Develop A Game Plan For The Future

We touched a little at the end of yesterday’s blog post on the whole idea of moving forward and continuing to improve our email marketing game. Trust me, there’s always room for improvement, for anyone, including me. While an audit like this is a great way to update and improve things, it’s just as important to keep an eye on things and tweak them more regularly going forward. At the same time, it’s easy to put this task on the back burner and focus on new and exciting or more urgent tasks instead. That’s why it’s important to make a plan to keep improving your auto-responder going forward.

Let’s start by looking at some of the things we already talked about. It’s a good idea to review your lead magnet and consider changing it out every three to six months. Go ahead and put that on the calendar. As previously mentioned, you also want to continue to add new auto-responder messages to the list. You can either set aside a particular day of the week to do that or work on it in larger batches. Let’s say you’re going to add one new email message per week. You could put it on the calendar as a weekly activity that gets done every Tuesday morning for example. Or, if you prefer to work in batches, you could set aside a day every couple of months where you write and add 3 months’ worth of emails. Find a rhythm that works for you and then get in the habit of doing it regularly.

Next, I want to share three other tasks related to listing building and email marketing that you want to plan on doing regularly going forward. They are all important as is everything we’ve talked about so far. Make them a priority, put them on the calendar and get it done. Your list and your business will grow that much faster when you do.

The first thing is to make it a habit to look at your opt-in stats. We talked in earlier posts about how much you can learn from them. Look at open rates and unsubscribes in particular. The most important stat for your bottom line is of course how many people take you up on your offers. Study any email offers or solo emails that are converting well for you and try to do more along those lines.

Next, you want to look at your opt-in conversion rates. Play around with your opt-in forms and pages, the placement of the forms, the copy, etc. and see if you can get that percentage to go up. Most auto-responder services give you the ability to split test your forms and pages. Take advantage of that. Set up tests and always have one running. Continue to try to beat your previous conversion rate.

Last but not least consider setting up different opt-in funnels. You can target specific subsets of your target audience with special funnels designed just for them. This allows you to speak directly to them and their particular needs. Of course, you could also go wide by setting up a funnel on a related topic that your current readers may also be interested in. Continue to grow your list by setting up new funnels and new autoresponders on a regular basis.

xoxo,

Mimi