Building your email follow-up engine Course Overview: Your email followup engine is the set of automated email campaigns (aka autoresponders ) that power your business on autopilot. You ve probably heard all about how important it is to get people to subscribe to your email list. But, then what? You may also know that almost all email list providers provide an autoresponder for your lists. It is that pre-written set of emails that you set up and are sent out automatically on a schedule you specify. But, what do you include in those messages? Page 1 of 46
Which messages go on your different email lists? How do you balance out automated messages versus one-time messages? Sales versus value? This training will walk you through how to build your own Email Followup Engine. This will show you how to build email campaigns that power the business model shown in the Blog Monetization Model. Introduction To This Action Plan We all know that your email list is a pretty fundamental component to how your online business works. But what do you DO with it? What do you send them? How often? That s what we ll be talking about in this Action Plan. See, we all know that you could manually email your whole list whenever you have something to say. Problem is That s very unstrategic. It is like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole sometimes. It isn t automated, which means you won t be building an asset that can work for you while you sleep. The most effective email marketing strategy is going to be a hybrid of both real time emails and automated emails. That AUTOMATED component of your email marketing machine is what will allow your business to literally operate 24/7. Done right, it can make sales for you while you do nothing. It is the blood flow of the business machine which sits behind your blog. It is what does the heavy lifting, so to speak. So, that s what we ll be building. Page 2 of 46
A Note On Email Content Swipe Files My goal here is to teach you how to fish not simply hand you the fish. It would be nice to get a bunch of swipe files with emails you can just copy/paste into your email system and run with. And, those things exist. In fact, some of the information I m going to be sharing with you in this AP is from a course I myself took a while back that did exactly that. But, there are two issues with it: I still had to modify the ever-loving hell out of everything because otherwise the context of the emails didn t fit or it would look like everybody else. I paid a hell of a lot more money for that course than you re paying right now (over $2K). So, I m not going to provide you with copy/paste emails. What I WILL give you is the concepts and the reasons for doing things that way you are able to craft your own emails. Copying others isn t the name of the game here, anyway. For some email sequences, I will share my own with you. You can use it as a baseline and a starting point. But, don t make the mistake of thinking that just because I did it a certain way that it is THE way to do it. You have to make it your own. It needs to be in your voice. And just because I did it one way doesn t mean it is the best way to do it. Let s continue How To Look At Multiple Lists Most blog owners treat all of their email subscribers exactly the same way. It kind of looks like this: Offer one lead magnet in the sidebar. Everybody gets the same thing. You send the same email to everybody. That s myopic. And quite frankly, it doesn t work as well as it used to. Page 3 of 46
The answer is segmentation. That s a fancy word which essentially means emailing people those things which are most relevant to them at the time. And you do that by constantly categorizing and grouping your subscribers into little buckets based on their actions. Truth is all your subscribers are NOT equal. Each person on your list has their own interests, their own frustrations, their own goals. So, talking to everybody the same exact way is, by its very nature, going to alienate many people. So, if we re going to place people into these little buckets based on their interest, how do you organize that? Well, if you re using an email list host which uses multiple email lists, then you re going to use each email list as a little bucket. Each list will have its own purpose with its own followup sequence. but, the WHOLE THING, including ALL your various email lists combined is effectively your list. So, in short: 1. Your email list is, in actuality, going to be split up into multiple lists. 2. Each list is going to be a little bucket you ve created based on actions your subscriber took. If you re using Aweber or MailChimp or some other multi-list setup like that, then your blog should have multiple email lists, not just one global newsletter list. Now, what do you then do with all these lists? We ll cover that in this Action Plan. How Most Bloggers Think About Their Email List In the last step, I made clear that you re going to have multiple lists inside your email list hosting account. But, let s also address another concept that most bloggers fall into the idea of what to send to your list. Most bloggers end up doing a couple of different things: 1. Emailing blog post updates, or a newsletter. Page 4 of 46
2. If they re a little more advanced, then they ll set up an ongoing autoresponder which usually simply highlights the most popular content over time. And there s nothing wrong with either of these things. The problem is it is incomplete. How do you interlace promotions into that? Do you just build in value and sales into the same autoresponder sequence? With a more developed followup machine, the issue is taken care of. Marketing campaigns will only be sent to people who take actions indicating they re ready for them. You won t waste time (or potentially harm your relationship) by sending promotions to things they re not interested in. So, in this Action Plan, I want to move you beyond the old, linear approach to email marketing. I want you to think beyond simply sending newsletters or blog post updates or dripping your best blog posts to them. A well designed followup machine is going to make sales AND provide value. It should do both. The 6 Types Of Email Followup I want to introduce you to the 6 Basic Types of Email Followup Campaigns. Now, first of all, this word "campaign", I want you to realize that it is interchangeable with the word "autoresponder", with the word "sequence"... Realize that we are referring to the same thing and that is simply a set of pre-written emails that is going to get delivered to somebody on a schedule that you specify. So we are referring all to the same thing here. And what we are going to be going over here are the 6 Different Kinds of Campaigns, generally speaking, that you will end up sending. Now, realize that you can use autoresponders for lots of different things. But generally, most kinds of autoresponders that you will use are going to be under one of this 6 categories; so let's go ahead and go through what they are. Welcome Sequence The first one is the Welcome Sequence. Now, the welcome sequence; it should be pretty clear right from the name exactly what it does... It welcomes a new person to the list. Page 5 of 46
So the way it is going to work is somebody is going to come in, they are going to opt-in to a lead magnet and they are going to be put on two different, essentially, lists at the same time. One is going to be this one; which we will get into in just a minute. The other is going to be a WELCOME. What the Welcome does is it is going to welcome them to the list, it is going to let them know what to expect, it is going to send them some of your best stuff basically to warm them up and really let them know that they are going to get some real value by being a subscriber. None of these is sales oriented. It is all about orienting them to what it is going to be like to be a subscriber of yours. And so, this is the kind of thing that is going to go on your General List. So I want to make something clear here, again... and by the time that you get done with this Action Plan, this will be clear; is that when somebody subscribes to the list, they are going to be put on one list for the Lead magnet itself; this is where you are going to give them the Lead magnet and where you are going to follow it up with a front-end offer. And they are also going to be put on another list which is the General List. So, yes... They are going to be put on 2 different lists at the same time. And with something like Aweber, you can use an Automation Rule to make that happen. You are basically saying, "If they are put on this list, put them on this list as well." And you do that by setting up a rule. And so, at the very beginning they are going to be receiving 2 different sequences at the same time; this one right here... This is where your Welcome will go. Now, by doing it this way, that also means that when somebody comes in later and opts in for another Lead magnet, then this rule is going to execute. But because Aweber is smart and MailChimp is doing the same thing, they are not going to deliver the sequence to them again because they are already on your General List. And that is exactly the way we want it to work. We only want people to receive the Welcome Sequence at the very beginning when they are a brand new person. If they opt in for something else later, but they are already on your list, obviously it wouldn't make any sense to send the Welcome Sequence again. Front-End Sales Sequence The next type of sequence is the Front-end Sales Sequence. The entire idea here is two things: One, you are going to deliver the Lead magnet that they have opted in for, the second purpose is you are going to present a Front-end Offer. So this is going to be that sequence that goes right after they opted in on a squeeze page of something like that and you are going to give them a lead magnet and then you are going to promote your front-end offer to them. Page 6 of 46
So what we are talking about is they opt-in here and they come down, they are going to see this page with your front-end offer and the sales sequence is "that" right there. That is the exact sequence that is going to be put on is that. And what it is going to do it is going to basically deliver the lead magnet they came in on and then it is going to begin re-stating the front-end offer. And it is going to only go out for maybe 2 or 3 days, something like that, to give them an opportunity to take this front-end offer. And if they don't buy the front-end offer, then you are going to stop. You are not going to keep sending them the same darn thing because that is going to be quite redundant. So that is the purpose of the Front-end Sales Sequence. Onboarding Sequence The Onboarding Sequence is designed to be delivered to people who have bought something from you and the main purpose of it is to get them really using the thing that they have purchased. Now this is especially important for membership sites because the biggest thing for membership sites is that you want that member to stick around for a little while. Now, the best way to get them to stick around for a little while is to get them really integrated in using the benefits of your membership site. So if you got a community, you want to make sure that they get in to the community and begin posting as soon as possible. You want them to get into your training and make sure they actually begin going through this. And you want to do this as soon as possible, after their initial purchase. And that is exactly what the Onboarding Sequence is designed to do. Now you can also have an Onboarding Sequence for downloadable; like ebook type products. It probably won't be as long, but the entire purpose of onboarding is just to get them actually consuming the thing that they bought because one thing we know is that they will not ever buy anything from you again if they don't consume the first thing that they bought. You want them to get results. You want them to win and you want them to know that they got those wins by way of your product. And that really is the best kind of marketing; for them buying something else from you later. So that is what onboarding is all about. Ascension Sequence Ascension Sequence is a pretty much just like your front-end sales sequence except that we are talking about a little further along in our funnel. Essentially, we are trying to get them to buy the next thing in our sales funnel. So what we are going to be talking about here would be "this" and "this" on our chart. Essentially, let's say they bought the front-end offer and now they might have a short onboarding to get them to actually consume it and then you are going to start working on them for your membership site. Page 7 of 46
Now, when they join, you might present this offer right away. But the thing is, odds are, they are not going to take it right away. That is what this is for. This is where you have a sequence in place to get them to circle back and give them other opportunities to join that membership site. And same down the rest of your funnel. You are going to have these sequences in place that are basically designed to move them up to the next level in your sales funnel. So that is what Ascension is all about. The idea of ascending is simply to move them from the lower end of your product line which is going to be typically your front-end and move them up to higher priced things. Engagement/Segmentation The next one; and this one doesn't always work as an automated sequence, and that is Ongoing Engagement and Segmentation. Now, what this is... this is what we are all used to as bloggers with email lists. This is things like your newsletter, this is things like sending out your latest blog posts; things like that. This is the ongoing value. We are not generally selling things here at this section. We are actually just delivering ongoing value. Now, with the segmentation part of it, it comes down to what we are talking about in this Action Plan and that is that we do not want to send the same thing to everybody all the time. We want to put people into little buckets; little categories based on things that they are interested in. And one way that you can do that is that when you got people on the General List, you can send things to them and then based on whether they reacted to it or not, you can put them into another little bucket and that means that they might be a warmer lead for additional material on that particular topic. So let's go ever to the chart and show you where this fits in... So, where this is going to fit in is right down here... And in fact, you are going to see it on the chart right there. So what is going to happen is you are going to continue to do what bloggers do. You are going to publish new content, you might release new podcast episodes; things like that. And what you can do is go to your email list and tell them about it. And what is that going to do is it is going to bring people back up here to the blog and then if they take the call to action, maybe get on to another lead magnet, that can bring them back down in your funnel. But you can also; depending on what kind of email system that you are using, you could also be measuring the actual activity on these emails themselves. Page 8 of 46
So let's say you sent out an email and just by the fact that they clicked on that email, you can add a little tag or something like that to their profile or segment them off into a little bucket and that means that later you might send them additional topics on that whatever you just sent them. So let's say that I have people on my list who are really interested in setting up membership sites. Not everybody on my list might be ready for a membership site. So I might send an email to the General List that mentions membership sites and it points them over to a blog post about it. And if they click on that, then I have them in a little bucket. (Pretend that this is a bucket) and these are people who have clicked on that email, then I can send additional material just to those people because they have demonstrated interest. So you can see, how basically on an ongoing basis, I am segmenting the General List. The General List; what is going to happen when somebody doesn't buy, this is a front-end sales sequence, ascension... And they don't buy the thing; well, they are going to be on the general list. And this is what you are going to be sending them: New Content, new blog post, newsletters; things like that, but you can also use that material to put people into these little buckets. And then when it is right, you can present a new lead magnet to them, a new front-end offer, what have you... And you can do it on a more targeted basis when you know that the people on this little buckets have demonstrated interest in this topics. ReEngagement ReEngagement is the type of sequence that you are going to send out when the lead is kind of going dead. What is going to happen here is that people are just going to stop clicking on things, what have you; and we want to warm them back up again, we want to get them involved. Now this has everything to do with delivery rates because if you keep sending things to people who are not actively clicking on anything, it actually harms your delivery rates. Google with Gmail and Outlook.com and these services out there, they can see if people are actually clicking on things. And if they see on a global basis that this one sender; namely you, keep sending things to people who are not opening it, then it decreases your sender reputation. And you are going to have a harder time getting your emails through. So ReEngagement is about getting them to start clicking on things when they stopped clicking on things. And if they don't react, if they do not reengage, you are going to remove them from your email list. You are going to stop emailing them. And that is very important. I don't want you to get to be out of shape about deleting somebody out from your list. Page 9 of 46
But the truth is, if they are not clicking anything they are just wasting space and they are taking your money because we all have to pay more money the more emails we have on our system. Generally, most companies are going to increase your monthly rate depending on the size of your list. So the last thing that we want to do is be paying for people to be there that are not actually reading our stuff. So this is what reengagement is all about. Alright, so those are the 6 types of autoresponders; 6 types of campaigns. Now, below on this Action Plan we are go on to some more detail on these things and about how to actually set these things up and kind of what kind of things you want to do and say in these sequences. But those are the 6 basic kinds and now you should have an understanding about where they fall into context with our blog monetization model. 7 Rules For Writing Effective Emails To Your List Regardless of the kind of sequence you re writing, in the end you re going to be writing emails. These emails will be pre-written and then sent on a schedule you specify. It is really easy to get hit by writer s block when you re looking at that email message screen. So, let me give you a few pieces of advice and a few guidelines to follow. #1 Write In Your Own Voice First rule: Don t overthink it. You should write your emails just like you would any email to a friend of yours. You probably don t get writer s block when you write an email to somebody you know and it should be the same when you write an email to your list. In fact, if you keep it natural like that, your emails will usually get a better response. So, first rule is to write as yourself. Don t allow yourself to get mind-numbed by a bunch of marketers rules that you think you need to obey. Trust me, marketers LOVE to act like everything they do is so strategic and that there s deep psychological reasons for everything. And sometimes there are. But, more often than not? they re shooting from the hip. So, don t play copycat. Just know what the email is for and be yourself. #2 Plan Out Your Sequence In Advance The best email sequences are the ones which are congruent throughout the whole thing. This way you can tease what s coming, or refer back to something in the last email. You can build anticipation this way, too. Page 10 of 46
So, outline your sequence in advance. If you are working on a welcome sequence, then you know you ll need 3 or 4 emails. Outline the basic plan for those 4 emails. THEN sit down and do the writing. #3 Pay Special Attention To Your Email s Subject Line Your email subject line has one purpose: to get them to open the email. That s it. Don t try to get all fancy-pants and make the subject into a nice summary of the contents of the email. The ONLY thing that matters is getting them to open it. If they don t open it, none of the contents matter. #4 Tell Them What To Do It might sound harsh, but it isn t. It is just human nature. If you are going to have an audience which gets results, they have to do what you say. If you re going to have an audience which takes action on things, you have to be the authority and take control. So, take charge. Be exact on what you want them to do, and tell them to do it. You re a benevolent dictator of your own list. Keep their best interests in mind, but be very clear what you want them to do and why. #5 Never Forget To Have A Clickable Call To Action In general practice, you shouldn t send an email to your list which doesn t tell them to click on something. You shouldn t send emails which just educate them and leave it at that. Even the purpose is just to give value and not to sell anything, STILL make them click on something to get it. The reason goes back to #4 above. Think about your own life. Chances are, those people you respected the most are people who took control of you in some fashion. Your parents, a teacher, a mentor, etc. You did what they said because they took control. Control is only bad when it is done for nefarious reasons or is very unclear and aimless. #6 Use The P.S. You ve probably noticed how a lot of email marketers use PS s fairly regularly. And here s why Many email readers will open the email and skim to the bottom. For this reason, it is often a good idea to summarize the big idea of your email in the PS and give them the call to action link to click on. Page 11 of 46
You can even use PS s in your emails to give little extras, like extra tips, etc. This trains your subscribes to actually read your PS s, and then when you use the PS for sales purposes they are more likely to view/click it. #7 Avoid Multiple Calls To Action Generally speaking, if you give people too many things to do, they ll usually respond by doing nothing at all. So, your most effective emails are going to be the ones which only ask them to do ONE thing. You might give them the same link several times. In fact, that s usually a good idea. Whatever link you want them to click, give it to them toward the top, halfway down, then again at the bottom. But, each time, it is the same link. There can be exceptions, however, for instance; newsletters. General email newsletters often contain links to many different things in the same email. That s fine, although this kind of email should really only be sent to your general list, not as a followup sequence. But, any email which is designed to get your subscriber to do something, only ask them to do one thing at a time. Outline Your Basic Email Structure - Sequences Explained - The first thing is I want to show you how these 6 different types of email sequences map out to what we are actually building with the Blog Monetization Model. So... The first one is the WELCOME SEQUENCE. And basically what is happening here is just that something that you are going to send to brand new leads who come on to your list. Keep in mind that you might have people opting in to multiple things especially if you have more than one lead magnet. If somebody comes in here and opts in to this one then in a couple of months later they come and opt-in to that one, you don't want to send them the welcome sequence again, because they would have already gotten it. So here is what we want to do... The moment they opt-in for the very first thing, whatever it might be, your system is going to send them the Welcome. And that is it. Page 12 of 46
Now the way we are going to do this in a multi-list set up... You are going to end up having multiple lists here and in just a minute I am going to show you how that maps out to a multiple list set up; somewhere to what Aweber and MailChimp does. But essentially, what you are doing at this point is you are asking: "If new, send Welcome." So if they are a brand new lead, it will send the Welcome. If they are not a brand new lead; if they exist in our email system already, then we won't. That is how the Welcome Sequence works. The next one is the SALES SEQUENCE. The sales sequence is what is going to happen right here... In fact, you can see it right on the model. So they opt-in and they are going to see a targeted front-end offer of some kind. Now, behind the scenes on that they are going to start receiving an automatic follow up sequence via email. So essentially, they are going to see this offer but they also are going to start receiving the email. So if they do not take the offer right away; which majority of people will not, you will have those who do, and they will quickly move on. But many other people are not going to take the offer right away, but they are going to be on this follow up sequence; the sales sequence, that gives them a little bit of time to do it. So it will be like maybe a 3-Day Promo, something like that. So they see a front-end offer and says "Get this now for brand new subscribers only" but then they are going to get added to a 3- Day email follow-up sequence that gives them a chance to come back to the same page, so this is just looping them back to the same page for maybe 3 days or so. And then if they do not take you up on it, that is fine. Not a really big deal. So that is the Sales Sequence. The next one is ONBOARDING. Onboarding is a different kind of email sequence because it is not necessarily designed to make a sale. It is more to get somebody to consume something that they already bought. Any digital product that somebody buys, it is useless if they do not go through it. I mean, that part should be obvious, but also from the point of you as the product creator, you are not going to get those testimonials, you are not going to get those repeat customers if they do not buy and if they do not actually do the product. So the Onboarding is designed for that. Now where the Onboarding really comes into play is right here at the Membership Site. Now you can put in an onboarding sequence into an ebook offer, something simple like that. Just basically to get them to actually read the ebook. So what you could do is you could have onboarding that would be like pointing to "Hey did you see this in Page 3?" something like that or if you have a checklist or a question that you ask inside the ebook you can actually reference that question inside via your autoresponder sequence. It is getting them to go into the content. Now better yet though, with a membership; the whole idea here is to get them integrated into the program and get them taking action. Page 13 of 46
These are the two things that you want to do with your onboarding sequence. (Integrated & Taking Action). If you have a person who just signed up for your membership site, the most important thing to get them to do is to get them really integrated and active in the community. So what you can do is send them into; if you are running a private Facebook Group, with one of your emails you will point out the private Facebook Group and give them access to that. You can make sure that they didn't have any login issues. You can start walking them through the content that they are going to find inside your membership site and get them to actually go through things. The whole idea here is to get them to actually start doing stuff inside the membership because the more they are doing stuff, the more they start to see the value, the longer they are going to stick around which means you are going to be able to rebill them. So that is how the Onboarding works; an important, important sequence. The next one is ASCENSION. Ascension is basically a Sales Sequence. It is essentially the same thing. It is just that basically the only difference is that we are moving them forward in our sales funnel. So the whole idea is that if they buy let's say "this" then the ascension sequence will be used to get them to upsell into the membership. So where you see Ascension sequences in our models right here and right here. They have already bought that one. But they didn't buy into your membership. Or if you have a core offer here, that is fine, but they didn't buy that. So you are going to have an Ascension sequence designed to try to move them into that. So it is basically a promotional sequence, it is a sales sequence. Now how long you make this is up to you. You can make it nice and short and finite, maybe 3 to 4 days. But the thing is, for some products, a 3 to 4 days sequence is just not enough. So it might go on in perpetuity. It might go on for a little while, several weeks perhaps. It just really depends on the price point. But that is what the Ascension Sequence is about. It is to sell higher ticket things in order to get them to move further in the sales funnel. You always want to know what it is that somebody has bought. And then you are working on getting them to move into the next step. The next type of sequence is ENGAGEMENT or SEGMENTATION. Essentially what we are looking at here is this... You are going to have people who would either buy or they do not buy. Either way, eventually they are going to fall off this funnel and they are going to kind of be done. So what is going to happen is, right here, they are going to get to a point where you are going to bring them back into the fold. Essentially this is your General List. This is where you send your newsletters, where you send your latest blog posts, stuff like that. Page 14 of 46
These are not emails designed to get them to buy a particular offer or to ascend them in your sales funnel. It is designed specifically to get them back over to your blog, to get them to maybe opt-in for another one of your lead magnets or sometimes you might actually promote one of your front-end offers directly to the list. You can even do stuffs like this; it really doesn't matter. The whole idea here is that you are taking your general list and you are finding ways to cycle them back through your business. And that is essentially what you are doing with this; with the Segmentation Sequence. Here's the thing... The Segmentation Sequence does not have to be totally on automatic. You can also send these as one-off email. So you have the Auto and you have the Single. So the Singles would be emails that you write and you send one time. This could be a weekly newsletter, it could be a notice of your latest blog post, that type of thing. But you can also interlace them there automatic emails; maybe to feature some of your best content even if that blog post is several months old, you can build in an automatic follow-up message and it would bring them specifically to that. So you can combine these two together in that segmentation. It is kind of automated to a degree, but you need this to have a real-time nature to it as well so you will also be sending one-off email to this particular General List. The last one is RE-ENGAGEMENT and essentially, what is going to happen here is that you will have people that just get on to your list and they just kind of fall off the radar. They are just not opening things, they are not clicking on anything... And ideally you want to have a way of dealing with that. You want to try to get them to become re-engaged with you, to get them to come in and start clicking on things and reading blog posts again. And so, Re-engagement is designed to take a dying lead or even a dead lead and get them to become active yet again. So that is what the Re-engagement is. Re-engagement is not really seen on this model because at this point they are not really doing anything, but the whole idea would be to get them to resurrect and get them coming back and doing new things. So that is how the Re-engagement works. Outline Your Basic Email Structure - Multi-list Set Up - There are 2 kinds of email systems, generally. You have got the List type of email system and then you have got the Tag based email system. Page 15 of 46
Here's the difference... With LIST, then this would be these guys like Aweber, MailChimp, many of the popular ones. Popular, but on the lower end, tend to be list based. So essentially, what LIST BASED is, is that when you log in to your account and you are going to be able to create multiple email lists under the same account. Chances are, most of you guys who are watching this right now; that is the type of system that you are going to have. So let's draw a big line through that... A TAG BASED system is where you have got one list, but each subscriber on there can have multiple tags added to their account. So you basically have one group of emails, but based on what tags are added to their profile or even what sequences are added to their profile, they can be sent different things. So these different sequences that we are talking about; the welcome sequences, sales, onboarding and stuff like that, you can actually have sequences that are written and actually called such things and say "This is my product A sales sequence." Great. And so, at certain points you define rules so that if somebody opts-in for one of your opt-in forms, you will say "Assign this person "that" sequence." And that is how it gets sent to them. So it is actually simpler with a Tag Based system, I got to say. But this tend to be the more expensive systems and we are talking about guys like InfusionSoft, Ontraport, Active Campaign... Now, ActiveCampaign is not really that expensive. I think it starts out; at least as of the time I am recording this, it starts out around $49 a month and it goes up from there depending how many leads you have in the system. But the point is, is that ActiveCampaign is pretty an affordable way to get in to a fully automatic like CRM. It actually is a really nice system. It has all the same capabilities as these guys, it just does not have the ecommerce stuff built-in in terms of processing orders and stuff. But the thing is, you might not need that. ActiveCampaign might have everything you might actually need. So here is the thing, when it comes to setting up these sequences, things work a little bit differently. So first, let's talk about the LIST BASED system. And again, this is like MailChimp or Aweber or something like that. Each of your lists is going to be a sequence. So a list is essentially going to be a sequence that they could be one. So you are going to have a general list. Page 16 of 46
And this is going to be one of your lists. You can call this whatever the heck you want, but you are going to have one list. Let's say it is inside of Aweber; that is going to be your general list and everybody who gets added to your system is going to be added to that general list. Now, for other sequences like let's say you have an ebook, we will just call it "Product A" you will have a Product A Sales sequence. So this would be like maybe one of your front-end offers. So, somebody opts in to a lead magnet, they are automatically get put on this sequence right here (Product A) in order to be turned into a customer, to sell them the front-end offer. And for every front-end offer that you have or every lead magnet that you have, you are going to set up another sales sequence behind it. So let's say you set up another lead magnet and it is going to lead into Product B. Well, this would be another sequence; you will create another sequence for that. Let's just say you have a lead magnet and it points to Product A. And let's say you have another lead magnet and it is going to point to Product B. Now both of these might upsell into a membership. This right here, they are going to opt-in and they are going to get added to a sequence for this particular upsell. These guys are going to be added to another sequence for this particular upsell. Now realize that in an Aweber style system, this is a different list (A), this is a different list (B). If they buy that, they are going to be removed from this list and put on to the next one which is going to be a sequence designed to get them to buy the membership. So, essentially, you are going to have the General list and then you are going to have different sequences based on where they are at. We have: The General List - This is kind of like the general over-arching list because everybody is going to be on that one. But underneath this, you are going to have different little buckets that they can be on, depending on what is happening. Let's say they opted in for a lead magnet, they are going to be on this sequence. And they are being sold a front-end offer during that sequence. Now, if they don't buy... whatever... In an Aweber style system, they are probably going to stay on the sequence; it is just that they are not going to be delivered anything else. Page 17 of 46
Now, in a different type of a system that uses Tags, you can actually set up a rule that they do not buy the front-end offer after such and such a time, you can actually remove them from this. With Aweber of MailChimp, we really do not have that kind of capability. We can segment them off so that we do not continue to hammer them; that can definitely be done. But it is probably for all practical purposes, they are just going to stay at this point. Now if they do buy, then you are going to run a little rule that says: "Remove them from this and put them on to that one." So they are now no longer going to be getting this, they are going to be put on to the next sequence which is going to be about getting them to join the membership. If they do buy the membership, then you would run another little rule that would subscribe them to the Member List; but you would set up a rule that says "If they subscribe to the member list, remove them from this." because they are now no longer a prospect, they have been moved over to the Member List. So basically, you are going to have the General List which is like the big bucket; it is the big one. And then you are going to have all these little buckets that are going to be various sales sequences, upsell sequences and things like that... Your engagement and your segmentation, basically a newsletter type of stuff is going to be sent to this one. These are pretty much all going to run on automatic and you are going to write those email sequences in advance. So if you look at Aweber, you are probably going to have that General List. And then you are also going to have sequences for front-end. So what you might want to do is start naming these things, things that make sense to you. So you might want to say: Product X - front-end, Product Y - front-end and of course, you would replace the Product X, Product Y with something that indicates the thing that it is. So this way when you look at the name on the list, you know exactly what it is for. And then you might have one for Onboarding; this would be for new members. You might have one for Re-engagement. Actually you probably wouldn't have a list for Reengagement; that is something different that we would have to handle with an Aweber style system. If you are running something like Ontraport or ActiveCampaign, we can do this a lot cleaner. So this is essentially the type of set up you would have... Different sequences for different purposes. If you are going to do an upsell, let's say you have a sequence that if they buy one of your front-end offers you want to get them into your membership, you might have "whatever you would call this" but it would be a Membership Upsell, whatever it might be. Page 18 of 46
Actually what you probably would want to name it would be a Buyer's List for Product X so you would know what it is. So let's say it would be Product X - Buyers. So essentially it is a customer list; that is good to know, you would like to have a customer list. But built-in to being that customer list would be an upsell for the next thing in the sales funnel. And how you want to work that in with your onboarding is completely up to you. For a lower end product, you probably do not need much in the way of onboarding; for memberships you probably would. When somebody joins the Blog Monetization Lab, there are a few sales messages that gets sent to new members but it is very low key. It is primarily focused on onboarding because what I really want is for people to join the Lab. From there, I am not like I'm trying to turn everybody upside down and extract more, okay? So you would probably have the same philosophy. So hopefully you see how that works out to a list-based system. So what I would encourage you to do is actually sit down and create an outline of the various lists that you can set up inside your Aweber system. How To Set Up The Timing Of Your Autoresponder I want to introduce you to the 6 Basic Types of Email Followup Campaigns. Now, first of all, this word "campaign", I want you to realize that it is interchangeable with the word "autoresponder", with the word "sequence"... Realize that we are referring to the same thing and that is simply a set of pre-written emails that is going to get delivered to somebody on a schedule that you specify. So we are referring all to the same thing here. And what we are going to be going over here are the 6 Different Kinds of Campaigns, generally speaking, that you will end up sending. Now, realize that you can use autoresponders for lots of different things. But generally, most kinds of autoresponders that you will use are going to be under one of this 6 categories; so let's go ahead and go through what they are. Welcome Sequence The first one is the Welcome Sequence. Now, the welcome sequence; it should be pretty clear right from the name exactly what it does... It welcomes a new person to the list. Page 19 of 46
So the way it is going to work is somebody is going to come in, they are going to opt-in to a lead magnet and they are going to be put on two different, essentially, lists at the same time. One is going to be this one; which we will get into in just a minute. The other is going to be a WELCOME. So, what the welcome does is it is going to welcome them to the list, it is going to let them know what to expect, it is going to send them some of your best stuff basically to warm them up and really let them know that they are going to get some real value by being a subscriber. None of these is sales oriented. It is all about orienting them to what it is going to be like to be a subscriber of yours. And so, this is the kind of thing that is going to go on your General List. So I want to make something clear here, again... and by the time that you get done with this Action Plan, this will be clear; is that when somebody subscribes to the list, they are going to be put on one list for the Lead Magnet itself; this is where you are going to give them the Lead Magnet and where you are going to follow it up with a front-end offer. And they are also going to be put on another list which is the General List. So, yes... They are going to be put on 2 different lists at the same time. And with something like Aweber, you can use an Automation Rule to make that happen. You are basically saying, "If they are put on this list, put them on this list as well." And you do that by setting up a rule. And so, at the very beginning they are going to be receiving 2 different sequences at the same time; this one right here... This is where your Welcome will go. Now, by doing it this way, that also means that when somebody comes in later and opts in for another Lead Magnet, then this rule is going to execute. But because Aweber is smart and MailChimp is doing the same thing, they are not going to deliver the sequence to them again because they are already on your General List. And that is exactly the way we want it to work. We only want people to receive the Welcome Sequence at the very beginning when they are a brand new person. If they opt in for something else later, but they are already on your list, obviously it wouldn't make any sense to send the Welcome Sequence again. Front-End Sales Sequence The next type of sequence is the Front-end Sales Sequence. The entire idea here is two things: One, you are going to deliver the Lead Magnet that they have opted in for, the second purpose is you are going to present a Front-end Offer. So this is going to be that sequence that goes right after they opted in on a squeeze page of something like that and you are going to give them a lead magnet and then you are going to promote your front-end offer to them. Page 20 of 46
So what we are talking about is they opt-in here and they come down, they are going to see this page with your front-end offer and the sales sequence is "that" right there. That is the exact sequence that is going to be put on is that. And what it is going to do it is going to basically deliver the lead magnet they came in on and then it is going to begin re-stating the front-end offer. And it is going to only go out for maybe 2 or 3 days, something like that, to give them an opportunity to take this front-end offer. And if they don't buy the front-end offer, then you are going to stop. You are not going to keep sending them the same darn thing because that is going to be quite redundant. So that is the purpose of the Front-end Sales Sequence. Onboarding Sequence The Onboarding Sequence is designed to be delivered to people who have bought something from you and the main purpose of it is to get them really using the thing that they have purchased. Now this is especially important for membership sites because the biggest thing for membership sites is that you want that member to stick around for a little while. Now, the best way to get them to stick around for a little while is to get them really integrated in using the benefits of your membership site. So if you got a community, you want to make sure that they get in to the community and begin posting as soon as possible. You want them to get into your training and make sure they actually begin going through this. And you want to do this as soon as possible, after their initial purchase. And that is exactly what the Onboarding Sequence is designed to do. Now you can also have an Onboarding Sequence for downloadable; like ebook type products. It probably won't be as long, but the entire purpose of onboarding is just to get them actually consuming the thing that they bought because one thing we know is that they will not ever buy anything from you again if they don't consume the first thing that they bought. You want them to get results. You want them to win and you want them to know that they got those wins by way of your product. And that really is the best kind of marketing; for them buying something else from you later. So that is what onboarding is all about. Ascension Sequence Ascension Sequence is a pretty much just like your front-end sales sequence except that we are talking about a little further along in our funnel. Essentially, we are trying to get them to buy the next thing in our sales funnel. So what we are going to be talking about here would be "this" and "this" on our chart. Essentially, let's say they bought the front-end offer and now they might have a short onboarding to get them to actually consume it and then you are going to start working on them for your membership site. Now, when they join, you might present this offer right away. But the thing is, odds are, they are not going to take it right away. Page 21 of 46
That is what this is for. This is where you have a sequence in place to get them to circle back and give them other opportunities to join that membership site. And same down the rest of your funnel. You are going to have these sequences in place that are basically designed to move them up to the next level in your sales funnel. So that is what Ascension is all about. The idea of ascending is simply to move them from the lower end of your product line which is going to be typically your front-end and move them up to higher priced things. Engagement/Segmentation The next one; and this one doesn't always work as an automated sequence, and that is Ongoing Engagement and Segmentation. Now, what this is... this is what we are all used to as bloggers with email lists. This is things like your newsletter, this is things like sending out your latest blog posts; things like that. This is the ongoing value. We are not generally selling things here at this section. We are actually just delivering ongoing value. Now, with the segmentation part of it, it comes down to what we are talking about in this Action Plan and that is that we do not want to send the same thing to everybody all the time. We want to put people into little buckets; little categories based on things that they are interested in. And one way that you can do that is that when you got people on the General List, you can send things to them and then based on whether they reacted to it or not, you can put them into another little bucket and that means that they might be a warmer lead for additional material on that particular topic. So let's go ever to the chart and show you where this fits in... So, where this is going to fit in is right down here... And in fact, you are going to see it on the chart right there. So what is going to happen is you are going to continue to do what bloggers do. You are going to publish new content, you might release new podcast episodes; things like that. And what you can do is go to your email list and tell them about it. And what is that going to do is it is going to bring people back up here to the blog and then if they take the call to action, maybe get on to another lead magnet, that can bring them back down in your funnel. But you can also; depending on what kind of email system that you are using, you could also be measuring the actual activity on these emails themselves. Page 22 of 46