You’ve probably heard it a number of times by now…

“The money is in the list”.

Great. Cool. But, what does that mean? And why is it true? Does it mean you’re just constantly pitching to your list?

No, not at all.

If you back up to the last episode (#148) where I once again gave the bird’s eye view of how this whole business works, you’ll see how the primary purpose of the email list is to move people through your sales funnels.

Those funnels are like pipes…. and the more people you can keep inside those pipes, the more money you make. And the email list is literally the force which flows people through those pipes or gets them to re-enter those pipes.

In this episode of Coffee Break, I walk you through how this works. What happens when people get onto your list? What do you do with your “general list”? Are you constantly pitching?

Let me show you how this works.

So today let’s talk about how to use your email list to move people through your profit funnel; your sales funnel.

The whole purpose of the email list, really, is to keep people flowing through your blog profit funnels. Now the blog profit funnels; these are essentially your sales funnels. I would like to call them blog profit funnels, personally, because… You know, my whole business revolves around the blog and how everything tacks in to the blog, so I am fairly specific about the way that I define it. But at the same time, it is essentially a sales funnel. That is what it is.

The Sales Funnel Structure

Now, these sales funnels, you are going to have a few of them, ideally. And they, together make up what I like to call the business machine which sits behind your blog. Remember, the blog’s primary purpose is to attract people. And then the Lead Magnet is designed to get them to stick, kind of like a fly paper. And then once they have gone through that lead magnet and they are on your list, they are now inside of the business machine. Now, the business machine is composed of your funnels. And these funnels, generally speaking, have the layout of a front-end offer into a core offer, which in my case, I am a big fan of the membership site in that spot… And then they move up into higher end offers. That is the basic gist of it. And you can have multiple funnels. In fact, it is ideal that you do. Now, the components of these multiple funnels do not have to be different. For example; it’s not like every single funnel that you do needs to have a separate membership site or a separate core offer to put into that place. I mean, they can all point to the same thing, it is just that they have different front-end offers to get them there. This is all stuff we talk about, by the way, inside the Blog Monetization Lab, but I just want to make sure that you understand the basic structure there. And these funnels collectively go together to make up the business machine behind your blog.

Your Email List

Now, the list… your email list is designed to get people flowing through those funnels. You can look at these funnels kind of like a pipe. And each of these pipes have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is when a person subscribes to the lead magnet. And then at the end would be either when that person falls off and decides not to buy or when they kind of bought everything. But that is the pipe. That pipe has a link, and the more people that you can keep into that pipe, into that funnel, the more money you are going to make. It is that simple.

The more people that are actively engaged in one of your funnels, the more money you will make. And that actually should be something that you measure on a daily or weekly basis with your business. You know what your funnels are, and you should set it up to where you can actually measure and look at your email system and look at exactly how many people are actively in those email sequences at any given time. Because that will tell you how many people are actively being marketed to. Because your whole list is not going to be being marketed to simultaneously, not if you are doing this right… Now if you are sending the exact same message to every single person on your list, you are going to probably get more unsubscribes, they are going to be less interested because you might not be talking to them about what they are interested in at that point.  So if you are segmenting your list a little bit better, then people are going to be going through these funnels when they raise their hand and said they are interested in that particular thing. If they don’t then they are not going to be being marketed to; it is just basically going to be blog posts and stuff. Okay?

So looking at that, how do we measure how many people are being engaged in your funnels in any given time?

How Do You Measure Engagement?

Well, when you set this up; if you are on a list based system, kind of like Aweber where you have different email lists; or MailChimp, then what you would simply do is you know that that list is designed to deliver a particular autoresponder sequence to them. And so you can just basically look at how many people are on that list. And that will give you your figure.

Now if you are using a more advanced system that uses tags and it is a marketing automation platform; and this will be like InfusionSoft, Ontraport or ActiveCampaign, then this is even easier because part of that sequence is going to be that you can add a tag to their system at the beginning. Basically when they enter into the pipe, you can add a tag to their system. And a tag could be something like “Active Engagement” or “Active Marketing” or you can call this tag anything you want. And when they enter that pipe, part of that sequence is to add that tag to their profile. And then when they come off the other end of that pipe, the part of your sequence would be to remove that tag from their profile. And so what you can actually do is just set up a metric inside your system that says “How many people have that tag Active Marketing on their profile” and that will be your measure of how many people are actively inside on one of your funnels at any given time. Pretty simple and it is a very important metric.

But, let’s back up…

Your email list, again, is the primary mechanism for securing engagement with your funnels. Now, let’s mention here… The blog can do it; and a lot of people try; a lot of people use their email list primarily as a way to deliver latest blog posts and that type of thing. And so, that is really all they are using their list for and when they try to sell things, they are pretty much using the blog to do it usually by way of just having sales letter on the blog, maybe on your top navigation. You kind of cross your fingers and hope people will arrive on it and periodically maybe you link to the sales letter in your email list.

Well, that is a way to do it, but realize that the blog does not do the primary function of making sales. They are not really as engaged when they are on your blog. It is not nearly as effective at sales. The blog, as we have already stated, has the primary function of attracting people and engaging people. But that is about it! When it comes to making direct sales on the blog, it is generally going to be less effective. You are going to make most of your sales with your email list. This goes to the heart of why everybody worth their salt who talks about this stuff will talk about the importance of building your email list. That really is important. You don’t have a sales medium if you are not building up the list. That really is that simple.

So let’s talk about where people get on to this list and kind of generally how it moves people along… Well, when people subscribe to any one of your lead magnets, they are going to be put on to an automatic email sequence or an autoresponder that markets your front-end product. If you look at the Blog Monetization Model, that is kind of where the business machine starts; it is with the front-end offer. So when they opt-in to your lead magnet, the very first thing that you are going to do is you are going to deliver that lead magnet to them as promised.

So what happens after that?

Well, what happens after that is they are going to get a series of emails, it is generally not very long, maybe 3 or 4 days, that markets the front-end product to them. And I am not going to get to the specifics of copywriting here and what to say in those emails; that is all stuff that we talked about inside the Blog Monetization Lab, but just realize the big picture here… Somebody opts-in to a lead magnet and they are going to be put on to a 3 to 4 day, generally speaking, these are automatic emails that you have pre-written and they are designed to get the person to take the next step in your business machine which is going to be to buy your front-end offer.

Now if a person buys that front-end offer, then you are going to put them into a new email sequence. And this is going to be a sequence that only buyers are going to get. It is going to of course deliver the front-end product, make sure they got access to it and everything, but then it is going to proceed to get them to upsell into the next thing in your funnel.

And so I hope that you can see how the email list is designed to move people along by way of these autoresponder sequences that you write.

Now if the person doesn’t buy, which odds are, they are not… Let’s just be honest, even you are the best copywriter, you got the best product in the world, the majority of people are not going to buy what you offer to them. And that’s fine, it’s a fact of life. So if they don’t buy, what is going to happen is you can do one of two things… One is that you can move them to a cross-sell email sequence if you like. So you have an email sequence that is designed to sell another front-end offer that you have and you just move them over to that. Or you can basically let them fall off and get put on to your general list. Now the general list is basically the one that you do what most bloggers think of first and foremost, and that is letting people know about your latest blog post and things like that. That is what you do with your general email list. Most bloggers out there already kind of understand what to do with the general list. But what they fail to do is have the automatic email sequences in place to do the sales for them. So that is an important point.

Now once they are on your general list, what’s actually happening?

The General List

Well, as I said, you are sending them things like latest blog post, maybe tips, stories that you have to tell them about… You know, all the things that you would typically think of with a list. But I want you to keep the purpose of this in mind because this is important… The purpose is not to simply click over to your blog and read and then go back into the ether… the purpose is to get them to re-engage. The purpose is really to get them to re-enter a new funnel by way of an either a new front-end sale or a new lead magnet subscription. Okay?

Remember those pipes? These pipes are your funnels. And the more people you have inside those pipes at any given point, the more money you are going to make. So the purpose of your general list is to attract them so that they enter another one of those pipes. And so you get people who decide not to buy or they end up on your general list, most people will be there… And your job is to get them to re-engage and re-enter one of those pipes because that is how you are going to get them to buy something and turn them into a customer.

Now the way that you do that is not by constantly hitting them on the head with offer… Sale! Buy this! No, no, no… And most of us will probably not be comfortable of doing that. I am not ever condoning that you hit people over the head with offer after offer after offer… What you do with the general list is pretty much you are giving people free content at all times.

Now, periodically, you might offer a sale on a front-end offer or something like that, but most of the stuff that you send this people are just going to be free, helpful stuff. Now the key here, though, is that every single time you do that free and helpful stuff, you always have a call to action. And if they take that call to action, the result is going to be that they just re-entered one of your funnels. So every single time you present anything to your general list, it should have the purpose of getting somebody back in to one of your funnels. And that is either going to be by way of… maybe they click from your list directly into a front-end offer and they buy. Great! They skipped the lead magnet altogether.

But another way that you can do it is to tell them about another lead magnet. That is why you need to have more of these things. You need to have multiple lead magnets. Because if they opt-in to one of your new or secondary lead magnets, they just reactivated themselves as a person interested in that and then you can bring them down into a new sales funnel that talks about that and maybe get some to buy something based around that particular topic.

So that is essentially how that works…

Now, here’s the thing… That was kind of a bird’s eye view. I hope it made sense to you. That being said, I have a full Action Plan that walks you through all these. It is in graphical formats. Everything I just said to you verbally you are actually going to see it; so if you had a hard time understanding it you’ll see it. Not only that, we talk a lot more about what you actually say in those emails and how to structure this list together and how it actually works. And that Action Plan is called The Email Followup Engine and you will find it exclusively inside the Blog Monetization Lab.

See, a lot of stuff that we talk about in this podcast, I go into it in much more detail, in a way that you can actually execute at Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, inside the Blog Monetization Lab. I mean, that is why the Lab exists. So if you want to put that into use, and you really need to because you just have a blog and you are sending people onto links and maybe you got a sales page for a product and it is just kind of showing up on your sidebar with a banner and that type of thing, that is going to be ineffective and I am going to be really surprised if you are making that many sales. The way to do it is to have the email follow up engine in place. So in order to figure out how to build that for yourself and get the walkthrough on this, you need to go through the Email Followup Engine Action Plan.

Thank you so much and I will see you next time here on Coffee Break Blogging!