Video Transcript:
I was sitting here thinking about shooting a quick little video about a way I’ve been using to keep lists squeaky clean, keep your email open rates higher, your engagement up, all of the above. It has nothing to do with double opt-in versus single opt-in. Actually, I’m always a single-opt guy. I’ve used double-opt and still had a lot of junk end up on my list. A lot of these bots and things will still go in and confirm the link and then never, ever do anything with your emails. You can look at the email addresses that they’re using. They’re all junk, garbage; it’s quite obvious. Still they’re getting through the double-opt. I don’t think double-opt/single-opt, is a completely perfect way to do it. I like this system better. This is something I’ve started doing in the last few months. Works really good, and keeps your open rates up.
What are we doing? Let me show you what we are doing here. Basically, I’m making a little sequence to ensure that the person on the other end is a real person and actually wants and is using the information that they requested. This all has to do with the lead magnet. Let’s zoom in here. Typical scenario. You got your lead magnet on the landing page. You got some sort of offer. Somebody opts in on that page. They go to a thank you page without the lead magnet. Never put the lead magnet on the landing page. I always want to make them engage with that first email. At the very least, I want them to click something. I don’t want them to be able to just grab the lead magnet off the thank you page.
In this case they’ve opted in, they end up on my thank you page, which is probably going to tell them, “Hey, check your email. You’re going to receive it.” Then they’re going to get added to a sequence. Usually, most people at this point are just adding them to their regular autoresponder. “Hey, here you go. Here’s the lead magnet. Hey, I’ve got the ‘I’m really cool. I’m even cooler.'” You’re just going to get three, four emails in a row that tell them how awesome your company is and what your offer is, yada yada.
In this case I start them out on a sequence that I just call “Delivery”. My lead-offer-delivery sequence, obviously the first thing I’m going to do is send them whatever it was they requested. Here’s your lead magnet, whatever it is. We’re going to have a link to that in the email. It’s not an attachment, it’s a link. We want them to click something. I’m having them click the link and they’re going to be able to download that lead magnet.
If they click the link, I’m pretty sure they’re a real person and they wanted my info. If they don’t click the link, A) they’re a bot and they don’t matter anyway, or B) they really weren’t that interested. Now assuming they click the link, here’s what’s going to happen: They click the link, they’re going to go off on this other path and they’re going to end up on my autoresponder, my introductory “I’m so cool. Here’s what I’m offering. Here’s why you should buy from me” autoresponder.
If they don’t click the link, if they don’t download my free offer, well they’re going to stay on this delivery sequence. The next email they’re going to get the next day is they’re going to get my reminder number one. “Hey, did you want this?” We get busy. We’re on our mobile phone or whatever it is, and we request this free thing. If you’re on the phone and you request it, maybe you don’t want to download it on your phone. Maybe you want to download it on your computer and you’re just not there. Then the email ends up dropping down on the list in your inbox and you forget about it. A lot of times people will act on the second email. They’ll forget about it on this first one and they will act on the second email. It’s a good reminder. “Hey, did you really want this?”
If I just start them off on the sequence of “Hey, I’m so cool. Here’s my offer,” and they’ve never downloaded or consumed the lead magnet, really going to decrease the chances of them actually following through on my offer. Now again, if they do respond to this reminder number one, they click that link in there, they’re going to get added to my introductory autoresponder and taken off my delivery sequence.
Then we’re going to keep right on going. On the next day we’re going to remind them again. “Hey, do you still want this?” We’re going to remind them one more time. “Hey, you asked for this. What happened? Where are you? Why are you not opening this email? Are you even a real person?” We’re just going to keep sending this out day after day until they do something with it. Actually, I send it out four times. I figure if they haven’t done it over a week, it’s probably not going to happen. The fourth one, I’m deleting your account. I’m getting kind of serious here. “Hey, you don’t open this thing, it’s over.”
Then guess what? If they don’t click on that link and end up in my autoresponder series, I’m actually going to unsubscribe them from bulk email. They’re not going to get anything else from me ever again. Because I figure if they have not engaged with the thing they wanted in the first place, this is not going to be a good relationship. This isn’t really going to go anywhere. Quite honestly, they could just be a bot. They might not be anything legit anyway. I’m going to take them out. I’m going to forget about them and I’m going to move on.
That is what’s keeping my list really clean. It’s going to lead to higher open rates, better engagement. I’m actually getting people in my autoresponder that want to be in my autoresponder, that really wanted this free information that they downloaded. Now this kind of system, really simple to do if you’re on a smart system like ONTRAPORT or ActiveCampaign, something that you can run rules and do tags and such with. Very simple to do in ONTAPORT. Pretty simple to do on ActiveCampaign. I suppose you could do it with other systems. It might be more manual with some of them, like a MailChimp. It’s probably going to be hard to automate this in MailChimp but you could go in and clean it out once in a while and move people along manually.
There you have it. That’s how you can keep your list really clean and make sure that you only have people on there that want to be on there.
