The Email Marketing Show 7 Sales Elements to Give You More Reasons To Email During Your Launch
You've got an offer ready and have emailed your subscribers. Once. Maybe twice. Sure, you'd like to email them a bit more. That would help with your sales, right? But you just don't know what to email about! So here are 7 sales elements that will give you more reasons to email during your launch and help you create spikes in your sales.
Ready to have your mind absolutely blown by these strategies?
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SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(2:31) Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launch.
(4:04) Give your audience a guided tour of your sales page through your emails (and learn about the pretend electoral campaign between Paddington Bear and Rupert The Bear).
(11:48) Introduce a countdown timer to create urgency (but not right at the start).
(14:08) Add a bonus (or more).
(16:34) Combine the bonus and the countdown timer.
(17:47) Use your testimonials in your emails.
(20:20) Don't introduce payment plans or down sell options at the start of your launch.
(22:38) Help your customers remove overwhelm and make informed decisions.
(25:03) Handle objections.
(28:05) Subject line of the week.
Why you should email your audience more than once or twice during a launch
First thing first, how many times do your normally email your list when you launch a new product or service? The day you open the cart and then the day you close it? What happens in between? Can we just agree that two emails aren't really gonna cut it?
When you’re promoting a new offer, you need to email your list more than once or twice. But how exactly can you keep talking about this thing you’re launching?
Use your emails to give your audience a guided tour of your sales page
You see, the key is to have a plan. And your plan should be all about NOT putting everything you have to say about your launch on your sales page. Hold some things back from your sales page so you have a list of valid reasons to email your list. Because during your launch, you want to use your emails to drip out pieces of your offer – email by email.
This doesn't mean you're going to strip down your offer and turn it into something weak and mediocre that no one wants. Your offer needs to be amazing from day one! You're just holding off on announcing some of the stuff that most people announce at the start and breaking down the information that lives on your sales page and giving your subscribers a guided tour of it. Your emails are the place where you pick one element of your sales page and talk about it. Why? So that you can walk people through stuff they might have missed and make them pay attention to it.
By announcing new things throughout your launch, you create extra surges and spikes in your sales. Because we all know how it goes - launches are made of peaks and troughs. The peaks are the beginning and at the end. You make sales on your first day and then again on the last day before the cart closes. But in between? That's when you have your troughs. So you want to create some momentum - have an excuse to email your subscribers, give them more reasons to buy, and generate more peaks during your launch.
Here are 7 things (in no particular order) that will help you do just that.
Hold off introducing a countdown timer
A lot of people add a countdown timer to their sales page right at the start of their promotion. We suggest you don’t do that. Why?
First of all, because if you don’t put the timer on the sales page right away, it gives you a great reason to email your list later on and let them know when your cart closes.
But also, a countdown timer is a mechanism to create urgency - and a very effective one at that. So don't waste it! Because you won't create any urgency if you set your timer waaaay in the future. If you tell everyone that your offer expires in 2 weeks, they have no reason to take notice now. It’s only when the hours, minutes and seconds are literally ticking that they’ll pay attention and buy. So use it wisely because this is one of the reasons to email your list during your launch.
Add a bonus (or more)
Another strategy you can use is to take something you'd ordinarily include in your offer (like an additional piece of training or a worksheet, etc.) and add it as a bonus rather than including it from the start. As the days go by, you offer all these additional features as bonuses via email with a really effective subject line. Why does this work? Because it helps you draw attention to this bonus you just added and encourage someone to buy.
Effectively, you're selling your bonuses in your emails. And if you position them well, some people will buy the product because of that bonus. Just make sure it's clear that everyone who has already bought gets your bonuses too - the last thing you want is loads of emails and admin from people asking you if they're included in the offer.
Combine the bonus and the countdown timer
When it comes to bonuses, you might introduce some at the start of your launch and others as you carry on with your promotion. So a strategy you can use is to add a countdown timer that will remove one of your bonuses.
Pick your sexiest bonus – a mastermind or a live call, for example - and add a countdown to it. Give it a clear deadline and create some urgency around it. You want to position this as a fast action bonus – something that’s available to anyone who buys today or in the next two hours, for example. Why? It helps you create an additional surge. And, of course, make sure you then make this bonus go away when you say you will.
Use your testimonials in your emails
Another thing you want to do during your launch is to turn your testimonials into case studies. What’s the difference between the two? A testimonial is one of your customers saying they bought one of your products, and it was great. A case study goes further than that – it says that your customer was struggling with a particular problem, then they bought your fabulous course, and now their life is completely transformed. Think of the case study as the movie documentary of your customer’s life, whereas a testimonial is your customer telling you about their adventure with you.
Now, it’s great to have testimonials. And a lot of people add loads to their sales pages. But your customers won't read them all, which means testimonials don't have the impact they’re meant to have. So how do you get your subscribers to pay attention?
You email them.
You pull out a few really good testimonials and turn them into case studies - expand on them in your emails and show people how others like them had the same problem, worked with you, and got great results.
Don’t introduce payment plans or down-sell offers from the start
Another thing you might want to do at some point during your launch is to introduce payment plans or down-sell offers. Just don't do it at the start - because this will be one of the reasons to email your list during your launch. So do this after a few days and once you've had a good number of sales and are in a good cash flow position.
A few days in, you can then email your subscribers and tell them about how they can pay in installments or buy a cheaper version of your product that has less live support, for example. The key is to introduce these later so you have a good reason to email your subscribers.
Help your customers remove overwhelm and make an informed decision
One of the reasons why you want to be able to email your subscribers more than once during your launch is that you want to mop up all the people who are on the fence about buying. And one of the things that get in the way and stops people from buying is confusion, especially if you sell different packages or levels of your product. Because sometimes your prospective customers look at all the options and aren’t sure about which one to go for, and they'll buy neither!
So use your emails to talk about the features and advantages of your higher-end offer, explain the different packages and what they do, who they're for, and what the advantages of buying each of them are. This is about making sure people have the information they need to make a decision. Because when we sell or market anything, our job is to help people make informed decisions. Be the person that helps your subscribers get rid of overwhelm.
Handle objections
The last thing we want to point out to help you find more reasons to email your list during your launch is something we're really passionate about. We talk about this a lot because it really works - and it's handling objections.
Whenever we come up with an offer, we write down a whole bunch of objections and address them in our emails. Just bear in mind you don’t want to handle objections by raising them. Don’t put thoughts in people’s minds – if someone is already on the fence about buying and you raise an objection in their mind, you’re only going to move them further away from that fence - and not in the right direction! When handling objections, you want to be compelling people and propelling them forward.
So how do you do this exactly? We do it through Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), where we position every single thing really positively. So rather than asking the question, “What if you can’t make the live calls?” the FAQ will be worded as, “Will there be a recording of the calls?” and we'll explain how this is a really good thing because it allows people all over the world and from different time zones to access the calls. It’s a subtle difference, but it matters. So use your emails to handle objections.
Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “how the sausage gets made”. Of course, this is funny to us because it's got the word sausage in it, and we think the word is hilarious because we're 12-year-olds.
But jokes aside, it’s an expression, right? It’s a saying people are familiar with, and we like nothing more than to use common expressions and give them a bit of a twist. This was all about the idea of seeing behind the scenes of things, but you could the words to it to make it work for your individual business. Why does it work so well? Because it draws people in and triggers their curiosity. Awesome, right?
Useful Episode Resources
Related episodes
The Psychology Of A Successful Email Launch – Being Desirable With Abraham Kallon.
How to Say ‘No’ to Extending An Expired Offer.
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