The Danger Of Overloading Your Readers

Almost any internet marketing blog that you go to will tell you to create some kind of freebie which you offer as an optin bribe to build your mailing list.

That’s great. But you create one and then after a while you build a product and that has an optin as well. You may then use an optin form on a blog post to get people to optin before being able to read the rest of your content and before you know it you have five, six, seven or even more possible ways of opting into your mailing list.

Nothing wrong with that at initial glance. After all, you want as many avenues for people to join your mailing list as possible.

But… there is one problem. And it’s a big one.

Every time somebody joins your mailing list they get the auto-responder sequence for that particular offer. That maybe just one or two days of emails or it could be many weeks.

The people who read your blog regularly are going to be the people who want to get all your free stuff. After all they like what you do.

This means that your best prospects, the ones reading your content and engaging to get more, are now on multiple mailing lists.

For example let’s say they’re now on three mailing lists. This means that they’re now getting as many as three emails in a single day from you through different auto-responders.

Then you add in your emails sent outside of the autoresponder sequence and they could be getting as many as four emails in a single day.

And we’ve only got three possible methods of joining your mailing list!

If those auto-responders each go on to sell something then you could  be trying to sell the same person three products at the same time.

That’s only going to do one thing to your conversion rate…

Kill it!

If you’re doing this then you’re probably overloading your best prospects with too much information.

We need to be careful when we look at building our auto-responders to make sure that when someone joins our mailing list they’re only getting one email from that particular website at a time, possibly two if they’re at different times of the day but unless we’ve specifically told them we’re going to send more then you don’t want to do more than two a day.

There are two types of auto-responders. They are:

1. Contact Based
2. List Based

Aweber or GetResponse is an example of a list based auto-responder. This means that you create a list and the email addresses are assigned to that list. You may have a list for two optins and the same email address may be on both lists.

InfusionSoft and Premium Web Cart are examples of contact based auto-responders. These are where a contact is only added once and instead of having lists you have tags. These tags tell you what information the contact wants to receive. For example Contact A has tags of optin1 and optin2 so they would go both emails from auto-responders one and two. Whereas Contact B only has a tag of optin1 so only receives the emails from the optin 1 auto-responder.

My personal preference is for contact based mailing and I personally use InfusionSoft. The reason I prefer this is because it’s easier to keep control over the content that your sending out to your subscribers.

With these types of auto-responders you can make sure that they only receive a promotion sequence once by using tags to mark when they’ve had a particular mailing sequence. If they rejoin your mailing list through one of your other free offers you can check to see if they already received a sequence before sending it to them again. You can also make sure that they are only ever in one sequence at a time.

In the above screenshot you can see a segment of one of my blog campaigns. As you can see there are three entry points. You can join the mailing list through one or all of them. However in each of the three follow-up sequences there is only one single email telling them how to get what they opted in for.

Then the magic happens. Notice there is a three day delay, this is to make sure that we’re not emailing too often. Some people will get a newsletter email during this time depending on when they joined up. And then we get the…

Decision Node.

Before I explain how that works, notice how there are three possible options coming out of the decision node. This us one sales promo, one freebie offer and the other is blank time delay sequence.

We don’t want to send people both the sales and freebie promotion at the same time. So we check their tags! If they’ve:

• Not been through the sales promo already then we send them the promo
• If they’ve been through the sales promo but not the freebie then we send them the freebie
• If they’ve been through both we send them to the blank time delay

When they’ve finished the sales promo (whether a purchase is made or not) you can then see we put another time delay in place and then use another decision node to see if they’ve had the freebie or not. If they haven’t we send it to them and if they have we send them to the blank email sequence.

By doing this we are making sure that we are providing a high level of quality content and aren’t overloading our readers with multiple emails each day.

Overloading your readers will increase your unsubscribe rate and decrease your conversion, keep a close eye on your mailings to make sure that you aren’t in danger of doing this.