Here’s an email marketing experiment that made $1,764 from a single email, sent to just one segment of my email list.
This works great for your own products and services, it works for bloggers, and it works great for affiliate marketing too. This is a test campaign, and I’m pleased with the results so I’m going to scale it up. I’ll tell you how I’m going to do that in a few minutes. Now, this is an email campaign that anyone can do, but it does take a little bit of planning in advance.
So let me show you the figures so you can see how this works for yourself. This needs a little explaining, because, you can see that in total, I’ve emailed one hundred and forty seven thousand recipients. Now, I don’t pitch products to my list very often, so my emails aren’t promotional.
And what you’re looking at here are mostly-non promotional emails. And you can see how emails have been split-up through different segments of my list over several days.
Some days there are 27,000 recipients, other days there are just 7,000. And only one of these emails was promotional, for a low-ticket item, to a segment of my list… so not to my entire list, which generated 4-figures in revenue.
I think that would pay most people’s rent for a month, all from a single email. So imagine how many emails like this you’d send every month. Of course, the number of variables…. Is crazy, and no two people will get identical results, but I really do hope you surpass mine.
But there is a problem with this model, while the revenue isn’t too bad, it creates a spike. Let me draw it for you, because we need to turn that revenue spike into a steady line. Spikes are unpredictable, so we need to make this consistent and reliable. I’ll explain how to do that in a few minutes.
Ok, so we know email marketing works, and in a minute, I’ll give you the 3-step strategy I use to get results like this.
But I wasn’t always a convert. You see, once upon a time I thought building an email list was a complete waste of time. I tried it once for about 2 weeks in 2004 and nothing happened, so I thought it was some kind of ‘guru scam’. It wasn’t until I met a chap called Mike Herberts, that I started to see the power of email marketing. Now, Mike was absolutely crushing it online, and he was making most of his sales through… Email marketing.
And at the time, I had a very high traffic website, it was getting around 4 million hits a month, but I didn’t know how to monetize it properly. The fact is, I was making 100% of my income from adsense. I actually thought I had it all figured out, but it was Mike who showed me that I was missing out on a lot of revenue.
So he convinced me to give email marketing another chance. And ok, it wasn’t as easy as… Some guru’s made it out to be, but this time around I knew what to expect.
So I put my energy into building an email list, and after a while of driving traffic, and converting it into subscribers, something amazing happened. I went from making a few hundred bucks every week, to a few hundred bucks every day. I felt like I’d won the lottery. Can you imagine what it feels like to wake up to that every morning? As soon as you check your phone, you see that your entire day has already been paid for? That’s the power of email marketing.
Ok listen, it’s easy to get carried away with the possibilities. But even though the rewards can be great, it does take a lot of work. It doesn’t happen overnight. And you have to treat your list really well.
Ok, so with that in mind, here’s the strategy. Now, there are 3 stages to a successful email marketing campaign:
First, the ‘alert stage’, then the ‘open stage’, and finally the ‘close stage’. I’ll explain what each stage does.
The ‘alert stage’ is all about priming your list. It’s getting them pumped up and ready to buy. To make this happen we need to have to plan the promotional email at least a week in advance. The longer the better. This is called a pre-launch campaign.
It’s designed to help you create desire, way in advance of the launch. So when the time comes to promote it, people are feeling enthusiastic and have already made up their mind that they’re going to buy.
I’ve found it best to start dropping hints that something is coming a couple of weeks before-hand. One of the most effective ways to create desire, is to talk about the results the product gives, like using case studies.
And part of the pre-launch stage, is to create a‘coming soon’ page where people can opt-in to a waiting list. It’s just an email list that’s separate from your main list. You can also use the ‘waiting list’ to gauge interest in the product, by how many people opt-in.
Another smart thing to do is release teaser content. So you give your list a little sneak-peek inside the product, so they can get a feel for it and see how good it is. Tutorials will help you here.
One more type of content to email your list, is problem > solution content. This is where you highlight objections, the things that might prevent people from buying. You focus on the obstacles, and provide solutions. You remove the objections. I’m convinced that handling objections properly will be responsible for a decent percentage of your sales.
Whatismore, if you combine these strategies with a launch date, and a countdown to launch, you give your email list a reason to feel excited, build anticipation, and create the feeling of a special event around the launch.
Ok, now your email list should be primed and ready to buy. So we begin the second stage, the ‘cart open’ stage.
This is really straight forward.
On the launch-day go through all your sales copy again, check your funnel works properly, and clear your schedule. You will have people asking questions, and that’s a good thing. It’s a sign of interest, and you need to make time to answer those emails.
So, you email a list of benefits, and a link to the sales page. This email doesn’t have to be overtly salesy because you’ve already done a lot of selling in the first stage.
You can continue the ‘cart-open’ stage for as many days as you like, and email as often as you want. But the more you email, the more people will unsubscribe. That’s actually a good thing. If people who are not interested in buying from you opt-out, then it improves your metrics. Expect around naught point 1 percent, to 0.2% of people to unsubscribe.
During the ‘cart-open’ stage, you can also tease the next stage, which is the ‘close’ stage. Here we’re going to tell your email list that the offer is going to be removed. This creates a sense of urgency. It motivates people who are still on the fence, and taps into fomo – the fear of missing out.
You’ll receive another spike in sales during this stage. Again you can use a countdown sequence to really hammer it home, that the offer really is going away.
But do you have to completely remove the sales page? Absolutely not. And if you’re promoting affiliate offers then you probably don’t have any control over that. So if that’s you, you could give special bonuses to fast-action takers, and then remove them after the deadline.
Now, what if you’re not sure what to sell. Well, we can refine things a little more and gather some useful data. Before you make a product, or look for offers to promote, just ask your list what they want. It’s that simple. Run a survey, and go with the winner.
And the great thing about this strategy; it can be automated. That means every person who subscribes to your email list will have the exact same experience, regardless of when they joined. This turns a spike in revenue into a reliable and predictable, steady line.
So, the results that you saw at the beginning was a test for a new funnel. And that’s how I intend to scale up. I’m going to automate the campaign, build funnel pages, and start driving traffic. And the great thing is, you can have as many funnels as you like. When you get one converting, move on to the next, and then the next. And which each funnel you add, your revenue increases too.
But not only that.
Once a funnel is converting, you continue to test things out. So you split test squeeze pages, you email copy, sales copy, try different upsells and downsells. So now you have multiple funnels, producing multiple income streams. And each of those streams are optimized to produce the maximum amount of revenue per customer. That’s the power of email marketing.
Now, what if you don’t have an email list or you want to grow one? How do you get email subscribers in the first place? Well, you’re going to need traffic. So for that reason, I want to give you the traffic methods that I never share on youtube, or anywhere else. You can get them all for free, sent directly to your inbox every day, when you go to profitcopilot.com/traffic.
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