I learned this from Mark Widawer back in 2006 and I’ve been using it ever since.
There are 3 parts to building your email autoresponder list.
And inside each email there is a variation of AIDA (the 4 parts) or PAS to make sure those emails sell.
I’ll explain these shortly if you don’t know.
If you get any of them wrong, your list won’t work and your emails won’t sell.
Here’s the 3 things I test when my list isn’t growing:
- The Offer – What are you going to offer your visitors in exchange for their email address and name?
- The Content – This includes not only fulfilling the original promise of your offer above, but also the follow up emails that reinforce the offers use, its value, and encourage the reader to buy your product.
- The Form – You’ll need to create an optin form for people to fill out on your landing page.
Today, I want to only cover the offer.
A great offer is the VERY FIRST thing your potential new subscriber or follower will see…
A great place to test your offers is on twitter. This is what I do to this day. I tweet an offer that requires an action on your part to receive it.
This shows me that you have interest in that offer. So it passes the test. From there, I make the content of that offer the best quality I can and deliver it.
Now in order to craft the best offer, follow these tips.
The Offer – Your Bait For The Fishies
You probably don’t want a ton of spam in your inbox. Neither do your potential newsletter readers.
So it follows that you’ve got to give people something in exchange for their name and email address that is valuable enough for them to risk giving you their email address.
The thing you give them is the bait. Use the right bait for the fish you’re trying to catch.
You’ll also hear these offers called Ethical Bribes or Lead Magnets.
But I’m from a small fishing village so BAIT it is.
So let’s discuss what you’ll offer as your bait.
I write a lot of emails in the health and fitness niche. There are a lot of people like me selling fitness products. Their products teach you how to lose fat, gain muscle, become more athletic, or win your first bodybuilding contest.
When they want to get newsletter subscribers they make the mistake of offering bland tasting bait like “Fitness tips.”
Boring AND a bad idea.
Once your reader gets his fitness tips, they’re going to believe one or two things:
The information had little value. These tips didn’t help me, and if this stuff didn’t help, why should I expect that the product this guy is selling will be any better?
Or. . .
Wow, those tips were great. My “Fitness/fat loss/muscle gain” is better than ever. I guess I don’t need that guys paid stuff.”
But, what you really want the person to think is:
“The stuff I got for free was great, so the rest of the stuff I can buy must be better!”
But that’s not going to happen as I’ve shown above.
That is, unless you carefully craft your promise and your content.
Let’s do better.
Build your offer around one of these 3 ideas:
1) Offer something that your reader can use outside your product’s service but that is related. If you’re offering coaching on how to become faster, leaner and stronger for Rugby, then a good offer is a free 10-step pre-game checklist for turning on the winners mindset.
2) Offer something that your client can use concurrent with using your product. If you are selling an ebook called Simple Muscle Building Secrets No One Told You About (I do), then offer a list of the places with the lowest prices on mass building supplements online or the top ten supplements you suggest.
3) Offer something that demonstrates and emphasizes the need for your product. An example of that would be a mini-course on why developing hamstring strength increases performance and decreases time-off injuries along with the mandatory strength level needed to attain these traits…on your website where you sell an ebook about how to double your hamstring strength in 90 days.
Now, if you MUST send out some “tips”, make it a specific offer for a finite number of tips that accomplish a certain task. Let’s go back to the fitness example, and let’s assume your ebook is all about becoming more athletic over 40 years of age.
Your autoresponder “Bait” might read something like this:
“Discover my three secrets for how to fix knee pain and get your full squat back.”
The point here is that the reader’s expectations are that they’ll learn one specific technique, and this technique will serve as a good example of the quality of the rest of your product.
The reader gets a quick win and now trusts your instruction for further goals.
Win/win
See the difference?
I’ll share the 2nd and 3rd keys to building your email list in the next article and/or my newsletter
I’ve also created a free 7-day e-course called: How To Write Emails That Sell
Because there are three parts to BUILDING your email list AND 4 parts to writing emails that SELL.
Get all the pieces of the puzzle for FREE in the 7 day e-course here: https://RaymondBurton.com