In yesterday’s pep talk, I shared with you how to get people to sign up for your email list by offering a freebie, and that’s how you warm up a cold audience and start building that relationship, strategically moving cold to warm to hot, or from stranger to acquaintance to friend to best friend!
Once you’ve warmed someone up, it you want to either keep them warm and keep delivering value to keep them engaged so that when you have something to sell or want them to take some action on your behalf, you’re able to move them from warm to hot, meaning they’re taking the action you’re inviting them to take.
And the way to do that is through an automated 3-part email series.
And since you’re probably driving or walking your dog and can’t take notes, just go to www.shannonmattern.com/28 to a checklist of each of these steps sent right to your inbox.
Okay, so let’s get started.
Email 1 – Delivers your freebie. It gives them information about what results to expect from the freebie. And it lets them know that you’ll be following up the next day to check in.
Email 2: Sent the following day. Follows up to ask about their freebie experience, what results they got. Then you can go into a little bit more about you and why you do what you do and why you’re so passionate about helping them.
Email 3: What’s next. Invite them to follow you on social or join your Facebook group or subscribe to your YouTube channel. let them know that you’ll have more great content coming to their inbox weekly.
If you have something to sell, you can invite them to take the next step and learn more in this email. We’d consider them to be HOT if they move on to learn more and buy.
But what if you don’t have anything to sell yet? Moving them from WARM to HOT, in my opinion, doesn’t always mean that they buy something from you. Ask them to share your freebie out on social media – that helps you get more cold traffic to warm up, and that, in my opinion, is just as valuable as a sale. When I have people promoting my stuff online because they love it, then the traffic to my website isn’t coming in cold, it’s coming in already warmed up a little bit!
And then Step 4 is keeping them warm. And guess what? You don’t have to do anything extra, because you’re already creating that consistent content to get cold traffic. That’s what you’re going to be sending out to your existing subscribers, and you can even do special things just for them like workshops and webinars.
Okay, so now you know what to market your business, build your email list and warm up your subscribers to either turn them into customers or evangelists for your business.
There are a lot of moving pieces technically to make that all work.
Here are some of the tools I use and recommend in my business to pull all of this together:
- An email provider that does automation. You probably already have something set up especially if you took the Free 5 Day Website Challenge. I used MailChimp when I first started out, I’m currently on Infusionsoft, but I also love ConvertKit for a middle of the road solution.
- A way to quickly make eye-catching graphics for all the social media platforms. I recommending Canva, and definitely the paid version because you can store your brand colors and fonts which saves tons of time, you can upload your logo, create templates, automatically resize graphics for different social platforms, and organize it all into folders. Saves TONS of time.
- A way to record, edit and produce both audio and video. This is optional, but if you’re making tutorial videos for your freebies, or youtube videos or even going live on Facebook or Instagram to promote, knowing how to do this is huge! I personally use Camtasia, but it’s kind of expensive and requires a little more technical skill, so I’ve been recommending Filmora. And then I just literally use my iPhone or the camera on my laptop when I’m on camera, pop those into my editing software and edit.
So think it about it this way. You’re a side hustler. You have a day job. In order to make the kind of money you need to make to quit your day job, you need to be able to serve people one to many rather than one-to-one.
You spend a couple weekends building your website. Then you spend another couple weekends putting together an awesome freebie that’s going to solve a pain point like I did with my free 5-day website challenge or fulfill a desire, and you give it away in exchange for an email address.
You spend another couple weekends setting up an automated email series that automatically delivers your freebie and the followup emails.
Boom, your foundation is built. Now, your time is spent creating new content every week, sharing it on social media to attract new people, sending it out to your email list to keep them warm and letting them get to know you and how you can help them, and giving them opportunities to move from warm to hot, from subscriber to customer. It’s spent working with clients, creating programs and products and services to offer via your email list. And you’re spending the same amount of time you’d spend doing all of that for one person for hundreds, then thousands, even tens of thousands of people. Do you see where this is going? It’s exciting, isn’t it?
Click here to register for my Free Master Class, So You Have a Website, Now What?
In this live master class, discover the path from building a website to building an audience through online marketing, and turning your audience from casual subscribers into paying customers – using the foundation you already built in the Free 5 Day Website Challenge!
Today’s pep talk is brought to you by Bluehost. Go to www.shannonmattern.com/bluehost and get 36 months of web hosting for just $2.95 a month. That’s less than one trip to Starbucks a month – and if you’re anything like me, you’re at Starbucks more than that!
Then you can sign up for my Free 5 Day Website Challenge at www.shannonmattern.com/5day and I’ll show you step by step how to get started building your new website for your side hustle.
