We’ve talked about the power of email marketing and how an effective campaign can generate thousands of leads. However, you need to make sure you know the fundamentals of email marketing so your follow-ups will resonate with your readers. One of the biggest mistakes I hear my clients making is they forget who their subscribers are and what I’m talking about is them being “human beings”. When you get caught up in blogging and start making a little bit of money, it’s easy to start thinking of them as a cause for profit. You think they are great to sell products to and forget the true purpose of your mission. The less you think of them as a means of profit, the better you’ll be able to engage them through content and email marketing.
Today, I’d like to take some time and focus on a quick lesson I learned when trying my luck with ClickBank.com. I went from generating enormous sales per month to pretty much going stagnant within days. Here’s why and what you can learn from my lesson.
The Foundation
Several years back, I was promoting several ClickBank.com products through a website that I no longer have. The idea was pretty simple, which was to review different “online money making” products and sell them, earning a commission. I utilized organic traffic, banner advertising, and other PPC marketing methods to generate traffic. To achieve a higher ROI, I would capture the user email addresses and throughout the week, send them high value content. By sending them valuable content in the money making niche, I was able to earn their trust and then convert them into buying customers later in a few weeks. Here’s what happened…
I was able to gather 5,000 email subscribers in 4 months and through a series of follow-ups, earned a decent amount of money. However, I started to get lazy as time went on because I became greedy and forgot the main purpose of my website. Here’s what I mean…
The Mistake
Once I started to see some money coming in from my follow-up sequence, I began to cut the process even shorter. Instead of sending 12 emails then selling my product, I cut the entire process into ¼, only sending 4 emails, trying to achieve the same results. My mission was to cut the time and earn more money quickly, which completely backed fired because the sales slowly started to decline. As I’ve recommended with every blogger, I decided to test out a few different things, trying to find the cause. Here’s the things I looked for:
- Traffic flow
- Product popularity
- Competition
- Organic traffic
- Paid traffic
- Landing page
All those factors seem to be steady, but the sales kept dropping over several weeks. Then I decided to knock the follow-up sequence back up and the sales increased gradually over time. Why?
Here’s the lesson I learned…
The Lesson
The lesson took a while for me to learn, but is something I’d be preaching all along. You have to remember your subscribers are “human” and they have come to you for value. When I started to cut the email follow-up sequence down, I decreased the ultimate value they received from my messages. I went from sending them 12 valuable messages to only 4, which was a big hit in the end. I cut the sequence down to make conversions quickly, defining my customers as “conversions” and NOT humans requiring value.
No matter how large your email subscription list becomes, you have to always provide value to achieve your bottom line. The minute you forget they’re human, you stop seeing the bigger picture, which is they have a common problem and need help. This is what happened to me when I stopped providing them “12” pieces of awesome content in my follow-up to build a bond with them. So,
To succeed with email marketing, always consider your subscribers as “human” instead of a way to make money. I know it’s hard, sometimes people are an “email” and not physically present, but it’s something you should work hard at coding into your mentality.