list. Focus on the number of most responsive people on your list and the number of people who respond to an offer; so when you focus on your open rate — and the most important thing of all is, when you do a promotion, how many people buy from you and how much profit do you get on average when you do a promotion.
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