You know already you need to build a tribe, right? I mean you may call it your list (I tell my clients not to, for a variety of reasons), your community (better), your army of raving fans, or whatever, but you know you need to gather a bunch of people around you who care about what you have to say to them. You'll have heard that over and over again.
You also probably know that having built your tribe you need to engage with them, and the bare minimum for that is an email sequence or "autoresponder series".
The problem a lot of business owners have is that it's easy to write 20 emails, but that doesn't make an autoresponder sequence.
There’s a key thing they’re missing.
So I want to tell you what that is.
I’m sitting in my room at the beautiful Radisson Blu St Helens in Dublin, a former stately home turned 5-star hotel that is quickly becoming my second home in Ireland’s capital. I have to run to get a cab back to the airport in a moment, but I had a blinding flash of the obvious that I feel I need to share with you before I set off.
You see, I just said that most business owners are missing a vital point when they write their autoresponder sequences.
It’s taken me a few years to get it, but it finally came to me this morning.
The mistake most entrepreneurs make is to write a bunch of emails in isolation and expect them to make sense as a whole.
What happens when you write like that, though, is that each email stands alone. So it’s easy for a reader to drop out at any point.
For some time I’ve been teaching my clients the secrets to creating successful products. And this morning I finally made the connection.
YOUR AUTORESPONDER SEQUENCE IS A PRODUCT JUST LIKE ANY OTHER.
When you think of it that way, everything becomes easy.
If you prefer think of it like this: when you write a 20-email follow up sequence, write it as though you were writing a 20-chapter ebook.
You see, the thing about an autoresponder sequence (just like your products) is that it’s useless if the reader doesn’t get ALL THE WAY THROUGH.
If they bail out (i.e. unsubscribe) they won’t get your full message, so they won’t get all the benefits, so they won’t take anything else from you, and they won’t tell other people about you.
And if you’re going to put calls to action in your autoresponder sequence (and you should!), then they won’t be there to see them.
So you need to write your autoresponder the same way as you would a product:
- Top and tail it with an intro that tells the reader what you’re going to tell them, and a closing summary that reminds them what they’ve learned. And add summaries along the way.
- Structure it. Follow your system step by step, and have a narrative thread that runs through it
- Throw in case studies and examples. And exercises for people to do.
- Tell people what’s coming up in future instalments (the next day AND two weeks from now) so they’ll want to stay—you can only do that if you’ve planned out every step of the sequence!
- Leave a few cliffhangers to make sure people tune back in
This is so key that I’m going to be adding a whole workshop on autoresponder writing to my Protégé program from February.
Now I’m off to the airport—enough travel time to overhaul at least one of my autoresponders!
