If you understand why collecting emails is extremely important, you have the essential building block to creating a profitable business in virtually any niche.
Thanks to social media, it’s now possible to get traffic to almost ANY website. In the past, depending on your niche, it could be difficult to get the right volume of traffic to really create a business. However, now that social media’s made it so easy to connect with others, we see communities sprouting up for almost any thinkable hobby, skill, or idea.
The bottom line is this: it’s easier than ever to get traffic.
Because it’s easier than ever to get traffic, it’s also—theoretically—easier to run a profitable business. However, traffic alone does not make a profitable business. You need a way to capture that traffic and provide value to that traffic directly, over time.
After all, if someone visits your website once and then leaves without buying something if you don’t have any information on them, you’ve got nothing! On the other hand, if someone visits your website and gives you their email address, regardless of what they do next, you’ll have a reliable way to get in touch with them.
Here’s a sales funnel that will allow you to create a profitable business in virtually any niche:
Traffic generation -> provide value -> email capture -> provide value/build trust -> sell products
If this funnel looks familiar, it’s because it’s been used successfully for years. But there are some minor changes. It’s no longer enough to simply generate traffic and sell products. Now, we need to provide massive value to our visitors – both when they give us their email addresses, and before we pitch a product to them.
It’s no longer enough to get people on your list, then spam them with product offers. Instead, you need to keep your sales pitches to few and far between, and cram TONS of value into the other emails you’re sending. This ensures that your emails will continue to be opened and that potential customers clearly see the value in the information you provide. When customers see how much value you’re giving them for free, they’ll be much more likely to pay money for one of your products.For the remainder of this article, we’ll be discussing one of the most basic forms of an email list: the 7-part newsletter.
In this newsletter, we’ll be sending seven emails to our subscribers. One every two days. Six of these emails will be about building trust and authority for your business and brand, with a slight call-to-action at the bottom. The seventh email will be a “hard sell”, talking specifically about your product, and how it can offer value to your reader’s life.
With this format, we have plenty of time to deliver true value to our subscribers. By the time the seventh email comes along, they already view us as a trusted authority who provides value. This dramatically increases the odds of them buying our products.
So what exactly should each email be about? Read on!
Email #1: Brief Intro; Heavy Value
The first email you send is extremely important. It’s “make or break”. If you send a spammy or thin email the first go around, expect to see the majority of subscribers unsubscribe, immediately.
This is why in our first email, we want to “give away the farm”, so to speak. The most valuable free information you’re willing to share with your subscribers should be in this first email.
It needs to be an email that changes the lives of the readers. For example, if your newsletter was about making money online, your first email needs to be a concrete way your subscribers can start making money IMMEDIATELY, in a way they’ve never heard about before.
It should have an “exclusive” feel to it. After all, if you’re giving out top-quality information to subscribers alone, it IS exclusive information. 95% of this email should be valued. Then, at the very end, you should put a brief call-to-action about the product you sell, and how it ties into the email you just sent. Make it clear that if they got life-changing value from one email, your product will do several times that.
Remember – the point of this first email isn’t to sell your product. It’s to show your subscribers that you can change their lives. And you’ve already done so for free. This builds HUGE amounts of trust and loyalty.
Email #2: New Concept Related to Brand
For email #2, we’re going to once again give our subscribers great value. But this time, we’re going to frame it differently – we’re going to talk about our brand. This can be a company brand or your personal brand.
One of the best ways to do this is through a story. Simply tell a story about how you or your company made a change that brought you more success, or whatever it is your readers are looking for.
Let’s pretend again that we run a business telling people how to make money online. Well, we could write an article about a Facebook marketing plan we tried that doubled our revenue.
We’d lay out the marketing plan in a way that would be easy to follow for our subscribers. So they’d get awesome life-changing information out of the email while seeing how we work. They see that our business thinks outside-of-the-box, and knows how to create value.
We add to our subscriber’s lives through the lens of our brand.
Email #3: Value-Driven Case Study
This is similar to email #2, but it’s about what we did for one of our customers or clients. Once again, share game-changing value with your subscribers, but show them how you were able to create that value for one of your customers from scratch.
Once again, it’s very important that your subscribers learn from this case study. Talk about what improvements you made to your customer’s lives, and make it clear how subscribers can learn from these improvements.
Similar to our last email, the subscriber’s gained new insight and value, and it’s directly as a result of our company.
Email #4: Valuable Concept No. 2
In email #4, we go back to the style of email #1. Here we get away from our business and focus directly on a new concept the subscriber can apply to their lives. Now, realize that every email has been about the value to the subscriber. That never changes. All that changes is the way we present that information.
The presentation is very important because it’s how our customer views our business. Through this email newsletter style, we’re molding our customer’s perception of our business by providing massive value.
Just like email #1, this email should contain valuable information that the reader has never heard of before – something they can apply immediately after reading.
Email #5 and #6: Two-Part Guide
Now it’s time to provide a TON of value leading up to our product pitch. In emails five and six, we’ll be discussing one large topic, in two parts. When writing this guide, it’s ESSENTIAL you connect it with your product. After the two parts, the customer should have a definitive method to accomplishing one of their goals, AND the desire to know how to take the “next step”, which is when we introduce our product!
One of the absolute BEST examples of this guide comes from Neil Patel’s Quicksprout newsletter. He has a two-part guide entitled, “How to Get Your First 1,000 Visitors”. The guide shows you exactly how to get your first 1,000 visitors to your website. This leads up to the next email, where he gives subscribers a free trial to his analytics company – a company designed to show you the best ways to monetize your traffic.
He’s taught us how to build traffic and then given us the tool to move to the next step: his product.
Email #7: The Product Pitch
It’s finally here! Email #7. With this email, you want to be talking about your product. How it benefits your current customers, and most importantly, how it will benefit your subscribers.
Use this email to offer an exclusive deal. If your product has a free trial, give that immediately in this email. Provide your subscribers with an “easy way out”, to ensure that they don’t feel like they’re making a huge commitment by buying your product or service.
Remember, in all the emails up to this point, we’ve had calls to action. But they’ve only been at the very end of the emails. This email is different – the entire email should be dedicated to the value your product provides to its users.
Closing Thoughts
The 7-part newsletter is one of the most effective ways to turn traffic into buyers. And, as you can probably imagine, it’s not something that’s exclusive to one niche in particular. No, you can use this strategy in virtually any niche, selling virtually any product.
But the bottom line is, you have to provide MASSIVE value. If you’re not providing value with all the emails, your subscribers will get bored of your emails and unsubscribe. Additionally, they won’t view you as an authoritative source in your niche, making it very unlikely that they’ll buy your products.
Provide value and the 7-part email newsletter will funnel money into your bank account.
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