Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Last week I mentioned we were changing our first email to all our lists to be more direct about the fact that yes, we will be offering paid products occasionally along with our free tips, tricks and content.

Our sense is that while many people understand that joining a list means an occasional sale pitch for the products of the website owner or their partners, many do not – or at least appreciate a direct statement to that effect in the beginning.

In part, the emails now say something similar to this:

Here it is: we’re going to be emailing you ideas and tricks we use but never publish on our blog. And we’ll explain it in a step-by-step way that you’ll be able to understand and use them on your own website right away to make some coin (or euros, pounds, dollars, pesos, etc.).

That’s what makes our list so valuable to subscribers.

But we’re also going to introduce you to products and services we think are top notch and worthy of your attention and dollars – things we’ve bought ourselves.

In other words, we’re going to ask you to buy stuff too.

So if capitalism, grandma’s apple pie, or marketing offends you, you’ll want to find that unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email and put yourself out of your misery right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait….

So are we seeing more people click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of that email? The answer is YES. Not a lot more, but before we implemented the more direct text, very few unsubscribed after the first email. But, interestingly yet not surprisingly, less people are unusbscribing, percentage-wise, on the first sales pitch email that comes around email 6. This is across the board on all our sites.

So we’re just getting rid of non-buyers sooner in the follow-up chain. Which is A-OK by us. If there is no chance they are ever going to buy something then the sooner they are off the list, the better.

This is all based on just 6 days worth of data, but I think it’s encouraging and wanted to update you.

email marketing, list building email marketing

We’ve wanted to test something for about a year. Internet marketing “gurus” have done it for years but I’ve always been hesitant. Their classes, podcasts, courses and seminars have all said it’s OK, but I’ve never been quite comfortable with it…until last week.

It was the same “uncomfortableness” we felt when we started emailing our list every day. We thought our entire list would unsubscribe within a week. It actually grew and so did our sales.

So when I was ready to hit the send button for the second time in a single day, I wasn’t sure what would happen. But we couldn’t stand it any longer. We had to know what would happen when our list received two emails from us in a single day. What happened was we made an extra $2,000.

Last week we ran a promotion to a group of just over 1,000 new email list subscribers who had never been offered a special Lifetime Membership to one of our interview sites. We have 21 emails in our autoresponder follow-up series and we usually wait until after that series has completed to offer a special membership. But I was dying to know what would happen if we made those offers while they were still receiving freebie content at the same time.

So all of the 1,000 subscribers received the first email special offer on a day when we don’t send a follow-up email. Aweber allows us to not send follow-up emails on certain days. For us those days are usually Tuesdays and Thursdays so that we can send offers on those days. But Fridays they do get a follow-up email. But we purposely had the special membership offer expire at 5:00 pm Pacific on Friday.

Most of our follow-up emails go out between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm Pacific time. That week, the schedule looked like this:

Monday: Autresponder email
Tuesday: First email about special offer
Wednesday: Autoresponder email
Thursday: Second email about special offer
Friday: Autoresponder email in morning / Special offer expiration email in afternoon
(afternoon sales pitch email sent 2 hours prior to deadline)

Being the testing fools, we tracked the links in each special offer email separately. The special offer email in the afternoon brought in an additional 4 orders at $499 that we probably wouldn’t have received otherwise. Now those orders could have been people who were going to order before the deadline anyway and just clicked the link in that email because it was the latest. But typically we don’t get a rush of orders in the last few hours. One or two, maybe.

But my sense is that at those were people who were reminded at the right time and decided to buy because of the urgency present in that last email. Even if we assume only two of them were buyers that would not have purchased otherwise, that’s an extra $1,000 in our pocket on a Friday afternoon.

(By the way, Friday is a crummy day to expire an offer – I don’t recommend it. We did it because we wanted to test the consequences of emailing twice to a segment of our list, but it would have been better to have the deadline mid-week.)

Unsubscribes were in line with the previous week, where we had a normal schedule and no more than one email per day.

Lesson learned: Emailing twice in one day, when we had an impending deadline that day, resulted in additional sales and dollars.

What we didn’t test, of course, was sending two sales-pitch emails in a single day. In our case, it was one freebie content email and one sales pitch email. Perhaps two sales pitch emails for the same product in one day will result in more unsubscribes. Even if it does, I’d be OK with that. That’s just people qualifying themselves off the list who aren’t interested in buying.

One more thing on our list to test. We’ll keep you updated.

But for now, emailing twice on the day the special offer expires will be added to our standard procedure list.

email marketing, selling content online email marketing

I’ve mentioned several times at MemberCon about the fact that when we turned our attention to growing an email list of buyers and action-takers rather than just subscribers, our revenue increased dramatically. The day we stopped worrying about every unsubscribe and decided that it was a good thing that people were taking themselves off our list because it kept our conversions high, was quite liberating.

I watch our email signups very closely, obsessively charting the rise and fall of our list numbers on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis. The faster we can clean the list of freebie-hounds, email accounts people never check and general dead-weight, the better off we are. It means our list may not grow as quickly as others, but I know the people that do stay subscribed are passionate and hungry for the information we provide.

Watching the list is also a good reminder of that fact that sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to keep everyone subscribed. I saw a perfect example today in the logs.

The very first email we send out on all of our membership or content sites is pure content – no pitch, no call to action and not even a hint that we’re going to try to sell them something down the road. It’s simply a high-value chunk of information as a thanks for checking us out.

The screenshot is below, followed by the explanation:

The subscriber:

1. Signed up to receive the free piece of content at 12:33 pm
2. Clicked the double opt-in confirm link at: 12:36 pm
3. Unsubscribed at 12:43 pm

Exactly 10 minutes from sign-up to unsubscribe (6 minutes really – from the confirm click is a better guage). The piece of content was an audio file, 45 minutes in length.

Now, this isn’t usual. It’s extraordinarily quick in terms of deciding that we weren’t worth his/her time. But it’s a good lesson that:

a) people can decide very quickly whether or not they value what you have – so what you send them even for free better be great
b) there are a million other reasons that they unsubscribe and it’s not always about the quality of your content

So don’t take it personally. I don’t (anymore). I simply am thankful for the fact that I can spend more time catering to those who truly want the content and less time (preferably NO time) on those that don’t.

building your list, email marketing email marketing, online marketing

One of the best ways we’ve found to build traffic and an email list is to partner with websites that have the audience you want to capture. The larger we grow, the more people approach us to do the same thing. It is a fantastic way to grow your list with the right type of people (buyers) and get a spike in traffic at the same time.

But (there’s always a “but”), trades or barters are fraught with danger. You want to make sure the partnership is fair and you get a similar amount of new subscribers and traffic. Your email list is your money-maker and should never be traded lightly.

Follow this short checklist with every marketing barter and you’ll stay out of trouble. Our policy is that my partners have to agree to all of these points or no deal.

1. NEVER actually send your list to anyone else. Besides being a major breach of your subscribers’ trust, your list is sure to get out into the wild and lose value immediately as it gets passed around to all your competitors. Instead, you will be sending a message to your own list on their behalf through your own email system. They never actually get to see the list.

2. Write the email yourself in your own voice. Sometimes the partner site will want to provide specific html code for their email. That’s a deal-breaker for me – and it won’t work for them anyway. “We’ve tested this email and it works great!” they’ll say. Well they haven’t tested it with my list and I know what works. If you’ve been sending emails written in your own voice for months and then hit them with some big block of graphics, two things will happen. It will get very little response and you’ll get lots of unsubscribes. Neither is a happy thing.

Instead, offer to take a list of bullet points they provide and work it into your own email that matches the voice, relevancy and length your list is accustomed to getting. Your partner will get a much better response rate and your unsubs will remain at the normal rate.

3. Match dedicated email for dedicated email. This means if I send a dedicated message to my list, my partner will do the same. We don’t send newsletters with lots of links to lots of different pages so we’re not able to do newsletter mentions for newsletter mentions. Newsletter mentions are crap anyway and never result in traffic.

I’m still kicking myself for not following this rule early on. We were offered a mention in a newsletter that supposedly went to 129,000 subscribers in exchange for two dedicated emails to our list of 5,000. Surely, I thought, 129,000 subscribers would result in some clicks! Our two dedicated emails to our list resulted in 624 clicks to their site. Our newsletter mention in their email resulted in exactly 26 clicks. We got ripped off.

4. Check out the landing page your subscribers will be sent to. We’ve turned down several trades simply because I didn’t like the page they were sending my subscribers to. It’s not that they were offensive or irrelevant. It’s that they didn’t have a strong call to action. I want my partner to get a great response rate, but actually, that’s not my biggest concern. As we’ve mentioned many times, we train our list to take action when they receive an email. If they are taken to a page that doesn’t get them to take action, they are less likely to take action the next time I email them even though it is an email about something completely unrelated to the previous email. It’s a scientific fact. OK, well not scientific, but I know it to be true. We’ve monitored response rates from email to email and those with unexciting landing pages previously had lower response rates for the next message. Meaning, we’ve had to re-train the list again to take action.

This leads us to the most important consideration…

4. Trade on quality of list – not pure numbers. Our lists, because of the way we develop them, grow them, train them and get rid of non-action-takers quickly, are AWESOME. Sorry to brag, but it’s true. I would put the responsiveness of my 5,000 against most lists of 50,000 or more any day. But most people don’t work their lists like we do. We have lists of buyers, not subscribers. So rarely will I trade lists on straight numbers. This ruffles feathers occasionally but tough donuts.

Our lists are GOLD and if we do a trade with you, you’re going to get some unbelievable response rates and I want the same from my partner lists. Unless I know how a partner site has developed their list and has the same philosophy as we do about it, we’ll normally need them to mail to at least 25,000 people to get similar conversion percentages.

Sometimes its hard to discuss this one without sounding like, “Your list sucks and ours rules!” but it has to be done. In the end, they are believers and are more than happy to trade again (usually sooner than we are).

building your list, site marketing email marketing, email newsletters

When I interviewed Paul Colligan a while back, I asked him of all the tools out there to sell online content, what was working best? Without hesitation, he said EMAIL.

I was a bit shocked. Old-fashioned, “been around forever”, everyone-knows-how-to-use-it email? I thought surely RSS, Facebook, Twitter or some other form of social networking had taken over. After all, that’s all anyone talks about it seems. Paul knows what he’s talking about, but I’m one of those types that has to see it for myself to believe it.

So over the past few months Emile and I have been conducting our own experiments to see what converts to sales best.

Paul was right. As in BIG TIME right.

It’s convinced us that building our email list is the single-most important use of our resources. We do spend a lot of time on our website, but all of that time lately has been spent figuring out how to make our website build our email list faster.

If you’re selling anything online or simply want attention for something you are doing online, trust me on this. Build your email list and mail to it at least every other day.

You’ll get the response you are looking for.

We’re just starting to work on a way to build in daily urgency to buy with our email list. More on that later…

building your list, email marketing building your email list, email marketing, internet marketing, Paul Colligan