Seven Things #3: Second Chance Offers
Stu McLaren (The Nicest Guy on the Internet) interviewed me live last night in between Jim Edwards and Joel Comm. When he asked me what's the most signifcant change I made in 2008, the very first thing that came to mind, and therefore the thing I blurted out, was "automation."
If you can write a quick e-mail, or article, or blog post, chances are you can write 2 more really quick posts, even if they say nothing but, "Remember a few weeks ago when I said this?" Then lead into the exact same call to action...
Answering Stu's question reminded me of when I was at the Warrior Event in Austin earlier this year, when I picked up a really great tip from Ron Capps -- the NicheProf!
We were talking about sending offers to your list and how we both sometimes send new offers to our list for old products.
Ron will send a mailing out to his list promoting a product,
then send the same offer out again in 90 days!
On average, he promotes the exact same offer 5 or 6 times (one time every ninety days) before it completely runs out of gas.
That is a freaking cool way of looking at mining gold from your list.
That's what our plan is with the Daily Seminar membership site... simply because of attrition. I launched my first recurring membership site almost three years ago and it began with a big splash, but we didn't market it after that, and the membership slowly died off.
But you can do that with your one time products as well!
Two Products a Week?!
At one point many people on forums thought I was a machine -- that I pump out two products a week consistently. Not true. I just have so many products I created in the past year or so that it seems that way.
People forget. People don't read every single e-mail. People will look at your offer and save it for "later" ... which ends up being never.
In fact I promoted a product from 2001 (Software Secrets Exposed) ... all I did was I took an old product, slapped a dimesale onto it and told my list. $1200 in a day -- on a SUNDAY -- probably about an hour's worth of work total.
Nevermind the costs I put in, I'd already broke even on the resale rights from an earlier promo I did for that product.
The best thing was... because I had it on a timer... I didn't even do any work that day.
Your Mission (Should You Choose to Accept It)
Here's what I want you to do: The next time you send a mailing out to your list, write the mailing a second time and save it as a timed mailing to get sent out 90 days from now.
If you do that now, then just before Valentine's Day 2009, you'll get a nice little surprise bump in income!
It doesn't have to stop there. You know that 2001 product? Someone bought it and saw the 2001 copyright and asked how could the info still be relevant.
I responded with an e-mail explaining how 100% of the stuff in the book still applies today and how all the predictions Ben Prater made in 2001 are now true today.
After responding to that message, I worded it into a quick follow-up and added it to my autoresponder to go out SIX months later. Hit on an extra benefit in the follow-up that people missed or forgot about!
p.s. How's this for automation? I wrote this blog post on April 24, 2008, when I was in a blog writing frenzy, and scheduled it for December 2008... so I wouldn't overload my readers. It's only now being published 5 months later. Just before it went live, I took about 60 seconds to make it current. Best of both worlds.
Here's what we learned today:
- Send the same offer to your list every 90 days.
- You can promote the offer 5 to 6 times. (Over the course of 18 months.)
- Have it on a timer so you don't have to worry about it.
- If you can take the answer to a common fear and turn it into a sales message, do it!
Have you resurrected any dead offers successfully? What about when you failed, how was that different? Please leave a quick comment below.
Filed in: Seven Things
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Robert,
I Accept your challenge! (and the fact that you “took 60 seconds to make it current” makes me feel.. kinda wierd somehow :))
This response could have been posted in April! 😀
Robert,
This is only semi-related but…
A while back I changed the permalink structure on a blog that had an email plugin. When I did that, the plugin thought they were all new posts and promptly emailed them to my list. Luckily, there were only 25 posts on that blog. Problem?
No! I got a lot of positive feedback for the “review” and just one complaint about too many emails at once. Seems a lot of folks had missed some posts the first time around and were glad to get them again.
Now, I WON’T do THAT again, but my experience tends to confirm what you are saying. Send ’em again!
I adore automation, and I’ve been using automation products for years. Automate 6 and Internet Macros have proved invaluable but nowadays it’s mostly custom solutions. Although I still use A6 daily to gather all of my stats and produce the p/l spreadsheets.
Also, automation is another great reason to choose WordPress as the centrepoint of your business empire, it’s just so damn easy to automate.
ps. Snap. We have the same blog backgrounds
That’s why I’ve always kept my blog and autoresponder lists separate, I’m too paranoid something like that will happen.
Similar thing happened to Michel Fortin not that long ago. He had a plugin that e-mailed his list when he made a new blog post, but it was also set to e-mail them all anytime he edited a post. So he ended up accidentally sending about 20 e-mails in 1 hour to his list of thousands and thousands. Oops!
But when you write the autoresponder messages manually, it doesn’t make that much longer and you can add in some hook to get people to click over, instead of the boring automated, “I just made a blog post… click here to check it out.”
Thanks for the great information in this blog. You are right you do give “insane” marketing advice others are charging “an arm and a leg”. Quick question … if you had to choose between PPC, Article writing, blog posting, and others .. what is most effective way to build and maintain a list. Thanks in advance for your quick response. Welcome to all readers to respond.
Article writing. Submit the articles to the big 4 article sites and schedule the articles as blog posts over time.
Funnel the blog traffic into the mailing list, schedule autoresponder e-mails to notify them of the new blog posts plus the 90 day second chance e-mails.
Robert,
In some of my niche markets I’ve set up my autoresponder account with 17 messages. These messages provide good quality content and there is a link in each message to one of my products or to a product that I recommend as an affiliate.
The 17 messages are then repeated three times giving me a total of 51 messages.. almost a full years worth of content.
Yes, subscribers get the same message three times at four month intervals. I get sales on a regular basis throughout the year.
OK, I’m putting stuff like this in my own membership site! 😉
John
That’s killer advice John, especially when you have those autoresponders where it removes them from the prospect sublist for that product, when they join the buyer’s list for that product. That’s what I’ve been doing more with my list marketing.
Great advice, Robert! I’m going to add this strategy to all my mailing lists.
Thanks!
Hmm… I thought your “Second Chance Offers” would have been allowing your customers to have a second chance at buying your products at the low prices they might have missed earlier in the year.
I know a lot of bad feelings were unfortunately riled up, with the sales techniques employed on some of your products. I know I missed out on some of them and the only thing accomplished was creating a sense of scarcity–and generating a sense of animosity towards buying from you. (I have since forgiven and forgotten, but only because you have apparently changed your ways!) 🙂
Anyway, hmmm…. yeah, it would have been nice to have had a “Second Chance Offers” sale, right before Christmas, as a way of showing good will and gratitude to your customers….
That’s only going to generate aminosity from people who buy based on a low price.
It’s not like I put up something worth $1 or $7 and jacked up the price to $37, I put up something worth OVER $37 at $1 or $7 and jacked up the price to $37.
I still get marketing advice telling me to increase the price of me $37 offers to $97, which I’ll do eventually.
And I’m not dropping the price. When I see other marketers take a $97 product that sold for years, and reduce it to $10 or even make it free, just because they haven’t been marketing it, the first thing I think is… “Great. He just took a big dump over everyone who paid the regular price.”
I’ll tell you something else, any “recession” is only going to weed out those desperate low-ticket folks who buy just because it’s a dimesale. The high-ticket buyers will stick around.
Now that’s just no-brainer brilliant. I’m about to launch a product to my list, and I get to launch five times in the next year and a half for little more than doing it once.
And in the meantime, I can forget all about it.
Robert, that’s the smartest thing you ever wrote – and you write some smart stuff!
Matt- and to think he wrote it months ago-
imagine how smart he is NOW after the seminars and another few months of being The Plank!
Hey Robert,
You mentioned the 4 Big articles sites…obviously eZine Article, but which others do you put in that category?
Thanks!
Joel
Robert,
You consistently underprice your products, so there’s no need to cut the price again just because some people didn’t bother to buy at the low introductory price.
There is at least one really famous marketer who has taught me not to buy his products when he releases them, because he ends up giving them away a few months later, so I feel like a sucker for buying… and his stuff is way higher priced than yours.