AP 0401: What Happens When I Add New Autoresponder Emails?

AskPat 401 Episode Transcript

Pat: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 401 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have a great question today from David, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor.

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Okay, here's today's question from David.

David: Hi Pat. It's David here from Bartenderhq.com in the UK, which is a bartending website for new bartenders wanting to improve their skills. There's also a podcast with it, and I've got a mailing list set up using AWeber that you recommended. My question is, with the short orders from the sequence that I've got at the moment, if I was to add more auto-responder messages, will they go out to the people that are already subscribed, or will purely go to new subscribers who get to that point in the list?

I don't want to obviously not know what's going to happen beforehand. I do want to really increase the length of my auto-responder sequence, especially now I have my first product, which I launched a few weeks ago on how to memorize cocktails easily. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this Pat, and thank you for all the great work that you do for everyone. Cheers.

Pat: Hey David, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I am so happy to hear kind of the progression that you have here. So you came out with a product, and you're coming out with. . . you're increasing your auto-responder series, and some … I have a couple resources I want to share with you, and for everybody else out there listening that will be really helpful alongside this topic, and that is, Smart Passive Income Episode 143, and Smart Passive Income Episode 159, if you want to really quickly get to any of episode of the Smart Passive Income podcast, just go to smartpassiveincome.com/episode and then the number, so SmartPassiveIncome.com/session143 or SmartPassiveIncome.com/session159.

The short answer to your question is, yes. Anybody, especially on AWeber, because I use AWeber, and I know it very well, if you have, let's say for example, you have five emails in your auto-responder series, if you add a sixth one at the end there, everybody who is at the last one will get that email as if it was just a broadcast. If you send that email after the amount of days that you say to send between the previous email and that new one.

For example, if you have five emails, and people have been sitting on that last email, for two weeks, if you say that the next email that comes out, email number six that you're writing right now comes out seven days after the previous one, well they'll get that new one, because it's after the seven days. If you say it's going to be a month later, then they'll be within that month, and they won't get it, until that month comes by.

Now, what happens is people go through your emails, they get tagged in AWeber with a number based on the last email that they read. Then based on whatever how many days they have left until the next one comes out, that's when they get it, so yes, those people at the end of your series, if you come out with another one, that comes out for example the day after the previous and they've been on for a while, they're going to get that one that very day that it comes out. That's exactly what happens.

Now there are some things you can do and I would recommend in the future, especially now that you have a product to start thinking about how you can segment your list. You can do this in AWeber as well. You can figure out, okay, who buys the product? Those people go and get switched out and put onto a different list. I don't know exactly what kind of cart you're working with, but some carts and other advanced tools allow you to have it so that when somebody purchases a product of yours, it kind of talks to AWeber, through an API, and it tells AWeber to switch that person from this list to this list.

You can also do it manually using AWeber, if for example. . . there's ways to set rules in AWeber, for example you can say, when people get on list B, you can remove them from list A. So maybe you have everybody on list A, these are your prospects, and then you have set it up so that your cart sends an email to people who buy a product, and they have to click on a link to be able to subscribe to that secondary list of customers that you have. You can tell AWeber to say, well when they sign up and get a product, and when they get onto that new list for people who are already customers, you can have them automatically removed from the other one.

The reason you would want to that, is because you don't want to have emails being sent to people who have already had the product talking about buying the product, right? You don't want to send a “Hey, you can buy this product,” when they already have it. So that's the whole reason for doing that. That would be kind of the next level, but even before you get to that, just work on extending your auto-responder series and that's where these episodes 143 and 159, kind of play a roll, because they each talk about how the guest who came on talked about how he doubled the length of his email lists, and also had tripled the sales as a result of doing that, because people need more time to think about buying, and more calls to action.

You might want to start thinking about what's going to be in those emails as well. Some of those emails might target a specific demographic that you have, maybe it’s male bartenders, and then maybe another email, maybe it's a female who read that first one, and they weren't interested, but then the next one is about a female bartender, and maybe it's just a story about them, and it doesn't necessarily say, “Hey if you're female read this,” It just. . . Everybody reads it, but because the main character, the person who had purchased your product and leaving that testimonial or some story about a bartender because it's a female, the other females who are in your audience, who read that maybe they'll respond better.

You can target different demographics based off of different stories you tell, case studies, testimonials. Give valuable tips as well, you might hit a person right where they need to in order to say yes to buying your product. If you have a very short auto-responder, you're limiting the chances to that, and if they haven't bought yet, you can continue to send them emails, again, just try to respectful and think about, you know, make sure you're not sending 20 emails a day obviously, that's on one extreme.

But, you also don't want to wait a month between asking as well. You have the right to, if you have a product, especially if you know it's valuable, you have a right to ask that person, “Hey, is this something that you would be interested in? If you weren't interested in it before, well maybe this will convince you.” And then you can go from there. I am really excited to hear how this pans out for you David. I appreciate you calling, and I appreciate your support.

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Thanks so much, I appreciate you, and as always, we like to end it with a quote here on AskPat, and this quote today is from our good friend Chris Ducker at ChrisDucker.com, and also Youpreneur.com. He says, “Your vibe attracts your tribe.” It absolutely does, your vibe attracts your tribe. Cheers. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thank you.