How Your Subscribers Can Tell You What Product to Create Next
Your list can – and will – tell you exactly which product you should create next. This is great for you because you know they’ll buy what you create! I’m going to outline several types of email you can use to connect with your subscribers and get them to reveal what their needs are.
The first type of engagement email is a statement and a question. At first glance it may look like a content email. If your content emails are normally 200 or 300 words, this engagement email would be around 20 to 30 words. It has a statement and a question about something in your niche.
Let’s imagine that we are in the swimming niche and we have a video-based coaching program that teaches people how to swim. What we would do is make a statement like the following:
“Some people feel afraid when they’re learning to swim because of XYZ”
Then I would make a psychological statement as to the reason why people are afraid of swimming.
A fear of drowning is one of the most common fears people have when they’re trying to learn to swim. Because of this, some people never learn to swim. Psychologists tell us that the reason why people fear swimming is because of XYZ.
If we were going to write a content email about this exact subject, we would have a 200 to 300 word email that explained a point. In this case, it would be the fear of drowning. We would offer suggestions on how to avoid it and how to overcome it. This is an old-style content email.
In our engagement email, we’re just going to have the first couple of statements and then we are going to ask an engagement question. The engagement question could say:
“What about you? Do you have a fear of swimming? If so, do you think that fear has something to do with a fear of drowning or is it something else? If it’s something else, what is it?”
Notice that what we have done by writing this statement in question pattern is we have gotten people emotionally involved with the statement that we have made about our niche. And now, we have asked a question that gets them engaged emotionally. Notice, we are not asking them to buy anything. What we are asking them to do, which is under the radar, is to get involved with our statement.
What will this allow us to do? Let’s imagine that we are able to involve people for 3 to 5 days in a number of different emotional states about swimming. Then, five days later, we launch a coaching program on swimming. Because we have emotionally engaged people will we have gotten to the point to where they emotionally trust us at a higher level.
I frequently make the statement:
People buy based on trust, not on the words on your sales page.
I believe this very strongly. You’ll find other strong email marketers making similar claims that they can send their list to a pay button without a sales page and still make sales because they have engaged their list properly through email.
If we emotionally engage people so that we are not only building a relationship and trust, but we are building it at an emotional level, then what’s going to happen is that when it comes time to buy, they’re not necessarily going to be concerned about bullet point number one, three, and five.
Over the last four or five days they have become emotionally involved in such a way that their thought is, “the only person that I would ever want to teach me is you.” Why? Because you have emotionally engage them.
Think of this idea of emotional engagement with the swimming example. The purpose of engagement emails is to get people to trust us on a deeper level. Therefore, in the future, they would take more action with us.
Throughout the following examples, the emotional impact that I have just shared will be very similar.
Email Type 2: Question Only
If we are going to use just a question, we need to have it framed in such a way in our email campaign that yesterday, or the day before yesterday, we have engaged people with some statements. Maybe statements and questions. So our question is not going to be out of the blue, it’s going to be part of the sequence that they received a little bit of yesterday, the day before, and the day before.
Just like you’re watching a series on television. There’s a pattern. For 13 weeks they have a certain amount of information, and we find something is going to happen in when series ends. This is also worked in individual TV shows. For example the show will end before a conflict or situation is completely finished. This is the cliffhanger effect.
This makes the television viewers sit at the edge of their seats; they make sure they schedule time to watch how it ended. This is what we want to do with our emails. Every email should lead us to the next email. If we’re going to have a “question only” email, we’re going to ask a question on what we have shared in the last few days.
In this framework, your question could run like this:
Yesterday we talked about people’s fears and drowning. But what about you? Do you have other an additional fears besides drowning that lead you to be afraid to just swim?
or
Are you struggling with the backstroke? If so, why? Think about it. Give this a couple minutes.
This is your question email. It’s short and sweet to the point.
Email Type 3: The Follow-up Question
In this type, we’re going to ask a follow-up question. Our follow-up question would look like this:
Yesterday we talked about your struggles with the backstroke. What other swimming techniques do you struggle with and why? Why do you think this is?
This will get those who are prone to engage with you to engage, and you can dig down into what’s going on and pull out product ideas from continuing discussion because many people will actually reply to the email. If you want to encourage replies, put something like: “P.S. Fee free to share your thoughts with me. Just hit ‘reply’ and send me your answer”
Paste all the replies you get from these emails into a document, organize them, build the framework for your product right there. You can even use some of your subscribers’ exact language to write the bullet points on your sales letters!