Email Broadcasts

some people mail daily

some wekly

always monetize your mailings

Not sure about ALWAYS monetizing but Always link back to site.

My thinking was summarizing or consolidating the latest news on my site and sending the headlines in an email.

Also know to test, test and test.

Thanks for your reply

I use auto responders, have moved away from a newsletter as it doesn't vibe with my brand. Focus on sharing value as frequently as possible, push your limits, and rock it out!

E-mail marketing is a whole subject in and of itself. There's both art and science to it and it helps to have a system.

Essentially, you should be sending two types of e-mail: promotional and informational. Most e-mail you send should be a mix of both. However, for clarity, it helps to realize there are two types.

1. Helpful information

Often, people send an e-mail newsletter (aka "e-zine"). It can be a full-blown newsletter with multiple sections or it can be as simple as a tip of the week. Either way, it's primary purpose is to build a relationship with your subscribers by providing helpful and useful information. You're building trust and positioning yourself as a resource. This relationship is the core of your success.

And no, it doesn't have to be "breaking news." It can easily be just basic but useful information your audience would find helpful.

This can be in the form of:

1. tips
2. how-to tutorials
3. news
4. industry happenings
5. resources

...all related to your topic.

You can (and SHOULD) include some promotional info in the newsletter/tip/whatever. However, the emphasis will be be on providing useful information.

2. Promotions

Now that you're building a solid relationship, it's time to capitalize on it. Send out e-mails specifically and primarily designed to sell. As I said, there's an art to this and is best accomplished through a carefully crafted SEQUENCE of multiple e-mails which include a hard deadline for the offer.

It's NOT just a one-shot e-mail sent in a "spray and pray" fashion.

You'll see a lot of complaints here about getting on someone's list and being inundated and overwhelmed with "Buy my stuff! Buy my stuff" type of e-mails. That's because those marketers haven't 1) built a solid relationship by providing useful/helpful info first and 2) they don't create e-mail sequences which educate while they sell.

I've been on one marketer's list for over a year now and he sends out an e-mail almost every day. They're almost ALL sales e-mails and I never feel irritated or inundated. That is VERY rare in the IM space!

And it's because he creates sequences AND educates while he sells. I never feel like it's a "Buy my stuff! Buy my stuff" pitch. (It also helps that I like his style and personality. He's outgoing and fun, without being pushy.)

However, your promotional e-mails will never do very well unless you've built a solid relationship with your audience. And THAT is done with the e-zine.

See how they work together?

As for pre-programmed autoresponders vs. broadcast e-mails... It totally depends on what you're doing.

Program one or two -- or a short sequence -- of pre-written autoresponders to welcome your new subscribers.

Then send your e-zine and other promotional e-mails via broadcast, depending on your promotional schedule and what you're promoting at that time. Your audience needs to hear from you AT LEAST once a week. Too many other competitors are vying for your audience's attention. You need to capture their attention and create "top of mind" awareness for your products/services.

So a good rule of thumb is to send one e-zine/tip a week and one promotional sequence each week. Or do a promotion once every two weeks. But be sure to get your e-zine/tip out at least once a week.

Simple!

It's best to offer a low-priced introductory product in that initial sequence for a few reasons:

1. It sets the expectation that you WILL be pitching stuff for sale. Don't wait until Week 16 to suddenly ("Surprise!") pitch something for sale. It's jarring if you've trained them to expect nothing but freebies and you'll get a lot of complaints and unsubscribes.

2. You EXPECT them to buy. 'Nuff said.

3. You welcome them with some type of "new subscriber" special offer. However, "introductory" and "low-priced" are relative terms. If your primary offerings are priced around $100, you might offer something for $7 or $20. If your primary offerings are priced around $500 or $1,000, you might offer something for $47 or $97.

Just make sure it makes sense for your business and audience. If you're selling B2B info for around $1,000, your audience is going to "smell a scam" if you offer them something for $7. Pricing too low CAN hurt you in some cases.

Also, you MUST have price integrity with this. If you play games with prices and people can get it regularly or often at the "special" price, you'll sabotage your results with this.

4. An immediate, but low-priced offer helps break the "new customer" barrier. Once they've bought from you once and you delivered a good product/service AND a good experience, it will be MUCH easier for them to buy that $500 product from you.

If you need help crafting e-mail sequences that sell, check out Ben Adkins' Followup Master Plan (aka FUMP): Followup Master Plan

I have it, love it and highly recommend it. FUMP gives you complete e-mail sequences for common scenarios in IM:

1. Warming up and training brand new subscribers to buy from you almost immediately. Yay!

2. Reactivating your existing, "dead" list. (I've certainly let my own list go dormant -- Shame on me! -- and was very happy to see this.) Yay!

3. Selling local, offline services. Many people in the IM space are eager to sell their skills to local businesses. This sequence shows you exactly how to structure an e-mail sequence designed to drive foot traffic into a local business. Yay!

4. Training freebie seekers to buy. How many Warriors complain about building a list of people who apparently come only for the freebie but won't buy?? This sequence shows you exactly how to train those freebie seekers to buy. Yay!

And I can't remember the other one.

If you're selling physical products (like on eBay or Amazon) and competing with hundreds or thousands of people selling the exact same thing, check out "FUMP: eCommerce Edition": Followup Master Plan: eCommerce Edition

(Hint: he JUST released "FUMP: eCommerce Edition" yesterday and it's priced super-low. If you're even thinking about it, get it NOW! The price WILL go up. Ben has a lot of integrity with his prices and when a special price is over, it's OVER.)

In both editions, Ben talks about the psychology behind each scenario and sequence. So you not only have one complete campaign done for you for each scenario, you'll know the psychology and timing behind each so you can model them and write your own going forward.

Ben is the guy I was talking about earlier and he gets me with this stuff. I've bought several things from him in the past year.

If you only just get that initial sequence with the introductory offer programmed into your autoresponder and start getting some sales, you'll be a LOT more excited to go out and write articles and build your list because you'll KNOW exactly what to say to each new subscriber. And you'll know that if you get X subscribers, you'll make X sales.

Fun!

I've been tremendously impressed with what Ben does and how he does it. His e-mail training is truly some of the best stuff I've ever seen on the topic. And I've been around the IM space for a LONG time.

Hope that helps!

Michelle

Michelle,

Awesome! What a great answer to see first thing in the morning! I'm pretty sure I'll be reading your reply a few more times as I'm preparing some more emails or, Newsletters!

I will definitely be lookinh into Ben Adkins' offerings when I get home from work tonight.

I really appreciate the time you spent to leave a detailed answer to my question.

I can't wait to check out your recommendations, and your other posts now that I see you have some great insight to keeping your emails fresh and full of valuable information, as I get what your saying as I look forward to a couple of people's emails that I receive regularly.

Have a great day , Joe

Huge numbers of people do this.

I don't.

I think broadcasts are greatly inferior to scheduled autoresponder series emails. I think "not sending unnecessary broadcasts" is one of the very significant things that marketers can learn to do, toward maintaining the long-term value of their lists. I avoid broadcasts whenever possible, for a big variety of reasons.

The first and most important reason, for me, is ...

(i) Subscribers in many niches have told me in the past that they don't like "obvious broadcasts" because (a) they interrupt continuity, and (b) they make the sender look more like a marketer and less like a trusted provider of valuable information

But I have a few other reasons, too ...

(ii) It's very rare that I want everyone on a list to get the same information at the same time, regardless of how long they've been there and where they are in the series;

(iii) It interferes with "subscriber expectation". It's really important, when opting people in, to set their expectations, and tell them exactly what they're going to receive and when. This dramatically increases open-rates and click-through rates. Sending "broadcasts" makes that very difficult;

(iv) To me, it feels like "being in a hurry" and "aiming for quick sales" - exactly the things I like to avoid, because I earn far more in the long run by avoiding that, and by having subscribers who trust and respect the fact that I avoid that.

For me, the key concept is: interrupting continuity with an obvious promotion of something is really a much bigger deal than many people realise.

It makes you look desperate to sell, and to many subscribers, understandably, that comes across very negatively and ruins your credibility and their trust.

In my opinion, the people who imagine that isn't a big deal are typically those to whom open-rates of about 20% are acceptable (:p :rolleyes, perhaps partly because they have little awareness of customer perception of - for example - passing off a commissionable product-launch as "news". (In other words, not being aware of your customers' perspective very much at all!).

People can easily tell this from whether the continuity of the process has been interrupted, i.e. whether it matches what you told them at the end of the previous message to be "watching out for in the next message, in 5 days' time", or whatever. This is a fundamental part of expectation-setting and continuity-maintenance.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post6123982

Some marketers mail everyday.

Some mail every 2 days.

Some mail 2-3 times per week.

I see a lot of very successful internet marketers who mail out everyday without stop so something is working for them.

After my autoresponder sequence is over (about 3 weeks of daily tips) I mail my lists 2 times a week on average - one time with a promotion, the other time with a new helpful blog post.
I know that even some of the top marketers are emailing daily and 100% promotions, which is something that I'm not enjoying while being on their lists but I guess everyone has a different style.
My style works for me
Cheers!
Art

Email marketing... Possibly the hardest topic to talk about.
When to email, what to send out, when to sell, how to build relationship..

These questions will never be answered with a right or wrong answer. You need to get a goal for the purpose of building your list first then break it down. For example, if you opt into those so called "Guru's list", you will find that you will receive emails everyday with subject lines forcing you to open. Such as Your paypal has been cancelled.

On the other hand, most bloggers will send their subscribers back to their website to build that relationship etc.

What I'm trying to say is, there is never a right or wrong answer to email marketing. It all depends on what your goal is.

I have email series' setup that do all my up-selling for me. Of course I have many products in another niche and my preloaded emails lead them through many funnels giving good value in their own right which naturally leads the read to the next logical step which is to purchase the next product if they need the solution.

I also send broadcast emails when I release a new product and sometimes I run a huge 4-day sale which really kicks up the sales volume. (Learned that one from Frank Kern)

Like others have said, there is no right or wrong answer here - it depends on what your goals are. For me, the majority of my sales come from my autoresponder messages. It's all automated so I just have to concentrate on buying traffic and testing out new and interesting angles to get more subscribers. Everything else is pretty much hands free until I want to create a new product.

Sure, I sometimes outsource this process but I also like the creation process and will create my own products as well. I have a pretty slick product creation system going so it only takes me a week at most to create new products.

Thanks Mike,

That seems to be a key also, LOGICAL STEPS. A lot must be lost if your all over the place with your sequence.





Hehehe

That sounds like an expensive disease with the major symptom being a leakage of dollars from the pockets.

Some of the regular emails I receive from a couple of lists I'm on make it look so easy.

To be able to engage the reader with dozens of PRE-loaded messages and keep their attention, add value AND make sure it is not something that they can guess what will be coming next so that they cannot do a search for the rest of what the series of messages will reveal, requires a really true skill-set. Whether it comes natural or not, it's a skill.

This is just part of the hard work involved in keeping people on your list for a long time and actually begging you to sell them your next product.

Kudos to the writers who can do that!

You need to research properly before scheduling an email Broadcast that's what email marketing is all about try to interact with different email marketers on different online platforms. Apart from forums you can interact with bloggers who write in email marketing niche also there are allot of blue prints available on the internet which can benefit you.

Thanks Bobby,

I like to get on their lists and see for myself. You can usually pick up a thing or 2 this way but I think I mostly pick up more of what I don't want to do than what I should or want to do.

Thanks for the reply John.

I'm a little confused because it sounds like 3 lists: A starter list, a main list and a newsletter.

I must have read your reply 10 times but can't seem to grasp it. What am I missing?

I must be missing something obvious.

Joe

Once your series of autoresponder emails end, you will naturally start with broadcast emails which will be more like a newsletter or update email sent to everyone on that list. If you don't use this method, then you would simply stop communicating with everyone on that list.

Thanks Again John,

I understand it now and I appreciate the further explanation of it.

Joe