Converting people in a lifecycle email course
In this 3-part series, you learned:
Now let’s look at asking for the sale.
Your lifecycle email course is going to be all for nothing if you don’t ask for the sale.
You could read the word sale and take it too literally. The sale is not necessarily a financial transaction. The sale could be a follow up phone call with a sales person, or a demo of your product.
Or, it may be what you initially thought — a financial transaction.
When asking for the sale, a good place to start is the second to last email.
Why ask for the sale in the 2nd to last email?
Remember back at a school dance when you were a kid? Maybe there was someone you wanted to ask to dance. The later in the night it became, the more pressure there was when you thought about asking.
All of a sudden it’s the last dance. It’s a make or break situation. You’re running across the dance floor trying to ask your crush to dance. You don’t see that someone’s just spilled the punch, and you start slipping. So much for being calm, cool and collected.
Asking for the sale in the 2nd to last email reduces the build up and the pressure for a sale. It also gives you the ability to offer an option B in the last email.
The craziest sales email ever.
I wanted to share the craziest, longest sales email I’ve received. This is the sales email in a course from Ramit Sethi. I shrunk it down to fit on your screen.
I’m not saying that you should try what Ramit is doing here, but I think it’s worth observing how long the email is and how he builds up to the link at the bottom.
How do you ask for the sale?
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use AIDA to structure the sales email.
As a reminder, that structure is:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
With AIDA, you should be building, building, building towards the call to action. Everything else in the email reinforces why the person will benefit from taking the action.
In your call to action, focus on the outcome that the sale will provide. E.g.
- Choose your time for a free email strategy consultation
- Speed up your website in 30 minutes by signing up now
- Look sharp in a new custom suit — book your appointment today.
With this structure, it will be clear what people are supposed to do. You’re not going to get 100% conversion though.
What to do if people don’t take the deal?
You sweated building your conversion email, and you’re getting between 3% and 10% of people taking the deal. What about everybody else?
You now have a decision to make about how you’d like to continue the relationship. Here are 3 ideas for calls to action in your last email:
- Join our regular newsletter
- Join our community
- If this course was helpful, invite a friend to check it out.
Some people decide to auto-opt-in people who sign up for a course to their email newsletter. If you do this, you should certainly let people know that’s going to happen in the last email.
What else do you want to know about lifecycle emails / drip emails?
We barely scratched the surface together & this is a complicated topic.
A couple of paid options to learn more
Is there anything I haven’t covered yet that you want to know? Do you feel like you could get started building your first lifecycle email course or have I left you dangling missing something critical?
Let us know in the comments!