Automated Follow-Ups Make the Next Step a No-Brainer

As any smart business owner knows, the key to passive income is a well-established (and full) sales process.

So of course you’ve optimized your opt-in pages and monetized your download pages and encourage more buyers through well-placed upsells and downsells.

But what about the follow-up?

• Do you contact customers about the products or services they didn’t buy?
• Do you encourage them to use the products they have purchased?
• Are you making sure they know about all your other wonderful programs?

If not, you’re missing the boat. But the good news is, this can be easily managed with just a bit of simple automation, and when done right, it will smoothly lead your customers from one purchase to the next, at the exact right time for them to take advantage of your best offers.

A friend of mine, Ben Mack, wrote the book Think Two Products Ahead where he encourages you to NOT be short-sighted when plotting out your sales process – and to quite literally think AT LEAST two more products down the line. Most people think about this one product and that’s all. And that’s just not how great businesses are built.

Segment Your Audience

Many autoresponder services allow you to target emails based on reader action.

Want to sent a follow up email to those who clicked a specific link? Create a segment and mail away.

Want to re-engage with those who haven’t opened your emails in a while? Easy to do, and you can potentially recover subscribers who have gone missing.

In more sophisticated systems, such as Infusionsoft or Ontraport or Kartra, you can dig even deeper, and move people from one series to another based on their buying habits. That way you’ll never promote a product a reader already owns. Not only that, but you’ll always be able to offer the very best next thing, no matter where a subscriber is in your funnel.

Still another way to segment your list is according to what they do not buy.

If a subscriber has been on a list where you’re promoting your top-level coaching program, and she has not yet purchased, it may simply be too expensive for her at this time. Consider moving these readers to an autoresponder series promoting a lower cost option instead.

All of these tactics require that you know your audience and your products exceptionally well.

When you do, Automation will significantly scale the lifetime value of your customers

Study your stats. Know your open and click rates.

Monetizing Autoresponders is a Fast Way to Automate

Email marketing is one of the best ways to develop passive income.

If you use an autoresponder company (and you definitely should), you can write and store emails in your account that automatically get sent out to your list subscribers. These emails can contain links that sell products you believe in—either your own products or products you’re promoting as an affiliate.

You could choose to store enough content to last a year or more, if you wanted to. Write 100 emails over time, add links to them, and load them up into your autoresponder account. Set them to deliver every few days or a couple times a week or whatever works for you.

How is this passive? It’s passive because these emails will go out to new subscribers at the preset intervals you’ve determined ahead of time. Ideally, you’ll design a list-building funnel that will work for you day and night. So, someone who joins your list today will get your email sequence in order—they’ll see the emails where you teach things and emails where you sell things.

They’ll buy from you.

More people will join tomorrow, more people will join a month from now, and more people will join six months and a year from now. Those people will get your email sequence in order. So you’ll have hundreds and hopefully thousands of people receiving your well thought out, well-monetized autoresponder sequence. This can earn you some fantastic passive income.

You could be lounging on the beach, sleeping, traveling, or working on another project altogether and still be earning passive income from your autoresponder series because your emails are being delivered without any further effort on your part, after you set them up the first time.

Does that sound like a dream?

There are few things better for online income and building a real business than email marketing. Focus on earning passive income from autoresponder emails and you can truly choose your income.

Pay attention to the promotions that work, as well as those that fall flat. With information in hand, you’ll be better able to effectively segment your lists and make the most of all the parts of your funnel.