Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

In the days of direct mail, the “P.S.” text was the big money-maker secret. Add a P.S. at the bottom of your letter underneath the signature and readers will immediately jump to the bottom to read it and order whatever you were selling. That was the thought, anyway. And for years it worked with sales letter delivered by your friendly postal worker.

When the long online sales page came along, for some reason that rationale stuck and all internet marketers were told the P.S. and P.P.S and even the P.P.P.S. were the money-makers.

I didn’t believe it. And we’ve been testing that notion ever since.

A few years ago we tried long sales pages to sell everything from E-books to physical books and we tried all kinds of versions of postscripts. The trouble is, people don’t handle a physical letter the same way they read an online sales page. When you open a physical letter, it’s easy to drop your eyes down to the bottom. But on a web page (or in an email), when was the last time you went to a page and quickly scrolled down so you could read the postscripts? I don’t, and it turns neither does anyone else. When we put separate tracking links for every link in the email or web page, the postscript consistently rank at the bottom for click-through. As in, 2% or less for all clicks in the message.

The internet marketing urban legend of the P.S. is, well, BS.

BUT, we have found a new job for the poor P.S. We started using the P.S. to simply tell the reader what was coming next. For example, in an email where we talked about a series of upcoming interviews that were available for pre-order, a simple P.S. at the bottom that said, “Stay tuned – we’re putting the finishing touches on a new video entitled, “The 20 Habits of Wealthy Traders.” You’ll see it in your inbox in the next day or two.”

It was a bit of a fluke actually. It was late at night, I was tired, and couldn’t think of anything more to say about the paid interview series. I was behind on the video that I had promised and decided to mention it there.

It was the lowest number of unsubscribes in a pitch email we’d had in a long time. No links, no “last chance” pitch – just a promo for what was coming next.

So, after that, every email in our auto-responder chain got a P.S. makeover that included a mention of what was to come in the next email. Our unsubscribes continue to trend lower. It works well on all of the emails, but has done an especially great job of reducing unsubscribes on emails where we are “pitching to sell” more than normal free content emails.

It makes perfect sense, of course. Radio and TV have been doing it forever to keep us watching through the commercials. Tease them about the value of what’s to come and people stick around.

A simple and effective use of the email postscript. Welcome to your new job postscript – email subscriber retention – and thanks for all your years of service. We’re not ready to retire you yet.

P.S. There are some awesome blog posts coming this week. We’re going to reveal some of the best content sales tricks we learned in the past few months.

Do you have any tips or tricks for email subscriber retention? Let us know in the comments.

building your list, email marketing email subscriber retention, P.S. tricks