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Terra,

Thanks for listening and recommending our podcast. Here are my insights on your questions:

How often do you guys find that the emails you send out produce sales from people who were undecided on your products?

All the time. There will always be people who don’t buy on the first contact. If you don’t follow up with interested prospects, you are leaving money on the table. Your mileage will vary, but their is truth to the statement that the majority of customers buy on the 2nd to 7th contact. The last time we sent an promotion to the Internet Business Mastery list, half of the sales came from the 2nd and 3rd email.

The email list is also about building and maintaining a relationship to create lifetime customers.

Over a period of say, 2-3 months, what is average in terms of conversions to actual sales?

Their are too many factors that play into conversion to give a definite answer, but keep in mind that you can make money if even 2-3% of your list buy.

What’s most important is to track these things for your situation so you know how much it costs you to acquire each optin lead and then how much it costs you to acquire each sale. This will let you know how much you can spend on advertising and still make money or cut even. Some information marketers cut even on the first purchase because they know the Lifetime Value (LTV) of each customer. They make all their money on the back end.

And also, what has been your experience with people unsubscribing?

There will always be people that unsubscribe when you send out offers. Don’t take it personally. It is just part of the process. Think of it as cleaning your list. Those who unsubscribe are not the kind of customer you’re looking for anyway. Weed them out.

It’s pretty typical to have at least one or two people unsubscribe when you send out an email. The number will be higher if the list is quite large. This is nothing to worry about, though, unless people are really leaving in droves.

Jay

Gregg,

That is an good questions and a very useful technique to know. I will prepare an article and post it in the near future. I will also post the link to the answer the in the comments here. Stay tuned.

Allan,

You’re not doing anything wrong. The podcast feed is set to only have a certain number of episodes in it. I just raised that number so that all the episodes are available in the feed. If you right-click on our podcast title in iTunes and select “Update Podcast” it should now show all the episodes.

Enjoy!

David,

You bring up some excellent points. Switching your email list from one service to another can be a pain. There are many trade-offs. It may or may not be worth going through the process you described. I’m not sure what service you currently use, but it may have everything you need already.

Although we recommend Aweber, if you’re happy with your own (or don’t see an advantage worth the hassle of transition) then by all means stay with what you have.

I’m currently debating whether to transfer one of my own lists. At present it’s on a service that provides all the basic features I need, but it
doesn’t have some of the tracking of Aweber. I know that in transitioning I’ll lose some people from the list. Some of those will be people that are just not interested anymore anyway. (We all want that gratification of a “big” list, but it’s just as important to have a clean, focused list.) But some of them might still be at least mildly interested, but will fall through the cracks of the re-confirmation process.

This is why it’s important to get set up the right way early on with your email list. There are cheaper (or even free) solutions, but later on it could cause problems when you’re ready for a full-featured service and want to switch over.

Thanks for bringing up those important points.

Josh,

I used to live in SLC. Sterling lives there now.

As for your questions….

Is it difficult to find the balance between informative communication that results in sales and just spamming your customers until they hate you?

Personally I don’t think it’s hard at all as long as you keep the real goal in mind–to establish a relationship with the people on your email list. This is especially true when you are trying to position yourself as a thought leader.

It could be that the car dealership actually did have a focus–to sell the hell out of the list because the ongoing value is not their for them. Personally I think that’s short sighted and they are just missing the mark (killing the goose to get the gold so to speak).

There will always be people who flee your list at the first sign of selling. So be it. But you want to keep those “ideal” prospects around in order to move them through your sales/relationship funnel.

Ultimately you want to make money, too. This is about having a more longterm vision for your list and the trust you build with them. Keep that in mind and it will lead to more sales in the long run.

Can you give me an idea of how many listeners you have and how that has helped your business? We are hoping that the podcast could help position us as thought leaders in this category.

We will be talking soon on the show about branding yourself as an expert (or thought leader) online using social media such as blogging and podcasting. For me it has worked really well. Neither of us planned on being seen as experts in this space, but the Internet Business Mastery just made it happen. More people listen to it than we ever expected.

The same goes for my podcasting tips blog and Podcasting Underground podcast. Many of my business activities and clients have come about as a result of my “visibility” online through these media.

You can get great results from even having a few hundred listeners (although our podcast gets a lot more than that). It comes back to developing relationships which in the end lead to more leads, longer client retention, shorter sales cycle, greater lifetime value (LTV) of your customers, etc.

I would say, you should start a blog today. Start there and see what happens. Then you can try putting resources into podcasting after you get that running and see the results. Again, stay tuned to the show for more on this.

Best of luck.

Gary,

To answer your questions:

How are we to use these articles for self promotion, especially in an autoresponder? Is this not stealing intelectual property?

If the articles that you are referring to are from the Niche Kingdom, that is a services that provides articles that can be use by you as you please. You can use them as web site copy, you can use them in a blog, you can put them in a course, etc.

You are not required to credit anyone. They were written with the understanding that they would be used that way.

The best thing to do is to use them as a start and add to the content in some way.

when writting eBooks, is it ok to link to different sources on the web? - link to content that you did not originally author.

You’re free to link to whatever you want in your ebook or on your site. You can’t use the actual content (beyond using an attributed quote) unless you have permission. But you can link to stuff all you want.

Eric,

1ShoppingCart is much more of a complete commerce system. It is also very popular, but very expensive. When it comes just an email management system, we prefer aweber.