I received an email from Tony Shepherd (one of my favourite marketers to follow) – it was entitled ‘The Entire Marketing Strategy’. What a great subject line – it is difficult not to open an email with that subject line. This is what he said:
Did you know that the term ‘Hooker’ for a lady of the night actually originated with US Civil War General Joseph Hooker, who brought working girls along on military campaigns for his men.
Or that during the Great Depression people were so broke they often made clothes out of potato sacks and seeing this, the potato distributors made their sacks more colourful to help people remain at least somewhat fashionable.
Why am I telling you this?
Because it’s daft content like this that sets my open rates among some of the best of any other marketers I know.
It might not be relevant to online business although it often is.
But it’s engaging.
And if you keep your readers engaged and then follow up with relevant IM content you’ll make thousands of dollars a month.
Whoops – just gave away my entire marketing strategy 🙂
I think this is why he is just a handful of marketers whose emails I open – they are always entertaining to read and laced with great marketing advice.
The other reason that Tony is so successful is that he is very down-to-earth and authentic in the way he writes and I instinctively like people like that.
This is his entire marketing strategy and it seems to work – perhaps it might for you too? (Did the picture of the naked lady make you open this article?)
I’ve been studying about how to do story telling with email marketing – specifically reading Auto Responder Madness by Andre Chaperon.
At well over 300 pages, it is an ebook that I have had on my computer for quite a while and failed to read properly because of its length – indeed, I refer to it in one of my previous blog posts.
However, it is well worth taking the time and effort of ploughing through it because it gave me clarity about how to upgrade my email marketing efforts.
Your list building efforts will have a pitiful return on investment unless you get your email marketing right – my biggest failure to date is ‘list attrition’ i.e. not knowing how to properly develop a long-term relationship with my prospects and clients even though that was always my intention. ‘Intention’ is not enough unless you deploy a few writing strategies
My email marketing has been relatively poor in the past – lacking proper structure, strategy and, yes, based on what I read in Autoresponder Madness, the content of my emails can be greatly improved.
There are 3 core tactics that are employed within Autoresponder Madness:
List Segmentation – i.e. to ensure that you send relevant messages to your list it is critical that you understand who is on your list and what they want. List segmentation is critical to this. Andre outlines a number of strategies and tools for achieving this. It is not easy to do but it is very effective!
Story-telling – he delivers his content by way of stories in automated sequences – he calls them Soap Opera Sequences – to engage the reader and uses open loops and cliffhanger content to draw his reader through his emails. These stories are in a strategic order to deliver an overall solution to the client but the client can be diverted onto sub-lists with new Soap Opera Sequences depending on which topics they show interest in. Product Launches are delivered sparingly via broadcasts, perhaps once a month. Each email has a ‘hook’ and ends in a cliffhanger.
He uses Jay Abraham’s Strategy of Preeminence in creating a strong relationship with his readers i.e. he works hard to become their trusted long-term advisor, which results in incredible conversion rates from small lists.
A surprising bonus at the end of the book was that he outlined the structure of his working day. His work schedule is two 90 minute sessions in the morning with a 30 minute rest in between and then in the afternoon he works in Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes each to reflect his shorter attention span in the afternoon. As he lives in Spain, he takes ‘siesta’ time midday.
Within Autoresponder Madness, he refers to a product called Nano Lists which is not officially for sale. I managed to get hold of a copy of this too. This was also an eye-opener as to how well you can do with skilful list-building and email marketing i.e. adopting a smart strategy is crucial for success.
Together, both these products have made me realise that my email marketing needs to be upgraded in both strategic intent and content. I have received a glimpse of how it can be done so much better and I now just need to take action on what I have learnt.
I wish I had read Autoresponder Madness a long time ago – possibly I wouldn’t have realised just how good the content is had I not first ‘failed’ with my email marketing!
This book and ‘Email Slick’ by Lee Murray should be required reading for any internet marketer who wants to get to grips with their email marketing.
If I can just implement the strategy of story telling with email marketing, it would be a massive improvement!
I am about to start list building with Optin Hurricane.
I have been exploring if there are better and faster methods for building a list. In the past I have relied upon SEO to drive traffic to my website and then had various optin or buying options on my website.
I have also built lists by launching info products on JVZoo and Warrior Plus where traffic has largely been driven by affiliates.
However, I wanted to find a way of creating a list faster through paid traffic but realised that, if I was going to pay for traffic, I needed a number of things in place:
a good sales funnel
analytics to measure conversions and ROI
split-testing to improve conversions
the means to recover traffic ‘leaks’ using exit popups
I bought a product called ‘Optin Hurricane‘ – The Secret Files’ that sets out a basic funnel for solo-ad traffic as follows:
To facilitate the building of this funnel I am using a plugin called Optin Hurricane which I have purchased and installed on my blog.
It is my intention that the front of my website will be this funnel and access to the content on my site will only be granted once someone has gone through my squeeze page.
The plugin knows when someone has already opted in or visited before and previous visitors can therefore be redirected to my blog.
There are a number of other features that make this plugin highly attractive:
Multiple Squeeze Page Styles
Multiple Backgrounds – images, videos or colours
Vertical & Horizontal Squeeze Page Formats
Built in Call To Action Buttons (but you can customise as well)
Diverse Engagement Effects – animated options
One Click Countdown Timers
Exit Pop Up Technology
Universal Auto-responder Integration
Mobile Optimized Squeeze Pages
FB Comment Functionality
Import/Export feature for pages
Add Footers, Menus & Disclaimers
GEO Targeting & Visitor Segmentation to allow only specific countries to visit pages to segment your list
Generate Free Traffic through viral features
Accurate Tracking – find out your squeeze page conversions, premium stats redirects, past visits and build multiple campaigns (- link tracking is built into the software too!)
Redirect Past Sign Ups
Redirect Past Visitors
These extensive features mean that I do not need to add other plugins and software to achieve my goals. It even has an inbuilt meta refresh page that is illustrated in the above diagram as ‘Confirm & Redirect’. This page is also integral to the conversion tracking system.
Now that I have the sales funnel plan and the software to implement the plan, product offers now need to be added, the pages created and then traffic applied to the front of the funnel to test conversions and ROI.
‘Squeeze page 1’ will have an offer that covers a basic plan for how to make money online whilst ‘Squeeze page 2’ will probably cover how to generate traffic which is a major problem to internet marketers. After that, visitors will be sent to my e-book offer wall that is already on my blog – http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .
I then need to write the email follow-up sequence which is the semi-automated part of the system.
This means that when my list building system is set-up anyone coming to my site at http://mark-salmon.com they will visit my primary squeeze page and either optin or try to leave which will trigger a second squeeze page where they will either optin or try to leave which will trigger a redirect to my ebook offer wall http://mark-salmon.com/offerwall/ebooks/ .
If anyone who has already opted in comes back to http://mark-salmon.com then they will be redirected to my blog at http://mark-salmon.com/news .
When on my blog or if someone comes into my site via a post then there is a pop-over offer to join The Sky Inside (my product) for free and there are other offers bothin the sidebar and on posts and pages throughout my website.
All this is in a effort to maximise the my traffic to my blog by ensuring that visitors have multiple opportunities to join my list which is my primary goal.
Once on my list, my prospect will be redirected to an initial paid offer and will also receive 7 days of follow-up emails with further information and offers. Thereafter, they will join my master list and will receive broadcast emails.
Purchasing Optin Hurricane will make your task of building a relatively sophisticated list building sales funnel relatively easy and I therefore recommend it.
This is an important question because unless you have a good reason to build a database, then nothing will happen. After all, database management is a really mundane and boring task so we need to be highly motivated to do it.
Like many small and mundane tasks, this is really critical to your long-term success.
I want you to imagine that at some time in the future you want to sell your business – it could be just a few years from now or even many years into the future.
What are you going to sell? If you are an online business, you may have some digital products but that is probably not where the true value in your business lies.
You may have systems and processes such as proven sales funnels and membership sites etc but that’s still not where most of the value lies in your business.
Most of the value lies in your customer database and the relationship that you have with that database.
If you have taken the trouble to create a comprehensive database and to nurture a good relationship with that database then you have a ready made revenue source.
In internet marketing, most marketers think that it is sufficient just to build a list and send out emails. However, it is likely that you you know very little about your customers and prospects other than their name and email address and perhaps which products they opted into or bought.
This makes it difficult to build a solid relationship with them.
The only way that you can build a solid relationship with them is by gathering as much data as you can about them i.e. really take a genuine interest in them and find out who they really are.
What if you took all buyers of your products and put them into a CRM system and gathered more information on them such as website, social media profiles, birth date, and so on and reached out to them personally?
In most offline businesses, this kind of data is gathered through a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) but I wonder how many internet marketers consider running such a system? Most of them seek to gather email addresses in huge quantity rather than trying to improve the QUALITY of their relationships by taking a genuine interest in their prospects and customers.
Could this type of approach revolutionise your business – I think it could.
It would certainly differentiate you from most other list builders.
If you did this, you wouldn’t need a large list in order to succeed now would you?
So how could you go about deepening your relationships in this way?
Nowadays, I think that if you could invite your prospects and customers into a Facebook Group, or Google+ community or your social media community, it would give you the opportunity to engage directly with them and gather more information that could personalise your approach.
But you could be more direct by simply asking them or incentivising them to give you the information say through a poll or questionnaire.
Rather than just pure list building and email marketing, perhaps you should also be operating a CRM system alongside?
What if you also adopted this approach when recruiting affiliates? It would make an enormous difference, don’t you think to your success in getting them to mail for you?
Here’s a video by a real estate business that does an excellent job of explaining the value of building your data base in this way and how to do it manually – as internet marketers there is plenty of software available to automate this process. (Whilst this video is dated, it is extremely important to learn the message and then create your own system. You’ll thank me later that you took this advice and did something with it.)
It’s called ‘Build Your Database with Gary Keller’ and it is 28 minutes well spent:
You are going to do something with it, aren’t you? Stop right now and implement this today before you forget about it. And don’t forget to subscribe to my list in the sidebar if you want to stay informed and don’t forget to look me up on Facebook 🙂 because I really want to know more about you!
I really hope you build your database along these lines rather than in the normal ‘scatter-gun’ method – I think you will find this approach much more valuable and Microsoft Outlook (or something similar) has plenty of tools to enable you to set up a simple CRM system of your own until you can afford a system like Infusionsoft.
I’ve decided that my next product should be Email-ATM – it’s a product that’s all about email marketing.
In the past, this has not been an great area of strength (or interest) for me:
I’ve lacked a proper strategy
I’ve lacked consistency
I’ve really failed to focus on this area of my business
This is massively stupid because this is a key area for any online business – creating a list and communicating with that list. It’s not as if I don’t know what I should be doing! In the past, I’ve bought a number of products on email marketing and it’s now a question of putting it all into practice.
These are some of the things that I am planning to put into place as I create Email-ATM as a product:
7 day-follow-up series for each list
after 7 days, my lists will receive daily broadcast emails with a mixture of value and promotional information
I will be formatting and structuring my emails better
emails will be created within a relevant framework that makes sense to my customers
emails will be planned for at least 90 days and eventually longer
I will be monitoring open and click through rates with a view to improving my performance
I will be cleaning up my lists on a regular basis
I will create an avatar of my ideal customer
promotions will be carefully selected to be relevant to the storyline of my emails which will follow my consulting framework (see Businessstoryboards)
I’ve already created a number of high value bonuses, (some from PLR material) that I hold:
The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File – this is a collectionof links to free copywriting resources recommended by Warriors on the Warrior Forum
Surefire Solo Ads – this is all about building a list and making money with solo ads
Emails in the Cloud – as you list gets bigger, the costing of sending emails rises. You can mitigate by using ‘the cloud’ to send emails – this training shows you how to use Mail Jet.
Get Response Training – I generally use Aweber as my auto-responder supplier, but it is useful to know about other solutions like Get Response. This training shows you how to maximise your use of Get Response.
Alongside the development of Email-ATM, I am going to put more effort into growing my list as follows:
driving more traffic to
more squeeze pages and funnels (one coach I know has 50!)
better monitoring & testing of my stats and use of split-testing.
increasing my speed of implementation
I have just purchased a ready-made, high-converting affiliate funnel for the first time – I’m going to test this and, if it works, consider purchasing more. At the very least, I intend to reverse-engineer this funnel to see how it was created.
Traffic sources will be:
Facebook Ads
Solo Ads
Promoted YouTube videos
Google Hangouts – I am planning a series of short video workshops that will be keyword optimised.
If you would like access to any of the above bonuses to Email-ATM that are all related to email marketing, then please feel free to make me an offer I can’t refuse! Alternatively, you will have to wait for the launch of this product.
I received an email from Tony Shepherd (one of my favourite marketers to follow) – it was entitled ‘The Entire Marketing Strategy’. What a great subject line – it is difficult not to open an email with that subject line. This is what he said:
