There is no doubt about it, email marketing is popular among those who are succeeding online. From the “gurus” to the person quietly earning a six-figure income, email marketing is the most popular form of marketing you can find.
It’s popular because it works!
But it is working for you?
If you answered no (or not yet) I hope this article will help you see how to use follow up email marketing in your own life.
Here is a question I am often asked …
When it comes to affiliate marketing, should you have a follow up system?
Should you put up a squeeze page, have a series of emails that go out after a period of time and then try to make affiliate sales that way?
I believe you should.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now, I’ve sold a lot of affiliate products, and I’ve sold a lot of my own products.
My experience indicates that using an email follow up system is by far the easiest, fastest, and most effective way to succeed with affiliate marketing for people of all types of experience.
Whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been around for a while or you’re an expert, using a follow up system is really the most powerful way to market.
There are three huge advantages to using a follow up system and I’ll share those with you today.
1. It is the easiest way to sell the main product you are promoting.
Let’s say you are promoting a product that you really believe in and you love. The fact is out of 100 people who buy that product, there might only be a few people who bought it for the same reason as you.
For every product out there, there are a variety of reasons to buy.
- Some people want to try to get a benefit of some sort. They want a promise of gain.
- Some people want to try to avoid some kind of painful experience. They want to avoid loss.
There are many reasons to buy a particular product, and you can identify those with a little thought about what you’re selling.
Then you can send an email about each one of those reasons to your list and let your messages connect with their motivations, even though you don’t know them personally!
- You can write a message about a promise of gain, “If you buy this product you will get this great thing,”
- You can also write messages about avoiding problems.
You can address both of these motivations easily in a great follow up system.
Whether you are promoting a weight loss product or you are promoting a “how to make money” product or a relationship product, it doesn’t much matter.
There are going to be multiple motivations for buying that product and the easiest way to sell it is going to be to have one email message for each major motivation of buying that product.
2. You can sell other products to the same buyers.
With follow up email marketing you don’t only have to promote the main product that the person signed up for.
You can also offer them other products.
So if they liked this, maybe they’ll also like that.
Or if they don’t want this, maybe instead they want that.
It’s perfectly fine to do that. It just needs to be done well. You won’t get ahead blasting your list five times a day with the latest and greatest “special offer” from the forums.
But you will do well if you offer products to your list that help them and make sense in relation to why they joined your list.
Ultimately, with a follow up system, you can not only promote the main product but you can also promote other products.
An easy way to do that is to find products that compliment the main product you are promoting.
So let’s say that you’re selling a “how to make money online” system.
A person who joins a business opportunity is going to need an autoresponder.
They are going to need an ad tracking system, and they are probably going to need some copywriting.
They might need to buy some private label rights products, all of which you can promote once they are on your list.
3. You can ask the people on your list what they need, go out and get it, and offer it to them.
It’s been said for a long, long time now that the best way to do business is to find a need and fill it.
The way that you find that need is that you develop a communication relationship; you develop a relationship through communication with the people who are on your list.
Ask them what they want.
It might be a formal survey, it might be just an email message to say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you. I’m wondering what your needs are and how I can help.”
This way, you find out exactly what they need.
The easiest way possible to take a survey, is just to send an email and say, “Been thinking about you, wondering how I can help. Just hit reply and let me know what you need. Do you need traffic? Do you need to make money? Do you need to save time? Do you need to lose weight? What is it that you need?”
Then you find a product that’s well suited to their needs – one that you can believe in, one of that you can promote with all your heart – and you offer that product to them.
Can you imagine how much more likely they’ll be to buy when they know you’ve gone out and found that product specifically for them, based on their needs?
So these are three powerful reasons to use a follow up system as an affiliate. You can promote your main product, and future products down the line, more easily and more automatically with a follow up system.
Think about this for a second.
Once you create your follow up system and you program it into your autoresponder, like Aweber, then a person comes along and joins your list today, tomorrow or two years from now, they are going to get the same series of messages automatically.
They get exposed to all those selling messages, but you only had to enter all that into your auto responder once.
It’s a great way to sell your main product, and a great way to sell other products especially when those products complement the main thing you’re promoting.
It’s also a great way to do market research for free to find out what people need.
I hope you choose to build a follow up system for your affiliate marketing because most affiliates aren’t doing this. This is what super affiliates do – it’s not what the bottom 2% do, it’s what the top 2% do.
When you combine a follow up system with affiliate marketing you will have a beautiful thing indeed!
