In past articles we’ve talked about the 8-step process and the long- term, 12-month, follow up. These two processes will bring you more sales than you can ever imagine!
The 8-step process forces people to take action—they have to do it now; they can’t rest on it. It’s a countdown that instills the need to take action before it’s to late. If your product is good they will thank you for the little push you gave them with the 8-step process. If they’re not ready yet, you just keep yourself in front of them over the course of the next year.
So we have two distinct sides, the short-term side which is the eight- step follow-up and the long-term side which is the follow-up for the rest of the year. Both are equally important and both should be implemented in your marketing efforts.
Automation is the secret to the success of this system; it’s what makes this work and doable. You set it up once and then forget about it.
Here’s another way we put automation to work in my companies. It’s very similar to my eight-step process.
We used this system for our existing products. We had enough existing products that we could put a different product on the system every month all year long. For this method, we used a seven-day time-frame because it’s easier to set up when you’re doing it one year in advance.
We write all the emails in advance and started loading them into the autoresponder in December and finished up in January. Here’s how it worked.
We set up the autoresponder so the email for the first product went out on the first Tuesday of January. Here’s the schedule we used.
Email #1: Tuesday morning – “Hey did You See This Product” (or something similar)
Email #2: Wednesday – “Did you see yesterday’s email”
Email #3: Friday – “Big Benefit and/or testimonial”
Email #4: Sunday – “Big Benefit and/or testimonial”
Email #5: Monday – “Don’t Miss Out On This” or “You May Not See This Again” (or somethi ng like that) NOTE: We never said last chance or this is going away or anything like that.
The next month, on the first Tuesday, we’d do it again with a different product. We did this, with a different product each month…just one week of promotion at the beginning of the month. Did it have to start on the first Tuesday of the month? No…but it was a LOT easier to set up when we used a pattern like that.
Remember, ALL these were written in advance by our staff and loaded into the autoresponder at the beginning of the year and were not touched or looked at again for another 12 months.
Who were these emails sent to? To everyone on our lists!
Now here’s where it gets interesting… we saw a bump in sales every month after we sent out the sequence.
Sometimes it was only a few dollars but day after day we saw a sale or two. In our best month we saw something like an extra $10,000 in sales attributed to this simple system. Think about it…this was up to
$10,000 in extra sales FROM OUR EXISTING LIST! …and, best of all we didn’t even have to think about it because it was totally automated.
Remember, this was above and beyond all of our other mailings. These emails promoted existing products that people may have forgotten we had or new people on our list never even knew we had.
Let’s say, for example, that you started your business in 2014. You operate for a few years adding new products which you do a good job of promoting. Time flies by and it’s now 2019. You do a launch and promote a new product using the eight-step process (explained in previous Traces issues) and you add a bunch of new customers. Congratulations, you did good! You’ll now include these people on your mailings as you promote new products. BUT…
What about all the GREAT Products you’ve added over the past five years. Many of them are still relevant and needed by your new customers, but they don’t know about them. You may think they know all about you and about your existing line of fine products, but, as I’ve said before, they don’t!!! I hate to be the one to dish out a dose of reality…but you’re just not that important to them.
What this system does is introduce your existing products to your new customers. It also re-introduces your existing products to your EXISTING customers who may have forgotten about them. Remember, you’re not so important that they remember you and all of your products.
What it all boils down to is you’re trying to maximize the revenue you make from your list. You spend a lot of time and money building that list. You can’t afford to just make money off it once; you need to keep making money off it.
You can build a huge list, that’s actually quit easy, but if you’re not maximizing the potential of the list, you are losing out. You are leaving money on the table. In fact, over the long run you could be missing out on up to 90% of the profit potential of that list just because you’re not following up with them on a consistent basis and with a systematic process.
The system is the secret. You just don’t have the time to do this on a manual basis. If you tried, you’d soon start missing mailings and get things mixed up. By automating it, you can spend your time creating new products, marketing those products and running your business.
Give it a try. Just set some time aside (or better yet, have someone else do it for you) and write up a five-day sequence for each of your products and get it set up in your autoresponder.
Let me know how it works out for you!
