How To Sell More Things To Your Email List (And Make Sure They Don’t Hate You For Doing It)

In my last post I showed you how to build your email list In this post I want to show you How to sell more stuff to your subscribers without pissing them off.

First up, something that you may not have thought about. David Ogilvy said you cannot bore people into buying your stuff, and he’s right. No, your emails must entertain; they must be the proverbial welcome guest in your subscribers inbox – the email they actually look forward to getting each day. Most emails are boring as bat shit. Look around and you’ll see most marketers don’t give a rat’s ass for what their subscribers want, they send them what THEY want to send them instead of what their readers want to read. BIG difference. So step one in this little email party is

Send People Stuff They Are Actually Interested In

How do you find out what people are interested in? Simple, you ask them. There are a tonne of tools you can use to ask them but the simplest is Survey Monkey (or we use Google docs to create surveys). Then once you know what they’re interested in you segment them into groups along with other people who are interested in the same thing and you start to build sub-lists within your main list. So if you look at the opt in box on the bottom of this post you’ll see I segment people into 2 data sets 1. Those who have a business 2. Those who want a business.

Do You Think I Should Send Them The Same Thing?

Of course not! I send them stuff that would be more relevant to each subset of my subscribers. And then once I have segmented them into those 2 groups I start to segment some more. So, those who want to build a business are segmented into:

• Those who want an online business
• Those who want an offline business
• Those who want an affiliate business

and then through the emails I send to each, I start to understand what problems each subset of my list has, because problems are opportunities to sell stuff.

“But Neil, That Sure Does Sound Like A Lot Of Hard Work!”

And it is, but if you want great results that’s what you have to do… There are ways to speed up this process and indeed you can leverage your time in a number of ways. I’ll save those tips for a future post though. What I have found though is that this alone will elevate you to a level far above most marketers who are lazy. Sure you can create good money being lazy, but, it’s not long term. You’ll spend your online life in a constant loop of getting traffic, getting opt ins, sending out a “1 size fits all email” that will alienate 95% of your list and force them to stop paying attention to you.

There’s a better way! Send people stuff they want to read 🙂 They’ll like you more and trust you more – as they should – for being caring enough to find out what they want. Your list exists to create relationships so you can make offers. Don’t be afraid to sell. It’s not making a pitch that makes your subscribers unsubscribe it’s failing to respect your readers’ time and attention.

Neil