Someone Is Ready To Buy

Time to wrap up the Subscriber to Superfan series. The next step is when someone is ready to buy.

We started with someone finding you, and that’s where we talked about creating the lead magnet that attracts the right people to your email list. Then we talked about someone joining your email list and what to send them through a welcome or nurture sequence. Finally, we talked about how someone gets to know you and how to build trust through a regular email. Today, we’re at that final step. Someone is ready to buy.

I want to talk about something that I know makes people feel uncomfortable, and that is selling through email. Maybe you thought, “I don’t want to bother my subscribers,” or, “I don’t want people to think that I’m always trying to sell them something.”

It could be that you even thought, “I’m a Christian business owner; I need to serve, not sell.” I completely understand. However, I want to give you a different way to think about selling. Selling isn’t the opposite of serving. Sometimes selling is a part of it. Think about it. If someone has a problem and you have the solution, would it be serving them to keep that solution a secret?

Let them know.

If you’ve ever written a book that could encourage someone—you must tell them about it.
Perhaps you’ve created a course that can teach them something that they need to know—you should invite them to join.
If you’re offering coaching that can help reach their goals, let them know about it.
You provide a service that can save them hours of work or help through your business—tell them about it.

Your offer is a way that you can help them to take the next step, and that’s an important distinction. You aren’t trying to convince everyone to buy everything you ever offer. You’re simply making the invitation available to the people who need it at that time.

This is why the first three episodes of this series are so important. You don’t want your very first email to be, “Hey, buy my book.” They don’t know you yet. They don’t even know whether they can trust you, and they don’t necessarily know why you should care, or they should care about your offerings.

Building relationships

Rather, imagine that someone has been on your email list for six months. They’ve benefited from your sending them helpful information. You’ve probably answered some questions that they might have had. They’ve shared their experiences. You’ve encouraged them. They may have even listened to your podcast if you have one.

Maybe they’ve read some of your blog posts. They may have watched some videos. Now that they have a problem and you happen to have a solution, that’s a completely different situation. They know who you are, they already understand what you do, and they may already trust you. Then it makes sense to offer what you have to them.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is that they build a relationship with their audience, but they never actually tell them how they can work with them. They assume people are going to figure it out, but honestly, they won’t. You have to make the next step very clear. It’s kind of like a roadmap.

If you have a book, you have to say, “You can get my book here.”
If you have a course, you have to say, “If you’re ready to learn more, here’s where you can join.”
If you offer coaching, you might say something like, “If you’d like my help with this, here’s how we can work together.” Don’t make people hunt through your website to figure out what to do next.

Make it a clear invitation.

So a sales email… What does it look like? It’s pretty simple, honestly. Here’s a framework for you.

You start with the problem, what your audience is struggling with.
Then you tell them about the solution you have. That it can help them solve their problem, and then you introduce your offer.
You explain how your product or service helps.
Finally, you give them a very clear call to action. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. Click here, register here, buy the book, schedule a consultation, join the program, or whatever that next step is for them. That’s it. You don’t have to have a 47-page sales letter.

Sometimes an email, just a simple email, can be incredibly effective to sell something. Another thing I want you to remember is who your offer is for, because honestly, not everything we have is for everyone, and this can make selling feel less uncomfortable. So instead of saying, “Everyone needs this,” I really like to do these little things where I say, “This is for you if you’ve been trying to grow your email list but you don’t know what to send, or this is for you if you have a lead magnet but you don’t have a welcome sequence.”

That would be something I might offer. This is for you if you know email marketing is important, but you simply don’t have the time to set it all up yourself. Now you’re helping people determine whether the offer you have for them is actually a good fit, and you’re not trying to convince someone who doesn’t need it.

Repetition

Here’s another important lesson when it comes to email marketing. Unfortunately, you have to repeat yourself. You may think, “I already told them this,” but your subscribers probably didn’t all see that email. Some didn’t open it. Some people opened it but weren’t ready, and maybe people read it and forgot about it.

It could be that they just simply weren’t paying attention that day. Some people need to hear what you have to say several times before they’re ready to take action. Do not assume that because you mentioned your offer once, everybody knows about it. You can talk about the same offer from different perspectives.

Different expressions

You can tell a story about it.
You can answer a question.
You can share a testimonial and explain who it’s for.
Share what someone might learn from it.
Talk about the problem that it solves, then invite them again. It’s not annoying. It’s marketing.

Now, there’s something I don’t want you to do.

Don’t create false urgency. Don’t tell people there are only three spots left if you actually have 300 spots. You can’t tell people it’s ending tonight if you don’t plan to end it tonight. It is not good to make people feel guilty for not buying. You can create legitimate urgency when there’s actually a deadline.

Deadlines

Maybe you’re running a launch or maybe you’re offering a special price for a short period of time. It could be that your registration really is closing. That’s all fine, and be honest. So as Christian business owners, integrity matters more than the sale. We want to serve people well, and we want to be honest about what we’re offering.

This is one of the biggest reasons that I’ve encouraged you throughout this entire series to build your email list, because social media platforms can change, algorithms change frequently, accounts can be hacked, and platforms can disappear. But when someone gives you permission to communicate with them via email, you have a direct connection and relationship with that person, and that is incredibly valuable.

Building an asset

That’s why I don’t want you to think about email marketing as simply another marketing task. Think of it as an asset that you’re building. Every subscriber is another opportunity to build a relationship, and every email is another opportunity to serve, and every offer is another opportunity for them to take the next step.

So you may be reading this series and you may think… “Alyssa, I need to do this.” You know you need a lead magnet. Maybe you know that you’ve got the lead magnet, but you need a welcome sequence. You know you should be emailing your list consistently. Also, you know you need a strategy. But you’re thinking, “I don’t have time to figure all this out.”

If that’s you, I want you to know that you don’t have to do everything yourself. This is actually one of the services that I provide through Alyssa Avant and Company. My team and I offer a package called the Done For You Email Marketing Package, and it’s designed to help you get your email marketing system set up so that you can focus on what you do best.

We can help you develop your strategy, set up your email marketing system, create a landing page, and develop a nurture sequence. And the goal isn’t simply to give you another piece of technology. It’s to help you create a system that allows you to consistently build relationships with the people you’re trying to reach, because that’s really what this entire series has been about, relationships.

Wrapping up

So before we wrap up the series, I want to give you a challenge. I want you to look at your email marketing journey from beginning to end and ask yourself, “How does someone find me?

Do I have a lead magnet that attracts the right people?
What happens when they join my list?
Do they get a welcome series, or do they not hear from me?”
What happens after that? Am I providing that valuable content?
Finally, what happens when they’re ready to buy? Do I actually make an offer, or am I expecting them to just figure it out on their own?

If there is a gap anywhere in your journey, in the journey that people take, that’s where you should focus. So don’t think that you have to fix everything today. Pick one piece, get it working, and then move to the next. That’s where we’re going to end this from subscriber to super fan journey. If someone finds you, they become a subscriber. You welcome them, and hopefully you begin to provide value so that they can get to know you and begin to trust you. Eventually you’ll be ready for the solution, or when they’re ready for the solution that you can provide, you will invite them to take the next step.

That’s how a subscriber becomes a super fan. Not because you found the perfect subject line, not because you discovered some secret email marketing trick. I wish there was one out there, but it’s because you consistently showed up and built a relationship. Now I want to leave you with this. Your email list isn’t a list of people you can sell to.

It’s a group of people that you’ve been given the opportunity to serve. So when you approach email marketing that way, everything changes. It becomes less about how can I get them to buy and more about how can I help them? And when you genuinely have something that you can offer them to help them, don’t be afraid to give them the invitation. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can simply say is, “I have something that could help you, and here’s how you can get it.”

I want to say thank you for joining me through this August series, and I hope that you’ve walked away with a better understanding of how email can take someone from simply discovering you to becoming someone who trusts you, knows you, and wants to support your business.

As always, if you know of another author, speaker, or coach, or Christian entrepreneur who needs to improve their email marketing, I would love to share this series with them. Also, if you’re ready to stop trying to figure out email marketing on your own and have somebody help you, be sure to check out the Done For You Email Marketing Package from Alyssa Avant and Company.