By now you know you MUST create your lead capture pages to generate your own network marketing leads.
You know that when you do so, you’re builidng an email marketing list, and that in order to build an actual business, and not just a downline, you need to develop your own business assets.
And your own email list to market to an extremely valuable asset.
Congratulations. Understanding these concepts will make allow you to make as much money as possible in your network marketing business. You’re already ahead of 95% of the other reps.
Just one more critical piece of information we still need to cover…
Making money with an email list doesn’t happen until you actually send an email to your list.
Duh, right?
Although this makes sense, I constantly see people generating a list, but not doing anything with it…
Or, if they are doing something with their email list, they are failing to do to it effectively.
This post is going to answer a very important question …
What is the most effective way to make profitable use of your email marketing list?
First, we’ll dive into two broken strategies, which will set the table for the strategy I recommend most.
Broken Strategy #1 – The Auto-Responder Only Method
Many people take time to craft a completely automated autoresponder setup for their email marketing. This is a great thing to do, as it allows you to build a sequence of messages that can step a user through the idea of buying or consuming a product. It should also be used to establish a relationship between you and your lead.
But there are two very big flaws with an auto-responder only sequence:
- Your auto-responder will eventually end.
What does that mean? Well it means that all of your communication with that customer would end when the auto-responder ends. This makes it extremely difficult to sell them anything that may come down the road, or to maintain the relationship once the sequence ends.
- Relevance.
Your prospects are extremely good at telling the difference between “automated” messages and those that you wrote that day – in the moment. Even the best automated messages tend to result in more “unsubscribes” than a well written relevant-to-the-day broadcast message.
So does this mean that sending only broadcast messages is the best solution?
Broken Strategy #2 – The Broadcast Only Method
You want to make sure your emails are always relevant to what’s going on in your client’s mind. The best way to do that is with broadcast messages.
Broadcast messages allow you the most flexibility in the type of content you send out day that day. This hopefully leads to most relevant content possible in your message. The more relevant the content, the better.
Broadcasts also don’t have the issue of “ending” like auto responders do, because you can pretty much send them whenever you want.
However, someone who runs a broadcast only list will find trouble as well.
- The first problem is trying to establish the relationship between you and the lead.
If your list is being generated by a blog, this may not be as big an issue, but if you are using landing pages, where your prospect doesn’t know who you are, then broadcast emails are not a good way to establish a relationship.
Why?
Quite simply … You don’t want to have to start every one of your broadcast messages introducing yourself to new prospects. It would be bad for all the other people on your list who have already seen that message. It’s redundant.
- The second problem with broadcast only subscribers is “hotness.”
What do I mean by this?
Your prospects are most likely to buy and read your emails within the first week of opting in. So the sooner you’re able to get your message in front of them, the more likely they are to going consume and take action on it.
Since most people don’t send broadcast messages every day, it’s difficult to make sure you get in front of them right away if you are using a broadcast only list.
The Winning Strategy – A Combination of Both
You’ve probably guessed that the winning strategy is to use both the auto-responder as well as broadcast messages.
However, I’m going to take it a bit further for you…
It’s been my experience that the best method is to focus on the first seven days of your auto-responder, with each day having one email message. The schedule I normally recommend is something like this:
- Right Away/Day 1 – Welcome them, and thank them for joining your list. Start establishing the relationship between you and your prospect. If you have a product or freebie, be sure to include how to access it in this message.
- Day 2 – Continue to establish the relationship. Try to deliver some additional content that would be relevant to your prospect. Again, if you have a product or freebie as part of the offer to join this list, be sure to remind them to get it and consume it.
- Day 3 thru 5 – Should be content rich emails, designed to transition them to whatever you want them to buy. The content here should be designed to position them for upcoming sales, while still establishing yourself as providing great value through your list.Failure to provide good, free, relevant content will result in unsubscribes (no matter what).
- Day 6 and 7 – Still content rich, but start hard and soft selling. These should be designed to close the sale on whatever the next purchase you want them to make. Your goal is to have them take action.
You can continue beyond day seven, and rinse and repeat this cycle as you see fit for the auto-responder, however, you will find that after a week or two the effectiveness of your emails will drop off.
Instead, I recommend that you send out a weekly, or twice weekly broadcast message to keep your ENTIRE list current.
The goal of the broadcast messages should be to provide top content so that the readers continue to want to open your emails. Keep the selling to a minimum…
By keeping the selling to a minimum, you can set yourself up for the times when you want to do a big sales “push.”
Pushes should be kept to a minimum, and tend to work best with product launches. You can send one to two broadcasts a day for about three or four days with no trouble IF you haven’t done it that often, and IF you maintain the relationship week to week with high quality content based broadcast emails.
So How Do I Set All Of This Up?
You’ll need an email auto-responder like Aweber that supports both automated messages as well as broadcast style messages.
If you do sign up with Aweber, they have a great FAQ section that will take you through step by step of how to setup a follow up or broadcast message. You can also find additional tips and tricks within Aweber’s website to help you make your email marketing more effective.
Once you have your list setup, you’ll want to start generating leads. Be sure to check out our recent post on that topic here How To Create Your Own Live Exclusive Network Marketing Leads.
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Excellent article. Thank you. I am currently planning our own email marketing strategy. Essentially I will just be recycling content that is already on my website. I think the thing that makes email marketing cost effective is that it keeps your brand in front of your prospects eyes AND educates them. Nothing worse than dealing with uneducated clients.