When I first met Tina Glasneck, she was a USA Today Best-Selling author. She was speaking at an author’s conference about email marketing. We talked for much of the day about our businesses, opportunities, and challenges.
Toward the end of the day, Tina mentioned that even though she had an email list of 30,000, she was not getting a lot of engagement or generating a lot of revenue from the list. I found this fascinating and became curious about how a list this size was not generating revenue.
I agreed to work with her and see if I could determine why she wasn’t generating much revenue. Here are a few things we did to change Tina’s career.
Building The Email List
The first thing I did was I started analyzing how Tina built her email list. What I found is the primary way she built her list was by doing cross-promotions with other authors. This is normally a good idea if a group of authors each gives away a free book for a joint promotion. The promotions Tina was participating in consisted of giving away a Kindle to get people to subscribe to their list.
This raised a huge red flag, primarily because of intent. Why were people subscribing to the list? They subscribed to the list because they wanted a free Kindle. Not because they were interested in reading Tina’s books.
This created an email list that was not engaged with her content. Tina was paying a premium to her email provider with this number of subscribers, but not many people were engaged.
To fix this, we created an engagement campaign to reengage subscribers who had been dormant. Essentially, we incentivized them to at least open the email. We did this through a sequence of email autoresponders. Subscribers who did not at least open one email were removed from the list. This brought Tina’s list from 30,000 unengaged subscribers down to 12,000 engaged subscribers.
How are you training your prospects and customers?
The next step was I analyzed the content in her emails. What I found was a second problem. Marketing is about changing people’s behaviors. There is a lot of psychology behind getting people to move from prospects to customers.
You also need to train people what to do next and to move to the next customer level.
Often changing behavior is done in incremental steps.
- Can we get someone to optin to an email list?
- Can we get a person to open an email?
- Can we get your subscribers to engage with the email?
- Can we get the subscriber to move from a prospect to a customer, to a multi-buyer customer, to a loyal customer or even an advocate for your business?
What I found with Tina’s email content is that she was giving away a free book in almost every newsletter. Essentially, she was training her list NOT to purchase.
Her subscribers knew that eventually, she would give the book away for free. Needless to say, once I discovered this pattern of Tina giving away a free book in each newsletter, it ended abruptly.
But we still needed to engage Tina’s list and highlight her skills as an author. Each week Tina prompts her newsletter subscribers with 5 questions. Each week the questions and prompts are different. They are simple questions such as, What is your favorite color? Your favorite vacation destination? What is your favorite pet? Etc.
She tells her subscribers to leave their comments in her Facebook group. Each week she chooses one winner based on the person’s answers. She then writes a 100-word short story for next week’s newsletter. The winner receives a printed version of the essay along with other prizes. The weekly contest and short story has created engagement for Tina’s list and her Facebook group.
Mindset and Going Pro
Often success leaves clues. I am a believer that if you want to be successful, you need to behave in ways that successful people perform. Often it is slight shifts in our mindset that unlock small hinges that swing open big doors.
This is true for Tina. Another thing I noticed was some of the tools she was using were very limiting and causing her frustration. Plus, these tools were preventing her from performing at her highest level. So we started upgrading her email platform, her website, plus other software and tools that she used regularly. This saved her time and upgraded her brand image.
Building a Targeted Email List of Buyers
Next, we started building a targeted email list of people who would be interested in Tina’s books. We started targeting ads to pages of authors who wrote books like Tina’s. We gave away a free novella that led to the first book in a series that had 5 books total. This created a natural progression for people who download the free novella to purchase the rest of the books and become a multi-buyer and loyal customer.
Becoming an Amazon Best Selling Author
On July 21, 2019, Tina released her newest book, Once Bitten. The first day it was released, it went straight to #1 in her category on Amazon. Plus, it has remained in the #1 new bestseller spot for more than 4 weeks.
Speaking at DragonCon
Another career-changing moment for Tina was being invited to speak at Dragoncon this year in Atlanta, GA. Tina is going to be on several panels with nearly 80,000 people in attendance. She is going to leverage this speaking opportunity into many more national speaking opportunities.
Tina Shares Her Experience
“Before I met Charles, I was floundering in trying to market my books. But I’m not floundering anymore. Charles has changed how I see marketing.
“What’s amazing is that every week when we meet is like Shark Tank. Charles is a real-life shark to me and having him on my team, I’ve seen how not only my business has grown, but also how I approach it.
“He’s helped me find my audience, grow my list, and shift my paradigm from one close to giving up to one that is excited about the future.
Charles has skills that change lives!
Thanks, Charles, for believing in me!”
Tina Glasneck
USA Today Bestselling Author
Final Thoughts
I could not be happier for Tina. I’m excited about the future of her business, her career as an author, and the direction of her life. I can’t wait to see what the future holds as she scales news mountains, reaches new heights, breaks down new barriers, and pursues an extraordinary life on her terms.
Are you building your email list?
Today, when it comes to building your audience one of the most profitable marketing channels is email.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields a 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States.
ExactTarget reports for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25.
One of the most profitable ways to build your audience is to increase the size of your email list.
Discover 101 Ways to Increase The Size of Your Email List. Download the Free Report!
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