It almost goes without saying that building a targeted email list of high-quality subscribers should be the priority of every online marketer – especially beginners.
Much like a savings account or investment in a stock, an email list is an asset for long-term growth.
In the same way that adding more money to your savings account earns you more interest over time, increasing your “balance” of email subscribers swells the returns from each of your campaigns.
Most marketers, however, hit a brick wall when it comes to monetizing their lists quickly and effectively – and, unfortunately, traditional education in this area may be sabotaging their efforts.
Here, then, are the steps you can take that will get your list earning you solid revenue at the earliest available opportunity.
Stop the “Toe Dipping”
Conventional wisdom suggests that, when a subscriber joins your list, you should first promote only low-ticket, “easy” purchases, such as $10 eBooks or basic courses.
Should that subscriber invest in one of those products, the next step – so this thinking goes – is to offer mid-ticket, more advanced items for, say, $97 to $297.
Only if the subscriber invests in your mid-ticket offer is it then “safe” for you to start promoting higher-ticket items selling for $500 or more. By having demonstrated enough sustained trust in you as a salesperson, the time is now ripe for you to solicit deeper investments from this individual.
In other words, you should approach each new subscriber in the same way that a child learning to swim approaches a pool. You first dip in your toe from the edge, and then only after mastering the shallower waters can you progress to the deep end.
Now, while this gradualized approach to monetization can and does work, it suffers from one crushing drawback:
You’ll be waiting an awfully long time to earn serious money!
In fact, you could easily exhaust your startup capital with this method while receiving only a trickle of revenue in return.
Here’s why:
Low-Ticket Losers
Let’s say you spend (in either time or money) $500 on driving traffic to your opt-in pages. Suppose further that this effort adds 500 new subscribers to your list. ($1 per subscriber is an excellent lead acquisition cost, by the way).
Now let’s say that, to recoup this cost, you offer these budding subscribers a $10 eBook. That means that you have to find a total of 50 people – 10% of your subscriber base – willing to buy.
From amongst a small pool of cold to lukewarm leads, finding 50 people willing to part with even 10 bucks is extraordinarily difficult – especially if you are just starting out.
It will take you weeks, if not months, to fully nurture the requisite number – and that’s only to break even!
Moreover, what will you do with the leads who never buy? Keep offering an endless ream of $10 eBooks in the hope that one of them will bite.
High-Ticket Winners
The solution is to reverse this funnel by promoting a high-ticket offer first and your low-ticket offers later while segmenting your list at each price point.
Now, while this might sound counterintuitive, think, first of all, about the numbers:
As we already mentioned, you’d have to find 50 buyers to cover your ad spend if your offer costs just $10.
But with a $500 offer, you’d have to make just one sale to accomplish the same result.
That’s it – one, single person happy to whip out their credit card is all you need.
And, believe me, it’s much easier finding one person willing to pay $500 than it is searching for 50 people who will pay $10.
After you’ve won that first buyer, any other sales are pure profit. Should you find two or three buyers – again, entirely possible – then you’ve doubled or tripled your money respectively.
Steps to Build a High-Ticket List Funnel as an Affiliate
If you don’t have your own high-ticket product to promote, then you can do so easily as an affiliate.
There is, however, a precise formula you must follow if your campaign is to be effective:
- Find a high-ticket offer sold via a webinar. Promote free access to the webinar on your opt-in page – no need to create a separate lead magnet. Webinars are the best way to build a relationship quickly with a new lead – long sales pages are unlikely to work.
- Create a short video for your “thank you” page encouraging your leads to register for the webinar. This is an important step for building up your personal “know, like, and trust” element with new subscribers.
- Enter each new subscriber to an email campaign encouraging them to register for the webinar. The vendor should help you with email swipes, but remember to rewrite them in your own words. Try also to vary the campaign by offering free eBooks, videos, or other formats that promote the webinar.
- Make sure the vendor follows up with each registrant on your behalf after they register for the webinar (they usually will).
- Transfer the leads who buy to a “super segment” of high-ticket buyers. You can then consider marketing $1,000, $5,000, or even $10,000 coaching programs to this list.
Promoting to the Non-Buyers
Question: What’s the best way to encourage someone to spend $100 on your product?
Answer: Tell them it costs $500, then discount it.
Once your high-ticket campaign is complete, start marketing to the non-buyers a similar offer but for a lower cost. Present this as the “affordable alternative” you’ve discovered that caters especially to those concerned about cost.
You can then segment the leads investing in this offer to your list of mid-ticket buyers.
As for those who still haven’t bought, whittle them down gradually through other offers to the $10 eBook level, segmenting each at their level of willingness to buy.
In other words, through this method, you’re swimming from the deep to the shallow end rather than vice versa, discovering where in the pool each subscriber is most comfortable.
Indeed, unless you’re a certifiable genius at targeting traffic, your new leads will be a mixed bag of different levels of experience and financial circumstances.
Ongoing low-ticket offers are never going to reveal to you their buying preferences.
Get Paid to Build Your Email List
I have heard at least three respected marketers say that if you can break even while building your list, then you are building that list for free.
The method outlined here, however, has the potential to go one step further:
You can get paid to build your email list.
Think about that for a moment:
You can earn profits by building a long-term, cash-generating asset.
Now, this doesn’t mean to say that all of this will be easy. There is quite a lot of skill required in setting up an effective high-ticket campaign marketed to new leads.
So if you want to get ahead on the learning curve, your best bet is to choose a high-ticket campaign that has been done for you.
A solution that takes away all of the time and expense of guesswork…
A direct line to the offers, promotions and campaigns that have been proven to convert:
Claim your done-for-you high-ticket list builder here.
This is a gues post written by Duncan Whitmore, if you wish to be considered for a guest post then please get in touch with me.
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