One reason that an autoresponder is so much more powerful than the typical downline mailer or safelist credit-mailer is the ability to segment and automate your email marketing.
Downline mailers and safelists let you send the same message to a certain number of people on the list at certain time intervals. Obviously, the bigger the list you can send to, the more likely it is you’ll get a response. The problem with this “shotgun” approach is that in order to create a reliable and sustainable income you would have to send messages by the boxcar load every day, using as many mailers as you have time for.
Log in, send 1,000 messages, log out. Log in, send 5,000 messages, log out. Pretty soon it’s a full time job. And you’re making HOW MUCH money this way?
If you are just starting out, “5,000 bonus mailing credits for signing up” probably sounds pretty good. In our opinion, based on our experience, 5,000 emails is just a drop in the bucket. We send over 100,000 safelist emails pretty much daily, and we are, by any realistic standard, a mom-and-pop operation. We’ve taken a few strategic upgrades and created a systematic routine, but this still takes time, and all that mail is just a bigger shotgun approach.
Of course, most of the people on these lists aren’t looking to buy, they’re after traffic for something they’re trying to sell. We use safelist and downline mailing for the most part to build our lists, often with monetized lead capture funnels, NOT to promote products or make sales.
Once you have your own list, you can customize your content and offers to individual subscribers, instead of flinging the same message at larger and larger numbers of possible readers and hoping some of them are interested in what your subject line seems to be about.
Email is ultimately a communication channel, especially effective for marketing. You need to be mindful that you are communicating with real people, just like we are doing right now. Losing sight of this fact is the single most common reason people fail in email marketing.
Would you go through the day having the same conversation with everyone? Of course not, everyone isn’t interested in the same subjects. If your dad likes fishing but thinks baseball is boring, and your brother likes baseball but has no interest in fishing, you would talk to each about what interests them, right?
With an autoresponder and your own list, you can take advantage of the interests of your readers to provide content and offers that actually interest them, instead of sending out mail about subjects you hope lots of them might be interested in.
Once you have people subscribed to your own list, realize that even though they all subscribed to your list, they are different. They have different interests, needs and expectations. Always sending the same message to everyone will not yield the best results. Successful email marketing relies on delivering relevant messages to the right audience. That’s where email segmentation and automation come into play.
Modern email service providers allow you to tag and segment your readers based on their characteristics or the actions taken by them. You can collect details by crafting a smart welcome email sequence or using a survey or quiz. What information you will want depends largely on the niche you’re marketing to. Please note, all internet marketing is niche marketing. More about that in a future message.
If you’re in the internet marketing niche, you can tag your subscribers interests by content consumption and behaviors. For example, we can tag you as a reader interested in email marketing if you’ve opened or clicked emails about email marketing. Or Worpress. Or Clickbank. Or YouTube. Or … OK you get the idea.
If you are in the e-commerce niche, you can segment subscribers based on their purchases, the amount spent, frequent buyers, and one time buyers. In the diet or healthy eating niches, there’s keto people, paleo people, fasting people, “clean” people, vegetarians, vegans…
Once we tag you, we can send you customized emails when we have something related to YOUR INTERESTS. We start tagging the minute you subscribe. Each of our squeeze pages is tagged by topic, and we use a variety of lead magnets in different areas: Clickbank, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. So when someone subscribes with us, they go into the broadly focused “Two Cents’ Worth” Newsletter, which is “internet marketing” content-driven. But they are also already tagged with at least one specific interest, and when we have something good related to, say, LinkedIn, everybody gets the general mail, but those we already know are interested will get extra mail in more detail.
With tagging, over time your list can become laser-focused. If you buy a PLR product, we can tag you as interested in “PLR”. Or “software”. Or “video training”. Or “PLR” “video training” related to “WordPress”. Again, you get the idea.
When you receive content relevant to your interests, you’re far more likely to open those emails and click the offers or other links. The more focused the message, the more likely it is to result in a sale and turn a subscriber into a customer.
You can see how segmentation could help you to power up your email marketing.
What if you could not only send relevant, engaging customized emails to your subscribers, but do it automatically?
That’s what email automation can do for you, and we’ll talk about that next time.