Email marketing is a huge deal these days, and for good reason:
- Email is free to send… although that’s a problem, too. (More on that later.)
- It’s effective (if you have a good copywriter and a good sales page).
- You can measure your results instantly and make changes if necessary.
So it’s easy to see why so many people are magnetically drawn to the idea of building up an email list, shooting out a few emails, and generating thousands of dollars.
But too many people make the mistake of looking at an email list as a get-rich-quick ticket, a lottery that pays out no matter how bad your numbers are.
Email is Free to Send… and You Can Ruin Your Chances in a Split-Second.
It’s so easy to send an email that many people completely ruin their chances with a potentially profitable email list by spitting out a few unprofessional emails and bad salesmanship.
In order to turn that list of 2,500 email addresses into real money ($4,913 in just 1 day), I had created an elaborate auto-responder sequence with 11 different emails.
The strategies that tied these emails together were critical to our success.
And more importantly, most of the emails had nothing to do with sales.
People Love Stories, Not Sales Emails.
It’s tempting to send a bunch of offers to your email list.
People who have tried this strategy quickly discovered that no one was interested. Unsubscribing rates went up, and sales were flat.
Of those 11 different emails, only 4 of them contained an actual sales message.
But that resulted in more than 35% of people clicking through the emails and landing on the sales page (which I had also written, getting a 16.4% conversion rate).
Now it’s time for me to stop taking credit and be realistic…
People Don’t Buy Garbage.
It sounds obvious.
But I’ve seen a lot of people try to sell some 25-page eBook with information you could easily get in a quick Google search for $10 online.
(Those are people I don’t write for.)
When I sold $4,913 in 1 day, I was selling an online membership priced at $100 that was probably worth thousands in real-world profits.
If you’ve created a useful product, or if you offer a genuinely useful service, I’m happy to help you sell it. I may not get you thousands of dollars in one day, but I do promise an increase in sales.