You need to have an email list, that’s given. You also need to have a separate even list for every product and every membership site you have as well. But it doesn’t even stop there. You should have a prospect list and a buyer’s list. That way, you can give people who are slightly interested in your offer but have not yet bought more reasons to get in and you can give messages to people who have bought and send them reminders to consume your content on a regular basis. Fortunately, with most modern autoresponders, you can even set up several rules so that if somebody is on your prospect list and joins your buyer’s list as well, it removes them from the prospect list. What this does is it keeps on bugging them to join until they do join and then it stops.
So, always have at least one pre-sell and post-sell list for your membership site. When creating the follow-ups for your pre-sell lists, and these are more reasons to deliver it every few days to purchase, just look at your sales letter. Look at the reasons you give for somebody to join your membership site. Look at the problems you lay out and how you solve those problems. Look at the common objections people usually have for membership sites and how your sales letter resolves them. Your email sequence is just your sales letter cut up into little tiny pieces. You should have at least 10 follow-ups sent out every single day to your prospects. If you need more than that, then add more at the end, send out every few weeks, and then every few months, just to make sure that people are reminded even weeks or months later, why it’s so important that they join. Then, add your post-sell lists and all you need to do is simply tell them upfront what to look forward to, what’s coming, and then send one message per week telling them what they missed or participated in that week and then a link back to the blog where they can log in and consume more of the content.
I’ve said in the past that if you have different membership levels that are drastically different, have those be sublists. But most of the time, for one single membership site, you can get away with just having one single email sublist and just one single set of follow-up messages. But when you have free offers, don’t get carried away creating lots and lots of sublists.
Let’s say you have one single membership site and it’s about real estate, you have a membership site about how to get started in real estate. And you create a simple audio interview that you use as an opt-in bribe as a gift to get people to get on the list. So, that’s one of your sublists. That’s just your pre-sell sublist. So, the bribe gets them on your pre-sell sequence. But then you make a report, a 5-page report, also about something getting started in real estate. Do you need to create a separate sublist for that? The answer is no. You send them on the same sublist because the message is the same, and you still want them to have more reasons to get into your paid membership site. So, why make it complicated? Why event all these extra sublists when you can put your effort into more marketing? When you can put your effort into more opt-in bribes?
So, have the same pre-sell sublists for these different bribes. Just create more bribes and create more sales letters, send more emails, focus your energy on that. But bare minimum, for your membership site, you should have at least one post-sell list to keep them updated and one pre-sell list to give them reasons to buy.
I hope I’ve opened your eyes to the real focus you should have on your membership sites. It’s on the marketing, not on the content. Give me permission to help you out and get you making a membership site much faster.