Engage Your Leads For Longer
Before we head to the next section we need to ensure that you get the power of engaging your leads for longer. Again, you can 5x your business just by applying this principle, because 85% of customers buy after the first 90 days.
The first way you do this is right as they become leads. Using multiple lead magnets across multiple formats, you can spend more time with your new leads. Take, for example, a lead who came into your business through a scorecard. At this point, they’ve spent 3-5 minutes with you. So you invite them at the end of the scorecard to sign up for a free workshop that you offer 1-2 times per month. That’s another 40-90 minutes they can spend with you. In the week leading up to that workshop, they’re getting your email series, which points to different YouTube videos and podcast episodes, so they can spend even more time with you.
Within a 1-2 week period, they’ve now spent hours with you, both in person and asynchronously because of the system you built to go deep with each new lead. By the time they are presented with an offer at your free workshop, they have so much more context and you’ve created more tension that they are more open to working with you.
Now that you’ve gone deep, you also need to go long. This is where a simple newsletter comes into play.
A newsletter or weekly email is an opportunity to provide ongoing value to your leads and customers. These don’t need to be 3,000-word blog posts. They can be a simple principle, a link to a video or podcast, or a resource.
Or, like my favorite email marketer André Chaperon, you can build an entire world for your new leads to explore. You show them a door, invite them to enter, and then you’ve carved some paths for them to wander at their own pace and wherever their curiosity takes them.
By showing up in their email inbox every single week - ideally on the same day and time so that it becomes a habit - you stay top of mind when it comes to that topic or need. If you’re constantly showing up and giving value - rather than just asking them to buy again - you nurture that affinity and trust with your audience.
When I was starting in this space I chose to write a book in public. I would share chapters as they were written on social media, my blog, and my newsletter. Over the three months that I was writing and sharing those chapters, my email list grew from 400 to 1200 people. My social media following doubled as well. After that, each new subscriber to my email list got a link to read the chapters for free on my blog or purchase a physical copy of the book. That’s led to thousands of people reading my book over the last two years, and amazing opportunities to speak, partner, and create new things.
A book is an invaluable resource - a business card on steroids. If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, I highly recommend that you do. Do it publicly, build your audience, and use the book as a lead magnet after it’s written. Especially for first-time authors, the upside of a book is not the sales, it’s the ability to better connect with your prospects and leads. They’re able to spend hours with “you” and your ideas before they ever are presented with an offer. That’s such an incredible asset for your business.
Your simple newsletter should go out weekly and include something valuable. I like to ask the question “What would my audience be willing to pay $1,000 for, that I could give them for free through my lead magnets and weekly emails?” That puts you in the right frame of mind to create tons of value.
If you don’t want to create another job for yourself, then consider writing the emails once and putting them into a sequence rather than broadcasting them out every week manually. With a sequence, you can schedule the emails to go out on a set schedule to everyone, and they start at email 1, rather than whatever issue you’re writing now. I did this in 2017 with an earlier book called Daily Mormon. I was doing research for a different - yet-to-be-released book - and found that I had over 330 references that I could share with people. So I started a daily email newsletter as a sequence and added to it every day for over 11 months. By the end, I had written over 50,000 words, published a book containing all of the emails, and had an email list of 2,500+ people. When I published the book I had my first sales and reviews from that audience. That email list is still running today, 5 years later, and I haven’t touched it once since the book came out.
Assets like lead magnets, books, and email newsletters are essential to the success of your business. They engage with your prospects, leads, and clients on your behalf, which means you can engage at scale. Every time you create something new - a podcast episode, a video, a blog post - think about how you can use it as an asset for your business. Can you link to it from your welcome sequence, or add it to your newsletter sequence? After a few years, you’ve likely said everything you need to say to help someone achieve the outcome they’re after. Now you need to make sure that you’re doing the final step of making sure every new lead sees it.
TAKE ACTION
Go through your content and put it into a new sequence and share it week after week with your audience, automatically. Look at what other lead magnets you can create and how they can point to each other. Make sure your lead magnets also add new leads to your welcome and newsletter email sequences so that it all happens automatically.
Sponsored By Lulu.com
The team at Lulu has been an incredible partner since I released my last book, Craftsman Creative - How Five-Figure Creators Can Build Six-Figure Businesses.
We've partnered on this next book, Blockbuster, to share the ins and outs, the behind the scenes of writing and publishing a book in public.
To learn more about how Lulu can help you get your book out into the world, visit lulu.com by clicking the button below:
NEXT CHAPTER
Daren Smith
PREVIOUS CHAPTER
Daren Smith
Member discussion