Pat Flynn
Imagine you’re in this scenario: You have an online business as a graphic designer coach, which means you teach other graphic designers how to make money with their talent. You have a coaching program that has videos and tutorials about how to contact potential clients and really expand their own freelance graphic design business.
To promote your $497 coaching program, you decide to hold a free webinar where you’ll be giving a short presentation and then pitching your course to whoever is watching. 300 people come online to watch your presentation. At the end of your extremely helpful and convincing webinar, you tell your audience about your coaching program, why it will sky-rocket their graphic design business, and where to get it. You also tell them that if they have any questions, to shoot you an email. You go to bed with dreams of seeing an inbox full of transactions in the morning.
You wake up to see that you have 75 unread messages in your inbox! Payday baby! But wait…
You open your inbox to see that you’ve only sold 4 programs, and the other 71 messages are questions from the webinar. 71 emails that you have to go through, some of which are a bit lengthy.
At this moment, how you would feel?
Go ahead, really think about it for a second…
Do You Think Like an Internet Marketer?
If you’d be pissed, you’re definitely not alone. When I first started doing business online, I would HATE to get emails from potential or existing customers. I setup my business to be as passive and as automated as possible, so whenever I got an email in my inbox, I would get a bit angry, especially when they came in waves of 2-5 emails at a time, which wasn’t all too rare.
You might think this post is about how to minimize the emails you get from your audience, but you’re wrong. In fact, this post is about how to embrace these emails, and why they are good for us.
If instead of getting pissed, you saw these emails as a golden opportunity—then you’re thinking like a successful online entrepreneur. Let me explain…
Emails Are Good
An email from a person means that this person took time out of their day to contact you and engage in a conversation. This is HUGE for any business. Any time you can engage with a customer, especially one on one, you’re more likely to close a deal and make a sale. Think about it. These emails are from SUPER TARGETED customers, not only because they were from people who watched your webinar, but because they actually have a question about whatever product it is you’re offering!
Embrace these emails. Answer their questions better than anyone ever has and impress the crap out of them. If you can do that for them, there’s a good chance they will either do one or more of the following:
- Buy from you
- Give you a great review or a testimonial
- Recommend you to a friend
- Become an affiliate
- Always remember you
This Isn’t Just for Webinars
It was smart of you to announce your email address on the webinar so people with questions could contact you. Chances are, most of these people were probably on the edge of buying your product, and just needed a little push, which can come from an outstanding response to their emails. If you can email those people back and blow them away, then they’ll definitely be more than happy to pay you.
This doesn’t apply just to webinars though, this applies to any shape or form that you have a presence online. I see so many websites and blog owners out there that try and make it so hard for people to contact them. They hide their email addresses or contact forms deep in their websites where no one will find it. What does that say about that person? What does that say about their business or blog?
Make it super easy to get a hold of you, embrace those emails, and you’ll be rewarded.
