QA 76 – How Soon Should I Ask my Email Subscribers to Buy Something

In today's Q&A, we are helping Melissa figure out how quickly she can pitch a product to her email list using an autoresponder. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Use your email list to provide value & drive traffic. Do the selling on your site."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Flip Your Life program Info on our live events Aweber Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. We got a great question today for you from Melissa Harley. Melissa is a member of our Flip Your Life membership community; we get to work with Melissa quite a bit in our forums over at flipyourlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and Melissa's question today is, "My question is, when do I send my list an ad for my product in the email if they've signed up for my blog post or my newsletter? Should there just be a link to it in every single email? How often or when should I sell people something?" And we get this question quite a bit. I think people are scared they are gonna jump in and make that pitch too early, and all of our questions this month are about email marketing, so this is a great and timely question for what we are talking about. Jocelyn, what do you think about that? How soon or often should people sell in their email list? JOCELYN: All right Melissa, I think that there are actually a couple of answers here because there's selling in an autoresponder, and then there's selling in like a normal broadcast, which I think is what you are asking about. But as far as an autoresponder goes, I don't really like to put a sales link in the first couple of emails. I really want to, kind of, overwhelm people with value and what they are getting from me instead of asking for something from them right away. I don't have a problem with in the email autoresponder, if you maybe put like a PS link and let people know that you have something for sale, in say maybe the third email or the fourth email something like that. Some people even do it in the first couple of emails and if that's what you choose to do, I mean, you could certainly test that out, see if it's working for your audience, but I personally just don't like to do that right away. Now as far as the broadcasts goes, I think that you really could do it a lot of different ways; what do you think? SHANE: Okay, I think with broadcasts, that's where you probably should be selling. Like Jocelyn was saying, the autoresponder, there's going to be a pitch that's for sure, but like she said, the first email is to kinda introduce yourself and deliver that thing you promised them, the second, third, and fourth emails are pretty much just to train them to open your emails. So Jocelyn said earlier that she wants to really overload them with value in those first few emails. If people don't get used to opening your emails, they're never going to click the link inside them anyway so you got to make sure they know that opening your email is like a Christmas gift. So make sure you are giving a lot of stuff away in those first couple of emails. Train them to click links though, they got to go to your website to get those, and then maybe in your autoresponder, you could sell something, maybe a quick offer around the fifth or sixth email, is that too early you think or – JOCELYN: No, I think that's probably reasonable; just depending on your audience and your niche, you just have to test it and see what is working for you. SHANE: But really after that, maybe initial pitch in your autoresponder to make ...