Tool #4 – Your Follow-Up Message Set
(If you missed earlier parts of this series, just go here —> Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4)
I receive over a thousand emails from Internet marketer’s autoresponders every day. Know what I do with most of them? Trash!
This is typical of most online marketers… so what do you do to get your messages read?
Four Types of Follow-Up Messages
There are four types of follow-up messages:
1) Welcome
2) Content
3) Soft sell
4) Hard sell
Let’s look at how to best use these message types…
Email 1 – The Welcome Message Introduces Yourself
NEVER try to sell on the first message. You need to earn your subscriber’s trust and build a friendship first. It’s called relationship marketing.
Introduce yourself. Give them the “freebie” they asked for. Share information that will ensure the subscriber that you are there to help them.
You want to tell your subscriber a little about yourself… where you are from… what your goals and aspirations are.
But, more importantly, you need to focus on how you can help them reach their goals in life… get the focus off of yourself quickly and move on to their wants and needs.
Use this first message to not only introduce yourself and your business product or service, but to really focus in on the subscriber.
They don’t want to learn about you… they want to learn about how you can help them.
Here’s another important strategy…
Identify your email messages in a way that subscribers will immediately know that it is from you. For instance, fo my primary business opportunity I start each of my email subject lines with [My20] so that they will know that the message is coming from My 20 Dollar Travel Biz.
For example, the subject line for one of my subscriber messages to My 20 Dollar Travel Biz list is as follows:
[My20] Tour My 20 Dollar Travel Business
One more suggestion…
Repeat the headline as the first line in your message. Why? This reinforces the thoughts contained in the subject line that prompted the reader to click on the email in the first place.
Emails 2 & 3 – Focus On Content
The next two emails need to focus on content… NO big sales pitch.
Give your subscriber something in each email that will help them. It could be marketing tips, or links to a new web tool you have found. (No FREE downloads though… you need to train them to the fact that if they want a product, they will need to fork over some cash.)
Develop an “anticipation” that makes the subscriber excited to open your emails.
Use the PostScript…
While I suggest that you don’t make a sales pitch until you have developed a trusted relationship with the reader, you can always insert a short promo blurb about one of the products you are promoting in the “P.S.”
Soft Sell Emails – Integrate an Offer Within Your Content
This is a combination message with 75% pure content and 25% sharing how a specific product can solve the problem described in the content you presented.
For example, I might be sharing great content on autoresponder message sets, and at the end I offer a recommendation link to an autoresponder service. NO pressure – NO hype – just information.
Hard Sell Messages – Sales Pages in Email Form
The last type of message is basically a sales page. Here you want to focus on how the product, service, or business opportunity benefits your subscriber. Don’t be pushy – no hype – just give the reader great information and link them to the actual sales page or opportunity page.
Here’s the thing… you always want to give the subscriber something they can take away from your email message EVEN if they don’t choose to buy yet.
What do I mean by that? One word… content.
Use the content on your sales email to teach something about the product or service, and focus on how this can benefit the reader. You want the reader to come away from the sales email thinking that they learned something, not that they were sold to. Very important.
Here’s a link to another blog post where I discuss this very topic – Don’t Advertise… Inform
You don’t want the reader unsubscribing from your list because they don’t like the tone of the sales page that you linked them to.
One more thing… even though the email formula described above is aimed at your regular follow-up message set, not your broadcast messages, it is important that you keep these strategies in mind for those as well.
Your broadcast messages need to be a mixture of soft sell and hard sell tactics… always focus on content and the benefits that will solve your subscribers problems.
Here’s the Final Formula…
Message # – Type
1 – Welcome
2 – Content
3 – Content
4 – Soft-Sell
5 – Content
6 – Content
7 – Hard-Sell
Rinse and Repeat
In the next post we will discuss Traffic Generation…
