How to Sell More (and Better!) to Your List

I won’t repeat the significance of building an e-mail list. Not the “blog update by Feedburner” list, but the real one, where you get people to double opt and you send them emails from time to time.

We all know how important it is but I want to share a little tweak with you, that will let you sell more and, more important, sell better, to your list.

Note: By selling, I don’t mean shoving some lousy products down their throats, I would never recommend that. But selling doesn’t always have to be limited to that. You can “sell them” to ask their friends to subscribe to your list, you can “sell” the idea of a post series you want them to share across their networks, etc.

So how can you do this? Segmenting buyers and non-buyers.

If you do have a product you are selling, this will be much easier. Most sale pages today require you to subscribe to get access to the sale page itself, go from pressing the purchase button to the payment page or most common – go from payment to download page.

In this case, if you are using Aweber (which I hope you do!), you will segment buyers very easy.

Set up a new list for those buyers and set the “automation”:

As you can see, with Aweber, this transformation will be a piece of cake, because as soon as someone subscribes to your “buyer” list, he will automatically be removed from other lists (if set that way).

Segmenting potential buyers

Another way you can segment subscribers, in this case potential buyers (since you don’t have a product yet) is to set up a list where people will subscribe to get updates on the launch you are preparing or certain course/post series you are doing.

So let’s say you are launching a product based on some WordPress information. As a warm up “gift” you are giving a 10 part email series away to subscribers. But not your existing ones, rather new ones, signing up from a special sign up page. The current subscribers only get a notification you are launching the series, but they need to subscribe to that list. Set up automation like in the screenshots above.

So now you have new subscribers that are interested in WordPress and you are “moving” current ones that are interested. How likely do you think they will be to purchase your product after reading the 10 part series where they see something good is cooking!?

Segmenting “maybes”

The last source for segmenting would be going through the stats in your Aweber account and digging for people who open your emails most often and click links in them. Obviously they are at least warmed up for what you are sending.

You can also try sending a few targeted emails. So for the example above, you would send a few emails with topic of WordPress and then see who is opening them and clicking links. That will let you segment those users. You will not have to move them to another list, just set a segment so you can send emails just to those people quickly.

So are you using segmenting on your list? How do these ideas sound to you?