Why It Can Be Good To Lose Subscribers

From an online perspective there is nothing as important for the success of your Life Coaching practice as to build your newsletter list.

Your list will become your life blood both for clients and when you have products to sell.

They are your most loyal advocates because they fall into the realm of permission marketing.

In other words, by them giving you their e-mail address they have given you permission to market to them.

Add Value

There is a caveat of course. You have to add value.

You cannot just put a nice bribe up their in terms of a free ebook or mini course and then batter the people who sign up with sales letter after sales letter.

On average (and in my opinion) no more than 1 in 4 newsletters should be used to sell directly.

Sure, give them the opportunity to buy from you or hire you, but give them important information that can benefit them in their lives.

That way you build up trust and you build up loyalty.

Most people understand you are a business and as such have to generate income if you are to stay around to help them.

Of course every e-mail list contains people who are only there for the free stuff and will never spend a penny with you, but that’s cool, that’s just life.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my early days with the A Daring Adventure list was to constantly offer value and never sell to it.

I just hated the thought of people unsubscribing or feeling like I was being pushy.

If You Don’t Sell, People Can’t Buy

The nett result when you don’t try and sell to people is, by and large, nobody buys from you.

I never had an e-mail from somebody asking me if I had anything to sell or a service to offer. In fact, in my early days, it wasn’t even obvious from my newsletters I even offered coaching.

Not very bright.

Somebody contacted me recently for help with a blog post round up. It’s the kind of post where you contact ‘experts’ in your industry and ask them (usually) one question.

The question I was asked was, ‘What is the biggest mistake you made with e-mail marketing’.

My answer was believing I had to have 5,000 people on my list before I had any chance of selling to them.

The fact that we only have 1,000 on the Coach the Life Coach list (albeit more targeted) and have sold out several courses just shows how little I knew.

The last week or so I have had to do something with the Fully Booked Coach list that has always made me feel uncomfortable even though almost every successful company that launches products or services does it.

That was to contact them multiple times.

Not everybody opens every e-mail (20% is normal, we usually get about 35%), so there was a huge possibility some people didn’t even know the course was due to start.

Not only that, but some people will have been wavering and needed that extra nudge to say, ‘yes’.

On the final day before we closed the course we had two spaces left and had sent e-mails out 3 times in the previous week.

Won’t We Lose Subscribers?

Karl (my partner at that time) said ‘send one more’

My old self kicked in. I worried about hassling people, looking needy, people unsubscribing and my anxiety levels went up.

I trusted Karl. I wouldn’t have brought him into the business if I didn’t.

I also knew at an intellectual level that when people unsubscribe for such a reason they were never likely to buy from you in the first place.

I also knew that when I did sell to my A Daring Adventure list way, way before I got to 5,000 I sold out in 24 hours.

I knew I had to get over my fear of people unsubscribing because in many ways it’s a good thing because it means we are testing their intention.

Testing intention is a sales term used to understand how serious somebody is about buying.

Here it had a double benefit.

Yes we tested whether people were serious about buying (and obviously the majority weren’t or had already done the course), but we were also testing how serious they were about succeeding as a Life Coach.

This may (or may not) sound arrogant, but I know we put out some incredible free information designed to help coaches. Information I would have killed for in my early days.

I honestly do not think there is a better resource for free, as well as paid content on the Internet.

Yes, that does sound a tad arrogant, but if I didn’t think that then we should be offering more, because if you don’t want to be the best, why bother?

Biting The Bullet

I bit the bullet and sent the e-mail literally 6 hours before we closed the course.

We filled both places.

Did we get unsubscribes?

Yes.

One.

When somebody gives you their e-mail they are telling you they trust you not to abuse it. They believe there will be a quid pro quo and a nice balance.

I now know that we have some very loyal subscribers and now we are out of ‘launch mode’ for a few months can get back to offering them high quality advice and help for free, like this 🙂