Archive for July, 2015
048: Email Marketing: Are You Building a Buyer’s List? (Or Any Kind of Email List At All?) and the “Why Didn’t You Buy” Email
Remember this:
- Your customers get trained to open your emails.
- Your customers get trained to buy from you.
- Your customers get trained to attend your webinars.
Whoever has the biggest email list wins. Facebook and Twitter followers are not that list.
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Think about that for a second. You can post all day but who has the biggest list in the world? Facebook. When you're on Facebook, don't you receive emails from them AT LEAST weekly?
Even if a customer opens your website or followers check out your Facebook page, all of the most popular sites (Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram) use email lists too.
"It worked so well, I stopped doing it."
In other words, don't neglect your list.
When we first start out doing something, sometimes it goes so well that we get lazy and we backslide. Then, we start losing income and we have to work twice as hard to get to where we were.
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers
A lot of people are shooting for the wrong kind of numbers...
It's not a big achievement to say you have a 0% refund rate if your website says absolutely no refunds and you spend your time ineffectively arguing with customers over $5 and $10 transactions.
Don't waste your time moving people from one list to another to achieve a "false" click-thru rate:
Say you have a list of 10k subscribers. Many people send out an email saying something like, "I have a new course coming up soon and I don't want you to get bombarded" so "instead, I want you to go join this other list to be on the exclusive XYZ launch list." They'll send their subscribers to that new list to sign up for the launch.
Let's say out of your 10k subscribers only 100 sign up on the new list. That's a really small amount...
When they announce the launch, 80 of those 100 click on it and they have an 80% click thru rate. In reality, your total interested subscribers are really only less than 1%. It's a lot of unnecessary steps.
A better use of your marketing is to get 100 new subscribers per day to your EXISTING list.
How? Add some exciting content to your blog, like videos.
Then, on the sidebar, you say something like "if you want to get exclusive articles, sign up here" and then you create the opt-in page where you offer a free report of your best few pieces of content. Now, you have additional potential customers on your list.
The service you use for this is called AWeber. AWeber is a permission-based (i.e. your customers "opted in") email marketing system...
$1 Dollar Visitor Value
This means that when you average everything out, when someone lands on your webpage, you want that visit to be worth $1.
If you're selling something for $100 you want that to convert at 1% to equal $1. If 100 people go to your webpage and you have a $100 product you want at least 1 buyer for that $100 product.
That's why you want 10k subscribers, at a minimum, so if you have a $1 per visitor value you still make that $10k per month.
Daily 1% List Decay
Your email list is going to decay every day by 1%.
If you have a list of 10k people, you can expect to lose 100 people per day.
At first, that goal of adding 100 people a day we talked about earlier sounds like a lot, but at some point it will level off in that if you're losing 100 people per day but you're gaining people at 100 per day you are still at a net list of 10k.
Expect a 2% click thru rate list-wide.
That means if you have 10,000 subscribers, expect 200 people to click thru when you send an email. If you have a $100 product for sale that is moving, then you can expect at least $200 a day in sales just from 2 people at a product that's $100 each purchase.
Then, if you email your list about the same product for the next 5-7 days in a row, the rate of clicks remain about the same. At a 2% click through rate, if you sent out 10 emails on that same product, you could expect to get 20% of that list to buy.
That would be 200 net people for sales of $2000. This can really add up.
You want to have a 6% refund rate when it comes to your products. If it's lower than that, you are not marketing aggressively enough and you're not selling enough. Any higher and there may be something wrong with your product. To learn this whole system and get vital information on how to successfully build and utilize your list, check out IncomeMachine.com.
Things You Need to Do to Successfully Utilize Your List
Have a way for people to sign up and become email subscribers.
Give them a way to "opt-out." Every now and then you'll see opt-out's. If every now and then 1% or so opts-out of your list, you're doing your job right. Besides, you don't want to waste your time marketing to people who will never be interested.
Market to your list. Don't forget about it and don't be afraid of it.
If you do at least once a week, that's great. Robert does once a day. Have something interesting to say every day:
- Did you check out the thing I have for sale? Here's the coolest thing about it.
- Describe different feature(s) of your product every day.
- Give them a couple of good reasons to click on a link, to go to one of your podcasts or blog articles for example.
What to Avoid in Your Email Marketing (Important!)
Some people will tell you to write stories in your emails, that it will keep people coming back for more. No, no one reads all their emails and they usually don't read them in order. Customers will get tired of doing this.
Some people advise you to come up with about 20 tips about some such subject and send your list one tip every day. This is just a great way for your customers to save your emails in a "saved email folder" and never get around to reading them.
What's worse, another tip is to interview 10 experts, and include 1 interview each day. Your subscribers get tired of that because if they miss a day or two that's a few hours to catch up on and they'll give up.
- Pay attention to the emails that get the most click-thru rates
- Pay attention to the email others send that get YOU PERSONALLY to click through
- Pay attention to what headings seem to work, or are "weird" (in a good way, because they get noticed)
- The best subject lines that work are ones like: "hey", "frustrated", and other one-line "teasers."
An email subject line that just says "frustrated" works well because it makes people question what's frustrating.
When they open the email, you can then talk about what's frustrating in business. For example, how to write an e-book, how to publish it, etc. and then tell them the "simple solution" which is your product.
The first 7 days are most important. Even if you don't want to email people every day, when they first become subscribers, email them once for 7 days in a row.
That's when they're hungry and looking for an answer to their problem and might be ready to buy something to solve it. In the first few days, you want to email them the link to get their free content, and then email them about your product.
After that first 7 days, you want to get them to take any kind of action. Opening an email and clicking a link is an action.
Even if they're not ready to buy just yet, they may still be thinking about it, so you want to throw out some questions in those emails to get them to think about how buying your product is going to solve their problem. That's where the "why didn't you buy?" email comes in.
Use The "Why didn't you buy?" Email
This is super-important and is the best email to send.
"Why didn't you buy?" IS the subject line.
In the body you say something like, "I noticed you haven't yet claimed your membership to our Make a Product book creation course. Did you know that we can show you how to: (insert what your product claims to do). Click on the reply button and tell us why you didn't buy."
This does a few different things: If they already bought from you but get this email, you can reply: "Great. What did you think of the course? What motivated you? Where's your book?" so now you can piece together a testimonial to use from this person to use on the sales letter.
- If someone is an "on the fence" buyer and writes back saying, "I didn't buy because of X reason", maybe they say the price is too high... now you can tell them there's a payment plan
- If they say they can't be sure the system works, you can tell them there's a money back guarantee
- If they say something specifically related to the product, you can tell them the solution or maybe you need to add something in the sales letter
- Even if they never plan to buy, you still stand out because a lot of people never even bother to ask
This email gets the most responses out of everything that Robert sends. They came to YOU looking for a solution.
Find out why they haven't bought the solution yet. Don't forget that you can find out more about this entire program of list-building and successfully utilizing your list by going to IncomeMachine.com. It shows you how to:
- Build a free opt-in page
- A paid membership site
- An email follow-up sequence
- A sales letter
- How you can utilize the list for paid ads, etc.
- And more
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047: The Mom Test: Is It the Reason Your Internet Marketing is Suffering?
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Don't be another statistic! Run your online business model, product, and sales letter through "The Mom Test" to discover how to sell faster and easier without resorting to painful "copywriting" or piling a lot of extra money into your business. It'll simplify your internet marketing...
Bad situation: A lot of internet marketers too caught up in ‘jargon’ and reinventing terms for concepts that already existed + a lot of people not wanting to look stupid and admit that they don’t know what something is = missed sales .
Too many marketers get too involved in making simple concepts difficult OR they are so vague and oversimplified that they sound ‘sketchy’.
Your marketing should ideally be able to pass "The Mom Test"...
Piece #1: Can You Explain What It Is That You’re Doing Online In A Way That Your Mom Could Understand It?
In other words, can you explain it to someone who isn’t "stupid" but is not necessarily internet-savvy and has zero interest in "internet tech stuff."
Piece #2: Are You Solving A Real Problem?
Figure out what people want to know and where they are personally stuck and how you can help them.
Example: Your niche is the stock market. Most people just want to know how to get started, how to trade some simple stocks. They want to learn how to buy a stock, read the stock quotes and make some return on their investment. They don't need to know the inner workings of Wall Street. THAT is not a real problem you are solving.
Piece #3: Can You Explain It In Less Than One Minute Or In One Sentence?
Just "state the facts."
Uber is a good example. Instead of saying, "I am a freelancer for a website that facilities transportation and is in direct competition with more traditional ways of hiring drivers for important events", etc., you would say, "Uber is a Peer to peer taxi service that costs less than traditional taxi service."
Piece #4: Do You Have A Physical Item?
Tangible items tend to lend credibility, especially to people who are unfamiliar with internet technology and feel that they need to see and touch something for it to be legitimate.
Let’s say that everything you have for sale is 100% online and is in the form of digital downloads.
- You can put this internet-based digital information (ex: a 4-module course) on a physical product like a DVD and puts it with a service called Kunaki.
- Robert uses Sony DVD Architect to create the DVD and Kunaki is company that specializes in DVD replication, packaging and distribution.
- Another option: take several of your blog posts, cut and paste them into Word and then turn those into an e-book.
- Go to Amazon KDP to create a Kindle format version of your book, and CreateSpace to create physical/printed copies of your book.
Robert's course, Make a Product, has a lot more information for you on how to publish your own e-book in less than 24 hours. Go check it out!
Piece #5: Is This Something That Can Change A Life Within 1 To 30 Days?
If it takes longer than 30 days it’s not exciting and you’re probably not doing a very good job marketing.
You need to have a set goal in mind of what your customer is going to achieve or will have been able to produce, as a result of their learning from you, WITHIN 30 days. Will they be able to play guitar? Will they have their own membership site up and running?
Closing Thoughts
- The average person, whether they’re a mom or not, does not understand a lot of the "technical stuff" and think that everyone on the internet is a "crazy new start-up."
- This is not about having an elevator pitch or a customer avatar.
- This is about explaining things in real, simple language and understanding that just because something might be exciting to you or seem simple to you, it might be going over your customers’ heads. Play it safe and dumb it down.
Ask your list and get feedback. Probably 80% of your list thinks that you’re too advanced.
Newbies are going to outnumber experts. The things that are going to keep bringing in leads are your simple things, the ones that are the "first step."
Yes, you want to have high-ticket items that are more advanced but don’t forget about your lead generation, introductory products. People want to know the basics.
[makeaproduct]
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046: Did You Send Out Thank You Cards to Your Customers Yet?
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No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you're still way ahead of anyone who isn't trying.
Very few marketers even make the effort of doing Thank You cards. Should this be part of your everyday routine? Are there tasks that are a "better" use of your time?
Maybe. But, what if, no matter what niche you're in, you just singled out 4 random customers today and just jotted down 4 quick Thank You's? It would take just a few minutes out of your day but put you way ahead of the curve.
You just want to thank your customers for buying from you. There's no "sell", no discount and no hustle. You are just thanking them for their business. They are part of your success. Here are your tools for "Thank You" productivity...
Thank-You Tool #1: WPKunaki
On Robert and Lance's website, MembershipCube.com, as well as their other membership sites, they use a plug-in called WPKunaki, which is an address collector.
When someone joins their membership site, the plug-in pops up and asks for their mailing address and runs it through the address validator. Lance would be really crazy not to be collecting addresses.
It's nice to have it on hand. He can use it for Thank You cards, he can use it to send them webinar or DVD copies as just a quick bonus. He can also use it for geographics to target customers later for Facebook ads.
Thank-You Tool #2: Phone Calls
Sometimes Lance will even call them on the phone.
If someone just bought a $7 e-book from you, they're not expecting anything at all, not even an auto-responder-generated email. So, if you make that call, you're way ahead of anyone else.
If someone bought from you and you contact them the same day, they are going to just be happy and not have any complaints.
Thank-You Tool #3: Send Out Cards
This is a service that will allow you to send traditional cards to your customers. These are NOT electronic cards. They are "paper" cards like you would get at the store so they are very personal, not "mass e-mailed" and they won't go to your customer's spam folder or look like another sales push.
There are also gift options within the Send Out Cards system that you can send to your customer as well.
To learn more about how Send Out Cards can help you personalize your relationships with your customers, go to DoubleAgentCards.com.
Thank-You Tool #4: Google Drive
If you have a Gmail account, you also have a drive account. If you don't already have one, go get one. It's free.
You can create any doc and have it be in your Google Drive, where you can now access it from anywhere.
A good idea here is to keep a journal of different contacts/activities that have with your customers. Here is where you can keep a journal of the Thank You cards that you send out.
"Cheesy" Marketing
You want to stay away from cheesy marketing. Many marketers tell you to look up today's holiday and give your customers a "special discount" for that day (example: a "Boxing Day" discount) or to look up your customers' birthdays market to them on their birthdays.
It sounds like a good idea but all these marketers who teach this have never personally marketed to me on in this way. They've really just posted an occasional sale here and there when they're probably running low in their bank account.
It makes more sense to just sell what you sell and be consistent. You don't have to have sales all the time if you're thanking your customers for being there.
The 1-4-15-80 Rule
This is an important concept that Robert talks about in his program Double Agent Marketing and its accompanying book. It's how your list is broken down:
- About 1% will buy everything you put out.
- 4% will buy most of your stuff.
- 15% won't always buy high-ticket items but they will probably buy things where they can do a payment plan.
- Then, your last 80% will probably not buy anything products/services over $20.
If that disappoints you, you can build a bigger list OR you can take better care of your list.
Even if your list is not that big you can still make sales. If you wanted to make $50K/month, would you rather have 100 subscribers and 50 sales of $100 each, regardless of the type of products? Or would you rather have 10,000 subscribers that only purchased $5 items. Robert has asked this of several of his customers and overwhelmingly people would rather work with the first option.
It's not necessarily about getting floods of people but about building a decent size list and really adding value in cultivating relationships with those who want to buy the higher-level products. It doesn't take much to:
- Mail them a DVD (Kunaki.com for DVD production)
- Mail them a book
- Send them Thank You cards (Vistaprint.com for address labels and postcards)
- Give them a phone call
Avoid the 3-inch DVD Syndrome
There are small writeable CD's. When Robert was first starting out, he saw these and thought, "Hey, cool I can fit this mini CD into a normal sized envelope. I can record something and send it out and I am going to make so much money."
If no one cares or no one plays it and it doesn't lead to anything it's not going to get you anywhere. In other words, something has to bring the customer back. It has to be intensely valuable and/or make the customer feel very valued.
Some Fun and Creative Marketing Ideas from Robert
One time for an event he took out Facebook ads that were so narrowed and targeted that the ad was basically just showing down to the 1 person he had picked out in Facebook.
For the one person he wanted to see it, he would put their name in the ad and their picture. He did successfully sell seats to seminars just based off this ad.
Another time, he went to Amazon and bought a huge box of microwave popcorn. He left the individual packages all sealed up in plastic and sent 100 of them out with copies of a quick letter. The letter basically said, "Here's some popcorn to watch this movie" and the URL in the letter went to an online "movie" that was pitching a live event. He spent $200 or $300 altogether on this marketing and sold seats to his event this way. It was a good return on investment.
An idea he's pursuing now is to send out copies of his Double Agent Marketing book to his customers along with a highlighter and a letter that says something along the lines of "this book has so much valuable information you'll need an extra highlighter."
Closing Thoughts
Don't do this to prospects or to people you plan to joint venture or network with. Do it low tech. once you start getting fancy it really kind of backfires.
These "Thank You" and marketing ideas are for your current customers, your best buyers and those you want to come back. Do it "low tech." Once you start trying to get "fancy", it really looks cheesy and can backfire. You just want to say Thank You and do something fun for them.
You can always reach Robert at his email via robert@robertplank.com. He would love to hear from you about your business and what marketing you're doing that is working successfully, and is happy to hear your questions. He may even feature your question on the show!
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045: How to Create a $10,000+ Per Month Income Stream In Just Five Hours Per Week
The steps to get you to that magical $10K level...
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There's a problem with people wanting to take shortcuts to get to that $10K per month level.
We want to get you out of that way of thinking. You have to do 3rd grade before you go to college. If you jump right in without the warm-up, you stand the chance of the whole venture falling in on itself.
You want to do this the RIGHT way.
A lot of people in internet marketing get to that number but without sufficient preparation, they fall into the trap of having to put a lot of money back into the business or maybe have to hire a lot of employees, so when it comes down to it, they're actually "netting" quite a bit less than the $10K per month.
Four Daily Tasks
We've covered the Four Daily Tasks principle before. To recap, it means to take 4 tasks EVERY DAY that you can complete. 3 of them are your longer tasks, your half hour to 40 minute tasks. Then, you complete a "gimme" task that take just a few minutes.
Being able to finish FOUR THINGS EVERY DAY is very purposeful and motivating.
Why "tasks" and NOT "time"? It's not a matter of how many hours you put in per week. That's an employee way of thinking, i.e. "If I make $10 an hour and I put in 40 hrs. this week, I've made $400."
You're not an employee. You're a one man show, a business owner. For you to be successful, it's about hitting milestones.
Your four tasks need to be things that are actually able to be completed that will put you in the position of making money.
Changing your Twitter background doesn't do that. If you're making a membership site, and you've only made 10% of it, that's not complete. If you register a domain name for your site that is a complete task and puts you on the path. If you have set up your membership site that someone can see is complete with a PayPal button, THAT is a complete step.
Attitude Adjustments
When it comes to mindset, one of the most powerful things Robert ever learned was it's either inside of you or outside of you.
If something is not working for you, only one of two things needs to happen: you either change the way you think about it or you change what you're doing.
80% of your problems are in the way you think about them. If your business is not succeeding and you're walking around complaining that "life isn't fair", it's time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something different. If you're buying thousands of dollars of products but you're business still isn't up and running or successful, these 2 things need to happen:
Finish one of the courses that you keep buying. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start implementing something.
The problem with your beliefs is that your beliefs are set in stone first. Then, you filter the information and facts that you find through that belief system in a way that lets you reinforce those beliefs. A lot of this is subconscious.
If your personal belief is that making money online doesn't work then everything you read or take in that says the opposite, you will ignore it or think it's fake.
What's really scary about this is it turns into an echo chamber. You're going to believe that people who think and talk like you are smarter than everyone else, because you can relate to them better. The problem is that if you're grumpy and you make friends with 5 other grumpies, you reinforce each other's beliefs and drag each other down.
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -- Henry Ford
We need to model. We need to look at what it is that we want. We need to find who has it. Then, we need to emulate what they are doing to get there.
Steps On The Path To $10K Per Month
Phase 1: Freelancing. This is your quick way to get from $1k to $2k per month.
- Fiverr (Fiverr.com)- a website where you can sell any service that you are skilled at. It doesn't have to be an advanced skill. It can be anything from transcription to voiceovers to converting documents to testing iOS apps.
It sounds like you'd have to make a crazy amount of sales at $5 each to get anywhere, but the secret is in the up-sells. Additionally, although it doesn't sound like much, it may work out to be $7 or $8 per hour of work in income, you've now saved the time from having to spend countless hours looking for a job, you can work from home avoiding gas and parking costs, etc. - Uber (Uber.com) – this is like being a private taxi service. This works particularly well if you're in a larger-scale city and can work peak times, like weekends and nights. It is possible to make $1000 or more per week doing this if you can meet those 2 aspects.
- Airbnb (AirBNB.com) – a property rental service. You can rent out a shared room, a private room or an entire home. Like Fiverr, there is a public profile rating system so you can see other reviews and know who is trustworthy and who is not.
- Ebay and Craigslist (Ebay.com and Craigslist.net) If you're using it and have no plans of using it in the future, sell it!
- FBA-Fulfillment by Amazon. This is where you find items that are low-priced and ship them into Amazon and make a profit on the difference between what it's sold for and what you purchased it for.
There's a little more advanced information to this and you can find out all the different ways to use and profit from FBA at Robert's program, www.dropshipceo.com.
Phase 2: Information Products. This is where you can make about $2K to $5K per month.
At some point, you're going to cap out on freelancing opportunities and just not be able to get over that $1K-$2K mark due to time constraints, etc. This is your next step.
First, you want to find a niche. Go to Clickbank.com and check out their "Marketplace." These are all the subjects and topics that people are looking for answers to. These are their "pain points"-the issues that they have where they are willing to pay for products that can help solve them.
Then, you can go to Robert's site, IncomeMachine.com, where you can find out how to take advantage of that niche, how to build a product with video and/or e-books, how to optimize putting together a program for people to purchase.
Once you get on the way with selling your product, you are building a "list", i.e. people who are purchasing your product that you can market to in the future.
As you build up that list, you can then joint venture with other peers in your niche (or a very similar niche) to piggyback on each other in an affiliate-type structure, where each of you benefits from the sale of either one of your products and you're both building lists.
You can also set up podcasts or webinars at this point, where you interview each other, guest blog, etc. This grows and grows.
When you're putting together information products for sale, it's best to go from "idea to implementation" within 3 to 7 days.
Some of what you turn out will be great and some of it may turn out to be duds.
It makes no sense to spend a year or two trying to get it perfect. Just get it out there and your customers' responses will tell you what you're doing right and wrong.
The ones that turn out successful, you can then spend more time revising and improving those or capitalizing on them. Let the duds go. They were just experiments.
As your information product business grows, you can let go of the more time-consuming and less-paying things you were doing to get by, you can step renting your room, etc.
Phase 3: Passive Income. This is where you're getting to that magical $10K per month.
This is the dream that you want to achieve. You need to build a membership site where people are paying to keep engaged with your program in one fashion or another.
Robert's MembershipCube.com will walk you through all the steps to set up a successful membership site.
For example, one of Robert's clients/students, Dr. Charles runs a directory. There's a certain procedure he teaches other doctors. When the doctors buy and complete his training, they get added to the nationwide directory so local people interested in that service can find them. These doctors are paying Dr. Charles monthly to stay in that directory. If they stop paying, they are deleted.
Ask yourself, what sort of service related to your niche would people be willing to pay for month after month? Do you have something where you could also provide a directory that people can pay to join?
Robert also has membership sites that people pay to have access to, such as www.podcastcrusher.com and www.makeaproduct.com. People want to learn how to do podcasting and create e-books because these are items that you can sell that will generate leads. What skill do you have that you can teach people that will provide them with real value?
Coaching
Once you've developed your information product in Phase 2 and a membership site in Phase 3, your next step to that $10K per month passive income can be coaching.
You've developed your DVD on guitar playing in easy steps in Phase 2, then you created a membership site in Phase 3, where you show monthly how to learn in just 1 day all the popular radio hits and started a directory for local guitar teachers.
The next step would be coaching. For a certain $ amount per hour (say $200 per hour), you will get on Skype with your client and walk them through any difficulties they are having or help them with starting their own local guitar teaching business.
Now, you've gotten to a level where you wake up in the morning and have an entire leads list that you can email with future products and services. You're pretty advanced at this point and getting ABOVE that $10K is going to seem a lot easier than it was GETTING to it.
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P.S. 5 hours per week to $10K....where'd that come from? Your 5 hours per week is your 4 daily tasks. Spend an hour or less every day on the path to making money. It's fun, things move a lot of faster, and it keeps you motivated!
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