Can you use an email marketing waitlist for your next big launch? Maybe you have a membership or a course and want to generate excitement, curiosity, and demand. Can a waitlist help you do that? Also, how do you keep people on your waitlist warm? How long should you run a waitlist for, and how often should you contact people on it?
We answer all these questions and much more...
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SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:08) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!
(4:18) Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course?
(11:17) When should you use a waitlist?
(14:08) How do you get people on your waitlist?
(15:22) Where possible, reward people instantly!
(17:50) How we use waitlists in our business?
(21:18) Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist.
(22:52) How do you keep people on your waitlist warm?
(30:07) What's the dual reality principle?
(32:47) Subject lines of the week.
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Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course?
Between the two of us, we’ve had experience selling courses and memberships for years, both with our current and previous businesses. And one of the strategies that go with opening the doors to your new product is having a waitlist. Do you absolutely need to have one? Unless your membership or course is capped in terms of the number of people who can join, we don’t think a waitlist is strictly necessary.
A waitlist helps you create demand in advance, which is why we use this strategy as a key component of a couple of the email marketing campaigns we teach. It can be a useful tool to gauge an interest. Is your audience interested in your upcoming product? By joining a waitlist, people make a micro commitment – they're deciding they want to find out more about something you're about to offer.
Plus, if you’re new to the world of online memberships and courses and aren’t sure whether something will sell, a waitlist is a low-barrier entryway to help you figure that out. Once you develop more experience, you’ll develop a level of confidence and awareness of what’s likely to work. But if you’re just starting, you can build this awareness with a waitlist.
Where will you talk about your waitlist?
Should you talk about your launch only to the people on your waitlist? Absolutely not! If you're only marketing to your waitlist and not the rest of your audience, you’re leaving money on the table. Because there will be people on your email list who would never sign up for a waitlist. And yet, they might be interested when they see your sales page.
You also need to think about what advantage you'll give to the people on your waitlist. Why are they on the waitlist in the first place? Will you give them early access? Does the waitlist serve a real purpose or are you just “dressing something up in marketing”?
A great place to promote your waitlist (and your upcoming launch) is on your social media. If you have a podcast or an active social channel, you can start talking about your membership or course a couple of weeks before you open the doors. Start inviting people to jump on your waitlist - it's a great call to action and a good way of attracting those with a level of intent into your world.
When should you use a waitlist?
We have a waitlist for our Email Engine Accelerator, which is a capped programme. We can only take a small number of people each time we run it (three times a year), and demand is high because people get results. So when we talk about it, our customers want to know when the next intake is. We have a good reason to ask people externally (on our podcast, for example) to join our waitlist to be informed about the next opening.
Before you decide to start a waitlist though, you should think about what you'll do after the launch. Because you can't suddenly take people from your waitlist and start sending them daily emails as part of your email marketing. If you want to do that, you have to frame that transition first. You can even sell them something else if the product they joined the waitlist for isn't available anymore or they didn't buy. But you have to tell them that's what you're going to do - you have to salvage that relationship first. A way to do that is via a welcome sequence. Ours is called the Get to Know You sequence, and it's a 4-part campaign that can act as a bridge for people who transition from a waitlist we created onto our daily emails.
What is a waitlist good for?
A waitlist can give you an idea of demand and a sense of confidence. When you ask people to join a waitlist to be informed about a product you're about to launch (and they do), it tells you they're interested and that you have a viable product.
Plus, a waitlist gives something importance - it elevates it. It tells others that what you have is important and exclusive. It means you have a bunch of people who've raised their hands and expressed an interest. And the next time you launch something, you can also go back to those same people again.
How do you get people on your waitlist?
Give people a good reason to join your waitlist
If you want people to join your waitlist, you have to give them a good reason to do so, such as an emotional reason (or a bunch of them). For example, in our Anticipation Action sequence or our Book Launch campaign, we ask people to join a waitlist. If it's a book you're launching, you can offer people some chapters of the book ahead of publication, for example.
If you’re selling a membership, you may offer little samples of the programme or ask people to express their preferences and get involved in specific parts of the creation process, which generates buy-in. Or you could offer a free gift to the first few people who join your waitlist. It could even be a video tour of your membership!
Where possible, reward people instantly!
Although it’s not always possible, try to give people something as soon as they join your waitlist. If you’re launching something live (and your product isn’t going to be available for a while), you could, for example, run a group call for the people on your waitlist and give them a preview or an outline of what’s to come. We do this in the shape of a webinar with an informal ‘behind the scenes’. Or you can give them instant access to the list of live calls.
Whatever you give them doesn’t have to be ‘big’ – it’s just something in return for joining your waitlist so they don’t feel they got nothing for that effort. It provides people with certainty, and it doesn't leave them feeling like they’ve been left alone after they gave you their email address. When you give people something in return, you trigger a sense of satisfaction.
For example, if you’re starting a live programme in a month, but you're giving people on the waitlist the calendar of calls now, they can start figuring out how your membership or course fits into their lives. They sell themselves in advance. Plus, if you’re giving them the information now, you’re answering questions they might have down the line, so you save yourself some time, too.
How we use waitlists in our business
There are two different ways we use to get people on waiting lists. In a couple of cases, the waitlist is already baked into our email campaigns.
Otherwise, on a subtle level, every once in a while, we’ll send out a pre-framing email that goes out before a sales campaign or just casually. This could be, for example, before our Black Friday campaign. We might send an email ahead of time and ask people to let us know if they want to be told about our Black Friday offer one hour before everyone else, for example. We don’t call it a waitlist, but the application is similar.
So we have two different circumstances – in one case, we’re asking people to click a link and send them to a dedicated page where they have to enter their name and email address to join a waitlist. Generally speaking, that’s not a great idea because people sometimes click on links by accident or may be using a piece of technology that clicks on links for them.
What you want instead is the extra commitment that someone needs to take with you when they type their name and email address and actively decide to join your waitlist. You could even add a PS at the end of one of your emails and ask people to click on a link so you can let them know an hour before your offer opens. It adds a bit of spice to the campaign.
Another thing you can do is to give people a bonus (something valuable to them) for joining your waitlist. This way, you build a waitlist full of people who already appreciate the value of your product. You’re pushing the psychology of someone’s commitment a little further because they're joining your list to get a bonus.
Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist!
When creating a waitlist, one of the most important things to do is to wrap it around a genuine reason. Why do you have a waitlist in the first place? Sure, it can create desire and anticipation. But ultimately, you’ll probably tell your whole email list about your product anyway. So it’s important to have a specific reason for the waitlist. An example could be that it's a limited-time offer or that you'll be capping the number of people who can join your programme.
If you don’t have a real reason (perhaps because your programme is evergreen), you can still do an open-and-close launch where you only let a handful of people in. That would give you a legitimate reason for a waitlist because you have limited spaces available.
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How do you keep people on your waitlist warm?
How often should you get in touch with people on your waitlist? The more time passes between someone joining your waitlist and the moment you open the cart, the colder people will be. Over time, they lose the excitement and drive that prompted them to sign up for the waitlist in the first place. Their desire for your product has waned and petered out.
That’s why, when we promote a sales webinar, we only do it 3-4 days in advance. So keep the time on the waitlist as short as you possibly can. Also, rather than spending time telling people that a waitlist is coming, let them know it's available now and build some anticipation.
A great way to do this is to promote your waitlist on your socials closer to the time of the launch by using dynamic content. This is something we do with our sponsorship segments for our podcast. The sponsorship piece of content is dynamically added through our podcast hosting platform, so anyone listening to any episode during the days leading up to a particular offer going live will hear it.
Don't try to keep people's interest - raise it!
What's also important is how you communicate with your waitlist. You can't keep telling people that your product is coming soon. Instead of focusing on keeping people's interest, try to raise it! You want people to get engaged and involved.
You can do that by asking them to vote on something, for example. That increases their emotional buy-in into what you're doing, so by the time you open the cart, they're interested and involved. Don't just simmer people - raise the heat!
Does a waitlist work with a cold audience?
We (Rob in particular) don't particularly believe you can launch your product by simply building a waitlist of cold leads. If you have a small audience or following, and you plan to spend money on ads to create a waitlist and then smash your launch, you might not get the amazing results you're expecting. Over time, we sold a lot of products online in different businesses and niches, and the waitlist strategy can work, but only if you do it by keeping the above principles in mind.
Of course, if you're an influencer in your niche and have a huge audience with thousands of followers who are ready and waiting to be told when your next product launches, then it's great. But a tiny social following or a completely cold ads-driven audience aren’t going to respond as well.
If this is you, consider selling organically to your audience and creating an evergreen offer instead of following the 'big launch' model. You can switch to that when you get to the point where you have a critical mass of people that you can move at speed (i.e. you drop an email in the morning, and you have lots of takers by the afternoon).
Otherwise, using a big launch + waitlist strategy with a cold audience is expensive, slow, and potentially risky. You may burn through a big budget before you can see results. Because it'll take much longer to get the number of people you need on your waiting list to make your launch work. If you go down this route, you’ll need to have the waitlist open for longer and put a lot of effort in to keep people warm and raise their interest.
What's the dual realityprinciple?
When we are in the situation of having a waitlist open and sending emails out to raise people's interest, we use what we call our dual reality principle. This is where we send the same emails to our waitlist and our generic email list but with a different call to action. We do that to build hype, excitement, and anticipation for everyone - not just the people on the waitlist.
And to do this, we use conditional content so some people see one paragraph of text in their emails and others see a different one with another call to action. If people aren’t on your waitlist, you can ask them to join it. And if they are on it already, you can give them a different call to action to take.
If you're using either our Anticipation Action sequence or our Book Launch campaign, the waitlist is baked into them already. If you have real scarcity (with limited spots available), a waiting list works beautifully. But generally speaking, the success of a waitlist strategy will also depend on how long you have it open, how you’re keeping people engaged, and how you’re transitioning them from your waitlist onto your daily email marketing, especially if they come from social media or ads.
If you want immediate access to all the campaigns and strategies we talked about, head over to The Email Hero Blueprint.
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Subject line of the week
This week’s subject line is “Very demanding money”. It works because it generates a lot of compound curiosity. Who’s demanding money? What are they demanding money for? Who are they demanding money from? Is it good? Is it bad?
The email was about how Netflix is now enforcing its multi-household policy on Rob’s account. But you’d have to open up the email to know that. So check it out!
If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.
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Transcripts
Unknown 0:17
Hey, it's Rob Adam Kennedy.
Unknown 0:18
Hello. Today on the Email Marketing Show, we're talking about how to maximise your email waitlist before a membership launch.
Unknown 0:25
Now just before we get into this really interesting conversation, we got some different views on this. We'd love to give you something totally for free because we know that you want to make more sales from your email marketing. That's why you're listening to this show, but you can't make sales if you can't get people to click on the links in the emails that you send them. And so that's why we've put together 12 super creative ways to get more clicks from every email you send. And it's all in a download that we call click tricks because Kennedy likes to come up with names and things just totally for free as a listener to this podcast today. All you have to do is head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks and you can download it there. He
Unknown 0:56
annoys me by telling people he was born in London. It's comedy habits it's drama sample
Unknown 1:01
and he wants started a business making and selling fitness music. It's like a logical mind reader candidate.
Unknown 1:08
So this is what happens right? Where are you? And Rob, although he spent 99.9% of his life in Sunderland. That's right and some of it in different places
Unknown 1:27
because people expressing an interest when people ask us because we don't, we don't serve as fucking draughty as most of the people who deliver
Unknown 1:34
stuff like that magician I follow on Instagram.
Unknown 1:38
So I try to explain I remember that I remember that little business you started where you just wanted to sort of accidental things, but sort of like it just happened. Organically grew into a thing. Yeah,
Unknown 1:49
it was called DJ tune up the HIGO and it was it was truly like the most probably entrepreneurial business ever started. not successful at all. Not not not the not the most successful and not successful either. I probably sold $100 worth of stuff like it was crap. But it was in terms of like I can't make music. I don't know how to produce music. So I went onto a freelancing website found a guy who produced music, I told him what I wanted, sent some bits and pieces over to him. You know, and it came back and yeah, I had like a little online shop selling music that people could use at a boot camps and a gym sessions, hit sessions and stuff like that. I was just reminiscing about that the other day actually filming. I wonder if I can make that work these days with my my knowledge. I've got a little bit more knowledge. Yeah, very
Unknown 2:29
probably. I was just thinking that we could call it DJ cockup.
Unknown 2:33
To us too much as to as to many ways that could be interpreted and I'm not housing. I cocked it up. Oh, my God. You're right. Which explicitly swiftly on before it turns into a one of those episodes. Every week on this show, we show you how to make sales and more sales and earn more money from the email subscribers that you've already got. We talk about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now to make more sales online making sure that you are marketing your business. And we've got a brand new episode every Monday Wednesday, so make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player. If you haven't already do go leave us a review on Apple podcasts. It really massively helps us out. So
Unknown 3:14
I think that's I think when I make stupid jokes I sometimes forget this is this is somebody's first episode.
Unknown 3:20
We'd like to apologise to all of our new listeners.
Unknown 3:23
Statistically, I forget that I think everyone's been listening since episode one. And this is episode 230 or something. And so this is again, this is somebody's first episode. So well heard.
Unknown 3:32
Was that all that double entendre Well, welcome. We're sorry. However,
Unknown 3:35
you'll you'll flag us in a minute if you want to look if you want to launch a membership.
Unknown 3:39
Are you okay? Yeah. So, we used to have a membership as our sort of main front end product, I guess we have a membership which is like that to support people who are customers of our blueprint course. So we've been around membership in this business for a few quite a few years, three years, three or four years. And then in the previous businesses like what we've done other things like what I used to have a membership for magicians, and you've had memberships for basically random images of various things, but going over to your right. And one of the things that is really useful if you have a membership and even if you're a donor member, if you got a course you can absolutely apply it. So if you've got a SAS or something like that, or anytime you're going to open the doors to something. One of the things that often people will ask us about and we'll talk about is it's having a waitlist, right. And I sort of have a double I have sort of two feelings around around a waitlist and part of me is like, yeah, you're weightless. And some of me I'm like, why? Where are you at with it?
Unknown 4:36
Yeah, so it's a complicated. It's a complicated thing. Under some circumstances, the prom is I can see why companies like you know, Glastonbury festival or Taylor Swift might have a you know, like a you know, I don't understand it. I haven't bought music concert tickets in a long time. But when the Taylor Swift Lathyrus tour went on sale, I did have a look to see what all the fuss was about on the websites. And I got so confused about what the hell I was registering for. I was like, I don't know if I'm buying tickets. I'm fairly sure I'm not buying tickets. But I think I might be sort of registering to be voted in to have the chance of maybe talking to somebody who might want to bought some tickets. You know, there's this is like process of things that have taken place outside of us, but I can I can see why things like that do it. But there's a there's a couple of bits where first of all, in reality, right, unless your thing is massively kept in terms of number of people who can have it and we'll talk about that. I guess. It sort of feels a bit like the waitlist is all frivolous fluff rather than something it's required because ultimately, if you can sell, you know, 100,000 new members in your membership, if they all came running with their money. It's not like they're actually registering to get advanced notification of anything to get in early. Again, unless there is a strict cap, but for most people, most of the time, that's not really the case. I think in my experience, and so actually what it is, is it's a sort of its marketing happening, isn't it? It's the it's the creation of demand in advance, which I guess we'll talk about for this thing, but I think I largely, I largely always just think Well, apart from one specific circumstance, which I'm sure we'll talk about. We've got one specific campaign two specific campaigns I can think of actually, where a waitlist plays a really integral part. But apart from that a lot of the time I think it can just get in the way. I
Unknown 6:02
think one of the things we have to consider whether waitlist is a great time to use a waitlist, I think is if you're like sort of putting a new offer out there and you want to sort of get a bit of an indication of what demand might be Now, obviously, you need to think well, you know, what if 30% of those people actually take out their credit card and actually buy so you have to not think I've got 100 people on a waiting list. Therefore, I'm gonna I'm gonna make 100 sales is definitely not gonna be that you have to think about it's a good indicator of you saying, You know what, I'm gonna organise to do an online class or I'm gonna I'm gonna might launch a membership. Let's see how many of you are on a waitlist and just sort of gauge interest with some level of commitment. So I like the fact that a waitlist is a micro commitment that gets people to go. Yeah, I want to find out more specifically about that. I think
Unknown 6:46
at the same time as spending:
Unknown 7:27
launch at the bottom, we can definitely sell that and it was an absolute you know, it's confidence
Unknown 7:30
is just level of confidence, you know, always right. So, once you've been around your market for a bit, you'll have a level of confidence and awareness as to what's likely to work or unlikely to work. Whereas when you're just starting out then obviously building this awareness to demand. I think my major problem with the way this thing is this if you are only going to market your product to the people who are on the waitlist and not the rest of the list, then you're definitely leaving money on the table because there's people who would never sign up to where this was something either because they didn't see it or because they're just not interested by the waitlist copy but they're really interested once they see the actual hook of the sales page. And if you are going to sell it to everybody, you're gonna offer it to you and tie this anyway. What's the difference between the two do give them like an hour's headstart in which case what's really the point like again, it's very much dressing up in marketing, which is okay, we're big fans of dressing stuff up in marketing. It's very much dressing it up and marketing as opposed to serving a huge real purpose.
Unknown 8:13
I think I was just trying to think about what's a really good use of awareness, you know, and I think, let's say for example, you've got a podcast or a social channel, maybe you've got an Instagram, Instagram following leave in a Facebook group or you've got a YouTube channel, you got some kind of social channel and what you could do, if you know you're about to open the doors to your membership, for example, you know, you only open that in two weeks time, maybe in a couple of weeks leading up to it or maybe people do the longest we'll give a couple of months leading up to the opening of the membership. You could start talking on the podcast on the YouTube channel on the social media thing about what's coming. And if you want to get on the waitlist to find out about it. It's a good it's a good way of getting on the list. It's a good call to action. So rather than the people who might not have responded to here's my lead magnet or get my newsletters might respond to oh, I've been hearing about your product, your membership your course and I want to know next time it's on sale. So I think a waitlist is a nice thing to do not to your email list. There are some campaign exceptions which again is marketing it's not really like that helpful. But it helps conversions was very helpful, but I think externally is where weightless really fit in for me. So we have a waitlist, for example, for our email engine accelerator, we know that it is capped we can only take a very small number of people on that each time. We know demand for it is very high because people see the results right? We talk about it all the stuff. So when we talk about it to our customers, and people are like hey, how can I find out about when the next email engine accelerator is happening? Because you only want it three times a year, we can say hey, go on the waitlist. Now, that means we can talk about Externally we can say hey, you know on the show, if we want to advertise it externally, we can say if you wanna get on the waitlist, so I think it's a good reason to get on your list. Then comes a decision of what I want to do with those people after that now, it depends on how you frame those people you call somebody joins your you join your email list just to get on the waitlist, and then you do the announcement of the waitlist and put the thing on sale. And then suddenly put them through the rest of your email marketing unless you've done some framing unless you've done some kind of setting up and then transitioning. Okay, cool. Now that thing is now closed, sold out, whatever. And now we're going to sort of tell you about something else that's fine as long as you sort of salvage the relationship so the media awareness is a good way of externally getting people onto your list with a specific level of intent. It's a good a good sign above the door.
Unknown:
Yeah, I think the piece of about handling how they transition to your email newsletter if they do like ongoing email marketing is to use something like getting to know you sequence I think that's like our sort of catch all if somebody opts in for more or less more or less anything if we put them through the getting to know you sequence our four part welcome sequence at the same time that does that little bridge from I was only joining a waiting list to I'm going to be on your newsletter now. And that's okay. So I think that's interesting. So let's let's quickly talk about the things we do like about where this will just roll through these. First of all, we it does give you a sense of demand and confidence, right? The minute you say I've got a thing, this is the loose but bare bones of what it is would you like to be on the wait list so that when it comes around, you'll be the first amongst the first you will be the first to do it. Not everyone on that way. There's gonna be the first time you'll be amongst the first and then property managers in here. It's good to see that that is a thing. And as we know about from some of our campaigns like our anticipations action campaign or book launch campaign, there is a sense of importance attached to something when there is a waitlist coming for even if there isn't if there isn't sort of elevates it up a little bit, doesn't it? It's not like you're just milling the listing and hey, I've got this other thing. It's basically saying this is important. This is exclusive or this is just for the few who who are in the know who are in this special little little group in this special room who gets to hear about this thing and nobody creates an exclusivity deal. And it also means you've got a bunch of people that you can go back to the next time you launch this the course like they may not sign up this time for whatever reason, but they can always you can always come back to them to next time around.
Unknown:
So let's talk about how she went about how to get your onto your waitlist. I think we could probably some interesting stuff to say around that because we often see again inside instead of our email Hero Academy, like how do I get people on the waitlist? I think one of the things you gotta give them a damn good reason. They can be emotional reasons that like hey, you got to watch me as I do something like for example in our book launch campaign that we teach we use the reason I'm on the waitlist is too often they'll get some chapters as you're writing the thing or the case of a membership, they might get some little samples of or get samples of the programme or they might get to vote on certain things. Would you prefer this or this do you think this is a good idea that they feel involves on that in that creation, but one of the things I think to do is really compel people to get onto that waitlist. So you can do things like hey, I'm gonna be opening the weightless tomorrow. Formatting thing it's about this here's the bare bones of what it is. The first person that joined my waitlist is going to get this free gift. Because what that does is it compels people to do now like I want to talk about first person or let's say the waitlist is for a membership. You're gonna get on the waitlist I'm going to you'll see the video tour of what I'm thinking of the memberships gonna look like. So you're giving them like this after picture of what am I going to get immediately, ideally, immediately after joining the witness, not always possible, right? We've done some things where the join the whale is moving to this product, where we go, what can we give them immediately because it's a live thing. We're going to do a live programme so they don't get anything immediately as the live programmes will start to like a week or two later, sometimes two months later. We've done some things like that. So what can we give them immediately? And we've made it really simple. So yes, we could give them a call so we could give people something or the right next to a call. You could do all that sort of like able to do an extra group call like next week to sort of welcome people and give you a bit of an outline. You can do all of that. So we're gonna do a webinar which shows you behind the scenes of what I'm thinking like an informal behind the scenes, fireside chats, I think you can do all of those things. They're great ideas. But the other thing you can do is really straight about doing simple if it's a live programme, the thing we get instant access to is the calendar of when the live calls are gonna be Yeah, so it doesn't have to be like some big thing. It just let me think of something because with a calendar of Oh as soon as you get in, you'll get the calendar with all of the live calls are going to be therefore what they've got is assurance officer, he doesn't want to lose they just bought something as soon as they've just enrolled, enrolled or registered for a waitlist is they don't want to be sort of let go of that I didn't get anything for that effort. I didn't I didn't receive anything in return. I haven't got any certainty. I sort of feel like I've been left alone. I've handed you your money or I've handed you my email address and he sort of turned around and walked away but your fingers in your ears which is a bit of a weird feeling. Whereas with giving you the calendar, they kind of go oh, I can now see when the calls are all epigenesis sense sense of satisfaction,
Unknown:
functional things like that are useful to be able to help start overcoming the know exactly objections with a sort of objections in advance. So for example, if you say we've got this eight week programme, it starts in February, come and join our email list in January. They come and put their email address in and you promised them I'll tell him I was surprised that as soon as they register that you give them the calendar thing subscribe to you with when all the calls, they can immediately start figuring out how that fits into their life and sort of selling themselves on it in advance. Which means that if any of the calls are a problem, then they're not gonna be up to enrol. But that's gonna be the case whenever you tell them when the calls are and it saves the when you do that when you're doing the marketing it saves some of the people replying on when are the calls? Are they recorded? Is it on the internet? Can I attend it? If I buy it? Do I get it? You know, all those questions that you get, I think what you never know in 2020 volume, it dodges some of that stuff. That's interesting. There are two different ways that we have got people on what I would consider weightless for things. Some of them aren't, as Kennedy said, baked into the campaigns. I mentioned a couple of earlier like our book will ensure the anticipation of action campaign on a very subtle level. Every once in a while we'll do like a pre framing email either as part of something we call a bed campaign, which goes out before we do a sales campaign, or just casually so for example, in our Black Friday email, we've done this Black Friday campaign we've done this we'll send an email before Black or the day before Black Friday. And we'll say, you know, tomorrow's Black Friday. Obviously, you don't need us to tell you that. Tomorrow's Black Friday we're doing a Black Friday offer if you want to see what's inside it, click here. And at the end, there's like a PSA or something from memory that says if you want to get told about this an hour before everyone else, just click this link and we'll pop you on our little sort of quicker notifications list I think is what we call it. It's not a wait list exactly. But fundamentally, it's a weird this to just have to wait this for lessons or applications. And so there's not there's two different circumstances there. One of them is we're sending people to a dedicated page where they have to put their name and email address in room the technology always exists now that you can send somebody an email having them click a link and put them on a waitlist and generally speaking, that's not a great idea because people will sometimes click a link just to see where it goes. Somebody will click a link, you know, by accident. So people click a link if it's at the bottom of your email thing that is the unsubscribe, they're on a waitlist if
Unknown:
they're in a corporation, they've got a piece of technology that will click all the links for them to check them out, which is handy. When we've got technology I clicked links for you now, if it
Unknown:
reads the sales page and starts buying stuff, I mean yeah, so that's the and so what you want is that extra commitment over the Mac physically typing their their their first name or their email address or whatever into that list. Having said that, just as a little bit of extra spice every once in a while. It's not a big promotion or you haven't got time to like make a page and all that stuff. There is something interesting once in a while just to mix it up a bit. I'm just having a PS, click here. And I'll let you know an hour before everyone else began, you do get a bit caught out by those bot clicks. So that's just one of those things. But there's there's not huge right now. So again, just an interesting little way of doing it every once in a while. Again, don't treat that with the same level of strength that you would treat somebody opting in through a through a dedicated Notifications page. But just as an extra little bit of spice in the campaign. It's quite cool.
Unknown:
Another thing you can do of course do is help is to drive people back assignment or get on the waitlist you can see people who get on the waitlist and then by also get this extra bonus. So you're basically moving people's mind not just to get on the waitlist, but to get onto the waitlist with the intent of buying right so you're saying hey, if you want to I'm gonna be launching this cool thing. I've got this waitlist if you get on the waitlist, people who buy who on the waitlist and buy also got this amazing cool thing worth X or which is valuable because what you've got now is a waitlist full of people who have already seen beyond just the waitlist, because one of the dangers of the waitlist is it's kind of not that much of a commitment. Whereas if we can sort of push the psychology of someone's commitment a little bit further to and when you buy you will get I'll go and get on the waitlist because when I buy your thing, I'm gonna get that really cool thing and I really want my extra bonus. So again, that's another way of getting people onto that waitlist as well. I just sort of sprung to my head that I've forgotten
Unknown:
to mention before. Now like with most things we talk about one of the most important things you can wrap around a waitlist to make it work is like a genuine reason why there is a waitlist. So basically, it's all well and good saying there's a waitlist and just hoping that that creates the sort of intended desire and anticipation that there's going to be some sort of limit to there. So there's some there's a massive benefit of being on the waitlist, because ultimately you're probably going to tell you entire list about this anyway, so let's just let's be serious about it for a second. If you're not then you're leaving a lot of money on the table. So if you can wrap it around, like the fact that it's a limited time offer or the fact that you're going to be capping the number of people who can join this. If you can't, and you can't always because sometimes like a lot of our stuff is open forever once it's open, but if you are, if you can wrap that around because you are going to do an open and closed launch or because it's a small thing. With a handful of people available a handful of spaces available, if you can say that, that gives a legitimate reason for the waitlist, because if it's only going to be running until Friday, or you only got eight places. There is a reason why somebody might miss out if they're not on the waitlist because they weren't paying attention like waiting out for the for the information, etc. So again, if you've got people on your email list already, so I'm talking about that, obviously Kennedy talked earlier about using the wait list as a lead magnet. And if you've got these people on your list already, if you can wrap a good reason, a good reason like a true reason of a marketing reason a true undeniable reason why being on the wait list gives them an advantage or an edge somehow, then that's always going to make this work a lot better.
Unknown:
Yeah, like I like in terms of like how often we should how to keep in touch with people we get this a lot. How do I keep people warm once they're on a waitlist and I think this is when it gets a little bit sticky a little bit tricky, because, like anything, our extensive tests and then the tests have like hundreds of people we've spoken to about this shows that the longer there is between someone joining the waitlist and you opening the car to allow people to buy it, the longer that period, the colder those people are. So you might end up with more people on the list because you've been talking on the waitlist, because you've been talking about all these different platforms for months and months and months. But the people who joined that waitlist months ago on their excitement and drive and desire to to actually buy to solve that problem for that thing has waned. It has petered out. And it's it's no longer what it was. That's the same reason that we often will promote a webinar where we'll even get people to show up. We promote a sales webinar. Three days maximum we did four think three or four days before anything longer than that our short break from the people who registered longer ago than three or four days sucks. absolutely sucks. So again, keep the weightless time as short as you possibly can. Now I get the fact that yes you want to go what I want to mention it on I want to use it as the way to get people in I want to do what I said earlier, which was mentioned on socials and podcast and we videos over that and get people on and have a bit of time to do that. So how can you how can you do a bit of both? Well, two things you could do one is instead of actually mentioning it weeks out, you could use like a bit of dynamic content on all of your episodes like we do often the beginning of this episode, like we have a sponsor and stuff like that. But that sponsor read that. I think by the time he was at this probably is still hopefully still there is dynamically being put at the beginning of every episode. So we use we use captivate.fm to do that. So that's our podcast hosting that means we can dynamically go oh, this week we want to tell everybody on it who listen to every episode doesn't matter whichever server listen to we want to tell them about this waitlist we've got coming up. So we can just broadcast that on. So now, whatever episode someone's listened to, in the four days or maybe the week leading up to our waitlist thing opening, we can tell everybody about it across every platform. That's one thing you could use, but there's a bit of technology. Okay, the second thing you could do is really look at shortening that the waitlist period, but if you really do need and you want to be out there talking to people and mentioning it getting on podcast being interviewed all that you know doing longer term stuff is I would spend some of that time saying there's a waitlist coming. I would spend some of that time saying the waitlist is now available to get on so you're building a bit of anticipation, and then you're telling people how you can get on the waitlist. And then it's all about how you actually communicate with that list. And the way to not communicate with that list is to be like is to be like Hey, remember, you're on this waitlist. It's coming soon. You can't just keep doing it's coming soon. It's coming What you want to do because that sounds like you're trying to keep them. This is the biggest thing. I think the big mistake I think I see people doing is they they try to keep people's interest. We don't want to keep people's interest when they're on a waitlist. We want to raise their interest. We want to give them more even more interest in the middle of how do we do that. We get them. We get them to engage we get them involved. Get on to vote on stuff I'm thinking about all the stuff we talked about before. Do with it this logo of that logo, shall we call the community the community or should we call it the tribe Shall we get people to who are on the waitlist to increase their personal emotional buying to what it is that you are doing? So by the time you do open, they're more invested? They're more interested. You don't want to be simmering them you want to be really raising the heat.
Unknown:
Yeah, and I think there's there's a popular trend occurred in the sort of course and membership creation world that I'm not I'm personally not a big fan of only and this might just be my competence. These are my opinions, not the opinions of email marketing heroes. I'm curious to get your take on this. But basically I think I think part of the dream of the waitlist has been sold right to mark to people to call squares and membership site owners that they can from a standing start and almost no audience so maybe a bit of a following Instagram or something they can build away and this is where the long wait there's time constraint I think what we would consider to be long is that you can from a standing start in a very small audience from the audience, you have got unfazed and paid ads, drive people to a waitlist and then launch your thing to that waitlist when it hits whatever you consider to be a critical mass and expect it to be a big result. We've sold a lot of stuff online and a lot of niches over a lot of time. For me personally my confidence in me making that work is me personally it's very low. If you haven't gotten out on the flip of that if you've got an enormous audience on a platform, you relatively control like Instagram or something like that. And you know that when you say something those people leave, right you've been an influencer in your niche with, you know, 10s of 1000s of people or hundreds of 1000 followers. And now you've learned about this course thing and you want to move those people that's a different story. But if you're going from a tiny social audience and a completely cold ads driven audience, most other people seem to make it work. For me personally, I like the warmth and comfort. So what I would do instead, I think for me, personally, I think you earn the right to do a bigger launch and expect to get a bunch of people through the doors over a period of time. So for me personally for the confidence of it, I would just build a list sell stuff to them organically have it all been evergreen all the time. Don't try and do a big launch. When you get to the point where you've got a critical mass of people you can move it at a speed like I can drop it, we could drop it in an email and get hundreds of people in a way this by this afternoon. Whereas actually doing that from ads and cold audiences is both expensive and slow and potentially risky. So I think in terms of this like length of time you need people on your waitlist or how often you contact them whilst they're on the waitlist that is lengthened by trying to drive cold people to your waitlist. Whereas if you're just trying to do it to your existing audience, you can massively shorten the amount of time that that way this is required if you're running cold ads to a waitlist you need longer probably because unless you unless you've got a big budget you can you can burn through in a week. You're going to need to take longer over in order to get the number of people on the wait list that you want for the launch to work. So there's like a weird thing where they're called and it's gonna take you longer to get them because you have to spread out that investment probably. And as you spread out that investment you also need to keep them keep them and raise their interest as you described before, because if they're coming from your existing list or existing social audience, you can put hundreds or 1000s of people into that where there's very quickly hundreds probably for most people into that way, it's very quickly, then you can keep that time very short. And therefore you can keep it like down to a matter of days. But I think one of the challenges you just have to figure out is if I send an email to my list every day, say or three times a week, and then I've got this wait list of people. You're not going to send two emails every day or two emails every three days, you know, three times a week. Or more bloody work. That's how I feel about the way I would do it though to solve that problem is I would have it so that we send a daily email newsletter. If for a period of time those emails are sending people to a waitlist, I would have the same emails, we'll use our dual reality principle. We'd have the same piece same emails go into the waitlist people but the call to action is just going to be different. Because the truth is you should be building hype, excitement and anticipation whether they're on the waitlist or not. So if I send people emails, when we call them, show them behind the scenes, we can send that to people on the waitlist and people who are not at the same time. If we're sending people a link where they get to see what times the calls are or some other bit of training that's gonna help them tee them up for the launch. You can send that to people regardless of whether they're on the waitlist or not. The only difference is you can use conditional content where some people see one paragraph of text in your email and some people see a different paragraph of text in your email. So the call to action at the end is different. The call to action is go and get on the waitlist if they're not on the waitlist, or if they are on the waitlist, it can be you know, you know Yeah, that sort of thing. Gosh, this is exciting. Yeah, gosh, and that's what solves the multi email problem. Yeah, cuz
Unknown:
we don't do more emails and we don't want to be efficient. We want to be effective with these emails. Right. So So you know, that's kind of our that's kind of our thinking around waitlist. I think we definitely got a place I think if you're gonna use them, especially if you're doing like our anticipation action sequence or if you're doing a if you're doing a book launch stuff like that, where you know, you're sort of getting people towards a particular thing. For example, if you know there's only 50 spots available, and you've got a waitlist of 2000 people, showing people that hey, there's 2000 people on this email list. There's only 50 spots we open tomorrow. You're gonna have a real surge of people wanting to buy that's definitely a marketing campaign where waitlist is absolutely crushes. It absolutely works beautifully, but the rest of it just really consider the length of that waitlist, how long you gonna leave it how you gonna keep those people engaged user some of the things that we've shared today, if you want to check out some of the things I've been talking about today are getting to know you sequel that's our four day welcome sequence, our book launch campaign, as well as a whole bunch of the stuff we've been talking about today. It's almost all of it. I think every almost every single thing of the day is inside of our email hero blueprint. So go to email hero blueprint.com. And you can go and check out the email hero blueprint. And now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. And Rob
Unknown:
It's the world's very demanding money. Lots of curiosity, compound curiosity, who's demanding money what they're demanding money from, who are they demanding? Money from? Is it bad? Is it good? Yeah, they're demanding money. It was all about the fact that Netflix have finally started to enforce their multi household policy on my account. So because my stepmom shows my Netflix and I have to pay an extra 599 for an avid
Unknown:
route. There you go. That's this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Thanks so much for listening on the show. If you're brand new listener, welcome. I hope you've enjoyed it. Make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player because we do a brand new free episode for you every single email marketing Wednesday, so hit subscribe. That means the episode downloads to your podcast player and you get to tune in every single week and listen to more gems. We got to crack an episode for your next week, which we can't wait to listen to. We'll see you then. Bye
