Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

One of the questions I get all the time is, “When should I start talking about my premium content or membership site in the email follow-ups?” In this whiteboard lesson, I talk about what we learned works for our financial interview website. The first thing we tried didn’t work, and I explain why we made changes and tested until we found the “sweet spot” of selling. I also talk about the concept of a “goodwill bank” and why you need to fill it before making a withdrawal.

We’ve all been taught that in order to get someone to sign up for your email list, you’ve got to offer them an incentive – some sort of free content – that they will receive in exchange for their email. That’s true, but after you fill the “goodwill bank” there will be a time to make a withdrawal and ask for them to part with more than just their email address.

You’re going to continue to exchange their time and attention for free content, but eventually it needs to turn into a real business transaction with dollars exchanged for knowledge and information.

But how soon should that start? Do you pitch in the first email that contains the link to the free e-book, interview or video? Perhaps. Some people would argue (including myself), that the more often you don’t make some sort of pitch, the harder it will be when you do want to sell something to get your audience to pay attention.

What has worked for us is that while the email itself may not pitch, the landing page you take them to in order to consume the content must ALWAYS contain a pitch of some sort.

In our auto-responder series, email 1 does not contain a pitch and neither does the landing page. We’re simply filling the good will bank. But emails 2-8 do lead to landing pages that contain a pitch for our premium content and memberships. The content is definitely valuable, but the pitch increases on each landing page until message 9, 10 and 11 are full sales pitches for our product.

At that point we feel we’ve given them ample chance to see the kind of content we offer – free and paid – and it’s time to make a decision. If we’ve done our job well, hopefully many people choose to become buyers. But either way, there comes a time when every subscriber needs to make that decision.

If they decide to unsubscribe, then so be it. And if they stay on the list without buying, that’s fine too. We’ll work on finding products for them that may, for whatever reason, be a better fit for them than ours and we will still make money via an affiliate relationship.

The tests come in when you work on seeing where that sales pitch comes in to your auto-responder series. For most sites I think that probably happens somewhere between email 5 and 15. I wouldn’t go in for the sale before that or wait any longer after that.

For additional reading on this issue see:

- Email Autoresponders: How Often Should You Email Your List?
- Our Top Email Subscriber Retention Trick
- The Betty Crocker Secret to Email Marketing that Works (Copy Blogger)
- The most critical SEO mistake in your email marketing (blue sky factory Blog)

creating content, email marketing, selling content online selling with free content

We’ve only tested two officially. But I’ve informally tested about 6 over the past few months.

Winner: Arial font at 11 pt.

The official and most scientific test was Arial font against Courier font.

Speaking with my colleagues from another site who do subscription newsletters, they swore Courier worked best for an older generation who grew up on newsprint. However, I had a feeling that my audience liked the clear, clean lines of Arial.

But does it really matter? In our test we sent 20,000 emails over a 7 day period with the exact same subject lines and content. Only the font was different in the A/B test:

Email messages in Arial font:
Open rate: 34.2%
Click rate: 9.6%

Email messages in Courier font:
Open rate: 31.8%
Click rate: 7.9%

Arial wins – but not by a huge margin. Enough that we’ll be using Arial for all our messages going forward.

One question I’m still not sure about: Why would open rate be affected if they haven’t seen the font yet? My guess is that email programs like Gmail show a snippet of the message and so they do see the font before actually opening the message. Let me know if you have any insight on that.

Interesting side note: Spam complaints with Arial: .02%. Spam complaints with Courier .09%. For whatever reason, Courier messages occasionally got people to click the “Spam” button in their email program more than Arial. That sample size is small enough to be an error either way, but my sense is that people just didn’t like the Courier format and it smelled more like spam to them.

building your list, email marketing email font open rate click rate, email marketing font

If you’re creating content for sale you know you need to build your email subscriber list using an email autoresponder service. You’ve probably gotten that far reading just a few blogs and watching a few videos.

But when you ask most people how often you should send email to your list, you get the dreaded “it depends.” Well not here. I am going to put my foot down and tell you exactly how often you should be sending email to your subscribers. No less than every other day.

This assumes, of course that the ultimate goal of your list is to sell something to them. If you are simply building an email list in order to tell them where to get the best ice cream each week, that’s something different. But since you’re reading this blog, I’m going to assume you want to build a real business with real dollars behind it. Therefore, email frequency matters.

Here’s why.

When someone signs up for your email newsletter, they are doing so to get the content you are giving away and to learn more about the industry or topic which you cover. They are a hot lead and are the most likely to buy something from you within the next 30 days. This means you have a very short period of time in which you need to develop “a relationship” with that person and convince them that what you offer is worth paying for.

There is something that happens when you provide great insight and content on a regular basis – either daily or every other day. Your new email subscriber becomes familiar with you much more quickly and you are able to build momentum with that subscriber toward the ultimate goal of a sale. Frequent and regular high-quality emails keep that lead from “cooling” as you move along and each time they receive a message from you, you have the opportunity to keep them “warm.”

If you’re mailing only weekly, or heaven-forbid once-per-month, it’s simply too far between emails to keep that momentum going. Your leads are cooling substantially between each email and you’re having to spend too much energy just warming them up again.

Each email you send is a reminder of who you are and what you can do to help your subscriber achieve something. Weekly or monthly emails have to spend half their time reminding the subscriber who you are and you get to spend less time telling them how you can help.

Will you have people who unsubscribe and send you a message that you send too much email? Yes. And those folks wouldn’t have bought anything from you anyway – I guarantee it. To quote Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, “If you want a friend, get a dog.” If you want buyers who appreciate the value you can bring to them, email your list frequently.

This doesn’t mean you can send your list sub-standard emails. You’ve got to work to make sure that everything you are sending them is worthy of their attention. If you aren’t sure, don’t send it. Instead, work hard to develop an email auto-responder chain of 20-25 emails so that the day your new subscriber signs up for your list, they will receive at least 3 weeks of email before you have to lift a finger.

In our autoresponder email marketing, we send an email nearly every day for the first two weeks while we are working hard to show the value of a membership or online class. Only after those first two weeks do we drop the frequency of emails to every other day.

This strategy results in more unsubscribes than you would get if you emailed less frequently. And that’s the way we want it. We’re working to weed out the non-buyers and non-action-takers from the very first email we send. What you have left is a smaller, more qualified list that will blow away lists that are 4 or 5 times the size.

Our membership site email lists of 4,000 to 5,000 regularly blow away newsletter lists that are 100,000 or more. But you need to set that standard from the very first email you send.

Your message to your list is this: I’m going to send you a lot of email – but I promise that everything I send will be worthy of your time. It’s a standard you have to work to achieve, but I promise you it will reward you richly.

The email autoresponder services I have heard the best things about:

1) AWeber.com
2) iContact.com

Related reading:

- What’s the right frequency to communicate with your customers? (Nigel Botterill)

email marketing, starting a membership site email autoresponders

Well the daughter is back in school and we’re back to heavy duty content creation and membership sales. The issue I want to discuss today is one that has come up several times this past week for us and is something with which most bloggers and email marketers have wrestled.

Everyone has heard the phrase, “The customer is always right.” I agree with that – to a point. As a website owner and online marketer, you want to make sure your customers are happy with their purchases and that their expectations are met, if not exceeded, every time. The simplest way to get repeat buyers is to always deliver what you promise.

However, there is a fine line between pleasing a customer or prospect and coming to the realization that you can’t please everyone. Most everyone reading this post is either doing everything themselves (creating the content, blogging, selling, working to get traffic) and there’s only so much you can scale yourself. The very fact that there is only one of you means you are going to be limited in how much you can do and offer to prospective buyers.

There will always be things your buyers would like – extra features, content on a specific subject that is important to them, etc. We get requests all the time from customers and prospects who ask if we can create content on a specific subject. If it’s something we can create that will be of benefit to a large group, then we’ll make it happen because a large portion of our customer base would find it helpful.

But you also need to be careful that you are not constantly making changes to your site and products simply because one person emailed and said they would buy your membership “if it had XYZ.” In the software business, it’s called “feature creep” and even large companies have taken big losses because they could never complete a project because new items were constantly being added to the list of what the software needed to do.

The same can happen with your website. You think to yourself that you’d get more customers if you offered “X.” And then just think how many more customers you’d get if you offered “Y.” And if you could only get “Z” finished, you’d really be rocking!

Yet you don’t even have A, B or C done. Or, A, B, and C ARE done, but you haven’t come anywhere close to saturating the market.

Whenever I find this happening to me, it’s usually because I don’t want to face some other issue I’m having with the product or site. I’m anxious about getting something done and instead I avoid the issue altogether by working on a product that I haven’t even determined if there is a market for it. The trick for me is to step back and realize what I’m doing – and re-focus on what really needs to be done.

All this is to say that it’s easy for membership site owners and paid content site owners to constantly chase your tail in an effort to please everyone who emails you with a request or promise to buy if you include a specific feature. Our experience has been that when we have actually added the feature or piece of content, that person who asked is no where to be found and never actually bought the product or became a member anyway.

Focus on selling the heck out of what you already have before you move on to something else. You’ll make more money and save yourself a whole lot of time.

email marketing, selling content online creating content for sale

In a previous video series we produced (How to Start a Membership Site: Part 1 and Part 2), we outlined our sales funnel and how we sold memberships by offering a special discount to potential subscribers.

We’ve done a bunch of tests and tweaks to that overall idea over the past year and we’ve settled on a sales funnel system that is working really well and driving daily sign ups for our membership sites. I’ll use our flagship membership site, Trader Interviews, as our example for today.

Our membership pricing for Trader Interviews is as follows:

- $39 per month: this membership only includes the four most recent interviews and all new interviews going forward for as long as they are a member
- $399 per year: this membership includes the entire “vault library” which is every interview we’ve ever done plus all new interviews added to the site for the coming year
- $999 for Lifetime: this membership includes our entire “vault library” and access to the site for life.

The Lifetime Membership is our most popular membership because in the online trading industry it is less expensive than many trading courses (which can range from $2,500 – $5,000) and offers the member access forever. Many people have said they simply didn’t want to have to worry about being rushed to listen to all the interviews and didn’t want to have to worry about a recurring membership.

But this industry is also very fickle. Lots of people come in and out quickly because either a neighbor told them “trading stocks is easy” or some crazy infomercial told them they could make “$42,455 in 7 days with this system!” – neither of which is true. So we get quite a few $39 monthly memberships who stay, on average, about 6 months (which is a long time in that industry, believe it or not).

Doing the math, you can see that $39 x 6 = $234. Obviously if we can make the Annual or Lifetime membership more attractive to a prospective member, that’s better for us. It’s also better for the member, because trading takes time to learn, like anything else.

Initially we started offering periodic “1/2 price” sales of the Lifetime Membership to our list and on the site. For a few days every other month we lowered the price to $499 for a Lifetime Membership. The response was great because it now made the Lifetime Membership very attractive when compared to the Annual membership which was just $100 less. But the downside would be that longtime list subscribers got used to seeing a sale happen every other month, and therefore would often wait two months to sign up. The sign ups during the sale were great, but dropped off considerably in between.

Also, new list subscribers wouldn’t be offered our Annual Membership at the discounted price for up to two months. That’s not ideal either, because a very excited new subscriber’s interest level may have waned by that time.

So we set up a system whereby every new email subscriber was offered a discounted price for a very short time. We started a sale countdown clock the moment they got their first email that ended in 5 days. Some people took the offer for the discounted Lifetime Membership, but many did not. We just weren’t giving them enough time to decide if they like the service. Why would they sign up for a Lifetime Membership when they just walked in the door? We were rushing them to make a decision and it didn’t work.

After months of testing, we realized that our “sweet spot” for signing up for a Lifetime Membership was after two weeks of getting our follow-up emails. After two weeks, email subscribers were either ready to make a decision or were probably never going to join our service. Perhaps it wasn’t for them – and that’s OK – we could monetize them down the road with affiliate offers to other trading services that would be a better fit for them.

Over the past few months we’ve improved the system and found what we think is the ideal method. It isn’t perfect and I’m sure we’ll continue to make small tweaks, but this is how to we do it:

When someone joins our email list, they come into our Aweber follow-up sequence. They get a free interview (one of our best) plus some bonus material so we can show them right up front how great the content is. Then over the next two weeks we email them almost daily with pure content. Videos, articles, and podcasts that are just great educational pieces. It looks like this:

We may allude to the membership options in these emails, but it is very subtle. The idea is to just blow them away with the quality of the content we offer.

After two weeks, Follow-up email #10 says (in so many words), “We hope you’ve enjoyed all the trading videos, audio interviews and articles we’ve sent. If you liked those, you’re going to love what members get here at the site.” It’s a full-blown sales pitch for membership.

When they click on that link, it starts a custom countdown clock that gives them a 1/2 price sale for a Lifetime Membership that expires in 4 days. It’s a true sale – if they miss it there’s no going back. The price goes back up to $999 and they are out of luck. You have to keep that integrity if people are going to believe that a sale really is a sale. Don’t go down that slimy route of automatically refreshing countdown clocks and fake sales. People are wise to that these days.

Here’s what ours looks like:

The next two emails after that are also pure sales pitches. We want to really drive home the benefits of joining and remind them that the sale is ending soon. Remember, we’ve given them two weeks of freebies and great content. If they get upset because after that 3 emails in a row are pitching them membership, they’re never going to join anyway and so if they unsubscribe that’s perfectly fine with us. In fact we’d rather they do so – I’d rather not waste their time and vice-versa.

This system has worked marvelously and Lifetime Memberships outsell all others by about 3 to 1. Every new subscriber gets an opportunity to join at a discounted price and we don’t have to continually put the site on sale manually every few months. This all happens automatically (thanks to Emile’s programming).

The question now becomes, do we offer a second chance to non-members once or twice per year? We may consider doing that, but for now, we want prospective members to know that they have basically one chance to join at 1/2 price. It creates the urgency we know all buyers need to make a decision but ensures that every new subscriber gets pitched at just the right time within the sales process when they are still excited and have learned enough about you to know whether the service is to their liking.

Offer it too soon and prospective members won’t feel like they know about you to make a decision. Offer it too late (after 30 days on your list, for example) and they may get used to all the free stuff you give them and decide they are happy with just the freebies.

This post is already long enough and there are a lot of nuances I could discuss but you’d be here all weekend reading. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

email marketing, membership pricing, subscription pricing selling lifetime memberships