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?)
In this article, I want to discuss the differences between short term versus long term marketing relationships.
I think you know what I mean…
How quickly do you go for your customers wallet after they have subscribed to your list?
Should you have a packed sales funnel after the initial optin or should you seek to offer additional value before asking for more?
Personally, I have little objection to a long sales funnel immediately after optin, as long as the products offered in the sales funnel meet the following criteria:
they genuinely complement and add to the initial purchase
the initial offer delivers a valuable solution that is not dependent on buying the upsell i.e. that I am left with a feeling of being ‘tricked’ into the initial decision.
The upsell offers good value e.g. perhaps a discount or a genuine step-up in performance
You must leave your customer thinking that you are genuinely interested in delivering excellent value versus an impression that the vendor sees you as a gullible consumer who is there simply to hand over as much cash as possible before you move onto the next product or customer. In the make money online niche, this is known as ‘burning your list’.
For this reason, it is important to think about how your business can deliver genuine value. For this to happen, you need your customer to actually do something with your product.
Also, consider whether you can you really deliver value across a whole range of niches or unrelated topics within your niche?
Or is it perhaps better to focus on a particular area and ‘go deep’ so that all the products you offer to your customer list are related to delivering the solution you offered initially when they first came to your squeeze page.
This means that you become a genuine expert in a particular area rather than a superficial generalist.
I believe that by focusing on your area of expertise and going deep in the creation of your own products, you will have more credibility and will be able to create a longer term relationship with your clients.
This does not preclude you from then offering the products of other experts in your niche who have genuine expertise. These must be selected carefully because your customers are buying based on your recommendation and an unscrupulous vendor could quickly degrade your relationship of trust with your customer.
One of the biggest keys to business growth is increasing the number of times customers buy from your business and it is therefore sensible to sometimes sacrifice short-term monetary desires in favour of long-term growth of your relationship.
One way to think about this is by first considering whether or not you would send this email, or make this recommendation, to a friend or a member of your family. If you hold yourself to a standard like this and write with their best interests at heart, then you will not go too far wrong.
You may be saying to yourself that you would freely offer your product or services to a friend. I don’t think that this is appropriate and I’ll tell you why.
I have discovered in my consulting business that people do not value that which they get for free. If they don’t value it, they won’t use it or learn from it so you are actually doing them a disservice by offering it for free, assuming you have a genuine solution to their problem.
Far better to fully explain the benefits and get them to commit to the solution by putting some ‘skin in the game’ which requires them to do something to get a return on their investment i.e. pay for it and use it!
Whilst there is a short-term imperative to at least cover our initial costs of marketing, taking a longer term perspective on the relationship you create with your customer is usually the most profitable way to proceed. However, the only way to create a genuine long-term relationship is when you persuade your customer to take action on what they get from you so that they actually receive the benefit you offer.
In order for that customer to be persuaded to take action, most times they need to have paid for the product or service that they received from you because otherwise they will not attach any value to what you provide (particularly in the info marketing niche where value is somewhat subjective and often based upon the willingness of the buyer to act on what you tell them.)
It is still possible to promote early on in your relationship with a subscriber if you do it with some finesse and elegance. An example of this, is offering plenty of free value along with your promotional link.
Content Frameworks
Also, a great way to not be overtly promotional is to extensively use personal stories based on your experience that somehow end up leading to your promotional link.
Great exponents of the story-line technique are Matt Furey, Ben Settle and Andre Chaperon. I am on Ben Settle’s list and I own training by the other two so I can speak from first experience of their techniques.
Andre likens short-term (or front-end) marketing and long-term marketing (or ‘backend’) marketing to an iceberg. The front-end being the tip of the iceberg in terms of profitability and the backend being the 90% of the iceberg that is hidden underwater and that generates the bulk of his profits.
In Autoresponder Madness, Andre refers to his story-line as a ‘soap opera’ – in other words his emails are an ongoing story so you are eager to open up the next email to find out what happens next. This is particularly powerful if you can leave the reader on a ‘cliff-edge’ at the end of the email.
What I particularly like about Autoresponder Madness is that when I read it it was in its third iteration i.e. the product was under constant revision and improvement. (I suspect that buyers of the initial book were offered a discount to buy the updated version.)
In Matt Furey’s case, the email story-line often has very little to do with the promotional link at the end of the email. The promotion is almost an after-thought to the story. Matt’s training is called Tao of Email Copy That Sells and I highly recommend it.
One of the best products I ever bought was a simple 45 minute webinar by Peter Garety called ‘Content Creation Framework Secrets’ in which he outlined a system for creating a structured framework for content creation that meant that all content created whether for blog, products or email marketing is created around a coherent framework which when taken together creates a coherent whole. This framework could be for all content created within a specific time-frame, say 3 months, dependent on the size and scope of your project.
Hopefully, these few ramblings offer you some insight into the differences between short-term marketing and the benefits of taking a longer term view of your content creation strategy.
What does monetization look like in YOUR business?
This is the topic in Sean Mize’s latest email to me and he went on to say:
Sometimes I feel like when I see folks working on their business . . . they don’t know WHY they are doing what they are doing.
They don’t have a purpose . . .a big why . . a why what they are doing is changing lives.
Or they have that, but they are just doing parts in their business . . .but nothing fits together.
They are writing articles . . . but they aren’t pointing them to the right places.
They create one product, and somehow think it will do the work of 100.
They send out sales emails when they see something converting well . . but rarely send out training emails to improve lives.
Ok, I’ll tell you my business model for years:
Irresistible offer in the form of a squeeze page that gives them something valuable –> daily email (like this) to teach and to train –> create products or trainings that change lives and sell those trainings –> create more training and sell it –> create more training and sell it
Of course, one effective part of my business is creating training I put on Warrior Plus, people promote it and tell others . . .and those buyers join my list. So those are buyer subscribers. And I have a mix of both on my list.
And the KEY to having people buy from you again and again is that they learn from you when they buy once – then they WANT to learn again and again.
So . . what about you? What does monetization look like in YOUR business?
When you look at your model of monetization, does it make sense?
Is it working?
What needs to change to make it work better?
In case you missed it, notice how simple this business model is.
It consists of the following simple actions carried out consistently, day after day:
A squeeze page and free offer to create a list
A daily email to the list
Creating a new product that improves other peoples lives
A sales letter
Driving traffic to the sales letter from:
the list by email
Warrior Special Offers i.e. taking advantage of the traffic already on the Warrior Forum
Rinse & Repeat
So what does monetisation look like in YOUR business?
You may be asking yourself what is a good squeeze page conversion rate?
The truth is that this is a bit like asking ‘how long is a piece of string’ because there are a number of critical factors that will influence the conversion rate of any particular squeeze page:
Quality of the traffic
The ‘quality’ of the visitors coming to your squeeze page is definitely an important factor. Have they been properly profiled and targeted as prospects for what you have to offer?
Are they coming to your squeeze page on the recommendation of someone they trust, like a JV or solo ad?
Have they been pre-qualified somewhere else by reading your book or an article you wrote or watching a video or listening to your podcast?
If they are simply random visitors to your site versus highly targeted traffic, then you can expect entirely different conversion rates.
Quality of the offer
One of the top internet marketers says that the quality of the offer is much more important than copywriting.
If your offer is irresistible then it doesn’t really matter if you are a poor copywriter and your script has several typos.
Visitors will always optin to get your offer if it is attractive enough so concentrate on solving a problem that everyone has in your niche and you will be golden.
Quality of the copywriting & page design
Once you have selected your offer, presenting it in the most effective way is also important to your conversion rate.
Your squeeze page headline will be critical to conversion rates. Does it invoke curiosity? Does it create a ‘pattern interrupt’ in the mind of the visitor such that they have to satisfy their curiosity?
Does it address a pain or fear that they are experiencing or offer an irresistible benefit that they are searching for?
Is the design of the page appealing, easy to read and have an image of what you are offer such as a book cover or product mock-up?
Clarity and simplicity are usually the key to success – your visitor needs to immediately understand what you are offering and it has to be highly relevant to the reason that bought them to your squeeze page in the first place.
There really needs to be no distractions on the page that will encourage the visitor to click away from your offer.
Quality of your testing
Once you start getting results from your squeeze page you have a ‘control’ result that you can then use as a benchmark for split-testing alternative squeeze pages to see if you can improve on your conversion results.
In reality, many marketers split-test right from the start and keep trying to improve on their best results. There are plenty of plugins and tools that can help you with this process
Quality of your lead capture process
The quality of the lead capture process is also important.
For example, conversions usually reduce the more information you ask your visitor to input which is why many marketers normally just ask for an email address.
On the other hand the quality of the optin may increase if your visitor is willing to offer more information to demonstrate their commitment to what you have to offer i.e. aim for quality versus quantity.
Exit pop-ups may also improve your conversion rate by making an alternative offer to your visitor before they leave.
Retargeting visitors to your page by using a retargeting pixel to enable you to bring your visitors back to your offer at a later date may also improve your ultimate conversions from traffic.
Other marketers use a two-step optin process to improve conversions.
All these processes need to be tested to find the optimal formula for maximum conversions. Sometimes simply split-testing two radically different offers is the best way to start.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a number of factors that determine what a good conversion rate is for any particular situation.
I suppose the best answer is that any conversion rate is good if you are able to make more money than you are spending on traffic generation because this will enable you to stay in business long enough to improve your conversion rates through testing.
Some marketers can get 70 or 80% conversion rates because they are driving quality targeted traffic to a good offer whilst others will get only 10 or 20%.
Determining ‘what is a good squeeze page conversion rate’ for your particular offer will be mainly determined by the factors discussed above, namely:
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.
I have been learning more about how to write powerful email copy from three top products:
The Tao of Email Copywriting by Matt Furey
Kickass Copywriting Secrets by John Carlton
Autoresponder Madness by Andre Chaperon
Last night I finished going through the Matt Furey product (which retails at $197). He is reputed to be one of the best email writers on the planet.
It all started out a bit slowly, with Matt talking about how to get yourself into the correct mindset to write email copy. This consists of some deep breathing exercises designed to get you into the moment and to energise your mind – this energy to be reflected in your subsequent writing.
As I lay on my office sofa listening to Matt in CD one, when he was talking about the fact that he was a world class copywriter, I was beginning to think it was all a lot of guru bullsit. You know the sort of thing – they spend a lot of time telling you about what a wonderful person they are and all the incredible things they have done!
I don’t really like this much – it’s a technique that Brendan Burchard uses to excess in my opinion to establish his credentials – too much hot air and not enough content!
Any ways, after not really being fully engaged by CD1 I decided to put on CD2 and see if I could manage to focus on what was being said (because I found CD1 hard to digest!)
I have to say that CD2 turned out to be simply the best explanation of copywriting that I have heard in all my 13 years as a business and marketing consultant.
What really electrified my mind was that Matt simply stood up and delivered an example of an email in front of his audience – it was made up ‘off the cuff’ so to speak. He said it was important to write your copy exactly as you speak (tidied up a little of course). This makes his writing very natural and he delivers his copy based on STORIES and his own life experience.
He starts his stories based on TIME & PLACE e.g. ‘when I was 5 years old growing up in XYZ this happened to me’ and eventually he transitions his story into his promotion. He said that this was a technique that Ronald Reagan used very effectively.
As soon as you begin your story with time and place you draw your audience into what happened at that time and place. Sometimes stories weave in and out of each other.
This is a very powerful technique and I believe that Andre Chaperon’s technique is similar – he basically creates a ‘Soap Opera’ in his emails that draws you into the story.
Matt talked about the fact that there are at least two stories in every email – what you want your reader to understand and your product or service promotion and how it relates to your positioning storyline.
The power of this story technique is further emphasised later in CD 2 and CD3 when Matt gets his audience to write emails based on this technique and then picks on members of the audience at random to read out their emails. Through the use of powerful personal stories I have to say that in every case these examples are quite riveting.
I think that if you can tell a story based on your own personal experience it seems more authentic and real – particularly if you can outline your failure and personal problems.
I have to say from a personal perspective, my own email copywriting should be a great deal more powerful as a result of listening to ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ because the lesson of writing from your own personal experiences has really hit home hard this time.
When I was at school I excelled in English Literature and English Language but through many years of business report writing and business writing, I lost touch with the creative muse that really enables me to write powerfully and authentically.
Just as I have recently rediscovered a love of creating art from photographs, I think I will now have a great deal of enjoyment writing powerful and creative email story-lines.
(I live in Shakespeare’s home town, so I really ought to take a leaf out of his book and dig deeper into my creativity. How did a home boy from Stratford-upon-Avon begin to write that stuff – it still baffles scholars today?)
Matt made the point that you do need to be FEARLESS in your writing – this will offend some people but this is also good because it means that you are having some impact on other people in a sea of grey and mediocre rubbish. It also means that you need to reveal your frailties as well as your strengths.
Whilst Matt isn’t the greatest speaker, it was really when he started to give examples of his work that the ‘penny dropped’.
It is also very evident that he is not afraid to SELL his products and services hard – he says that it is important to send emails daily and even twice or three times daily. He always makes more money if he does this and he makes millions from his email marketing.
And this leads me onto the purpose of this article. At some time in the near future I am creating my own email marketing product entitled – ‘Email-ATM’ – which will be based on my own experiences and what I learn from these top copywriting products – each of the products listed above costs quite a bit of money if you were to buy them yourself.
Copywriting is one of the most prized and also lucrative skills that you can possess in online marketing. I have paid a heavy price my not outsourcing my own sales letters to professional copywriters. I write all my own copy because this is a skill that I really want to master and Matt’s ‘The Tao of Email Copywriting’ has moved me a big step closer to that goal.
So why not join my list at the top of the sidebar and I will inform you when I launch my email copywriting product based on the distilled wisdom of these gurus, and others that I have studied, like Gary Halbert and Gary Bencivenga.
If you get Email ATM you will definitely learn a lot more about how to write powerful email copy – so make sure you join my list now to get what will be an awesome product.
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.
You are probably already aware that emails in the cloud are a great way of reducing the long-term cost of your email marketing.
The popular email auto-responders like Aweber and Get Response have conditioned us into believing that we need to pay more the bigger our list gets and the more emails that we send out.
Amazon AWS offers emails in the cloud but as far as I can see you need to be a technical wiz to get this up and running.
I was therefore interested to find comprehensive video training on a cloud service called MailJet . The creator of the training has looked at the alternatives available in the marketplace and settled on this service as being a great option.
If you are wondering how much you can save versus your existing email provider then this pricing page will give you a good reason for buying access to this training.
I have placed the training on the new membership site that I am building called Email-ATM.com as a bonus but for the time being you can purchase separate access to this bonus just for reading this article!
I will still use Aweber for the time being in addition to setting up emails in the cloud until I have tested this service more extensively.
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:
