How do you get your fans to get more involved in your business? Or how do you find such new people in the first place?
You set up a free newsletter course.
We recently got 28 signups in eight days for a spirituality course for one of our nonprofits. We used both paid advertising and organic posts on a Facebook page to publicize it.
Now, our client has 28 more curious people on their newsletter list. And they have their email addresses and names for followup.
The offer was a free seven-day course. It was made up from previous newsletters, which was easy to do. The course was set up on Constant Contact with a feature that the industry calls an autoresponder. MailChimp has the feature, too, as do most newsletter programs.
When the person signs up for the course, they get a welcome email right away, and then one email each day for seven days. It matters not when they sign up. And you can set the course for as many days as you want. The course starts the day after the person signs up. The program runs automatically. Once you set it up, all you have to do is publicize it.
Another client of ours got nearly 600 signups in two months after our course, “Free Benedictine Course in Spirituality,” went viral.
The free course has a different appeal than that of a normal newsletter. You don’t get the often-heard response, “Ugh – not another newsletter.”
The person thinks, “Hey, I’d like to learn more about how to do easy maintenance on my car, three places to meet good dates, or how to watch for telltale signs of sickness in my dog,” for example. Furthermore, they think, “I’m getting a free course, and I won’t get flooded with emails afterwards.”
After the course, you can send them a newsletter once a month without getting them upset.
Marketing expert Perry Marshall says that his research shows that you can double sales with an autoresponder, as compared to a simple sales page driven by a Google ad. He calls it the “drip, drip, drip” method, since you keep your message before the person day after day.
Then you can draw them into another course, ask them to like your Facebook page, or develop their interest in other ways.
