While watching the last X-Men movie last night, I thought about you and your online business.
And perhaps you’ll find a useful marketing lesson here:
After seeing the movie for the umpteenth time, I am convinced my mother stole Wolverine’s “healing factor”.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Izmir visiting family.
Short version:
The floor was wet, and my mother slipped and fell on her elbow.
Long version:
We are eating lunch. She picks up the humongous glass salad bowl and heads over to the kitchen to refill it.
One minute she is walking under the arch, the next she disappears from view, and there comes this sickening cracking sound.
I step out into hallway and find my mom sprawled on the marble floor. She is lying on her back. Still like a corpse. Eyes closed.
There is no sound coming from her.
In that split second, I freeze with fear:
Is she in shock?
Unconscious?
…
Dead?
I check her eyes and the back of her head, gingerly. No sign of concussion. Good.
She then calmly informs me that she is in pain, in full command of her faculties (“Stop asking me what date it is”), but unable to get up because she can’t move her right arm.
We rush her to the hospital.
Turns out her elbow is broken and needs immediate surgery.
Her first three questions to the attending doctor:
Will there be permanent damage? (No.)
Is surgery really necessary? (Yes.)
When will I be able to exercise again? (6 weeks.)
That makes her frown in disapproval. She snaps out of her trauma and defaults back to her factory settings, which my sister and I call “CEO mode”:
“That is unacceptable. Which medical school did you go to again?”
The worse part for her isn’t the surgery. It’s that she won’t be allowed to exercise for 6 weeks.
Scroll forward to yesterday.
She is back on her feet 2 weeks ahead of schedule.
Apparently, she was able to make Wolverine-like progress with physiotherapy because she’s ridiculously fit for her age. She had the metabolism, the circulation, and the supporting musculature in place to speed up the recovery.
Still, those four weeks sucked.
Especially because it was her right arm, which made life a living hell for her.
But you know what?
At least, she fell on her elbow.
She could have hit her head and cracked open her skull.
She could have been overweight, and crushed the bones to pieces under the extra weight (according to the doctor).
The hospital could have botched the surgery.
On the other hand:
If she had hit her head, or been overweight, or gone to a bad hospital, the consequences could have been catastrophic.
She could be on life support, permanently crippled, or even dead.
It was a close call.
And so it is with product launches, particularly if you have a small list.
One slip and you are bang there on the floor.
Especially if you haven’t primed your list before the launch.
Then when you fall, you’re likely to crack your head because you didn’t soften the impact with your elbow (so to say).
Especially if you have a morbidly obese list with useless - no: harmful - deadweight, such as freebie seekers and other low quality subscribers who aren’t that into what you do.
Then when you fall, you’re less likely to land on your elbow because all that weight limits your agility.
Especially if you can’t write great sales emails. This is like the surgeon botching the operation. If one email goes wrong, you don’t have the expertise to fix it.
Where will YOUR business be if you slip and crash your next ad campaign into the ground? How quickly can you recover from a broken product launch, and get the revenue back on its feet?
Because here is the thing:
Marketing mishaps can happen to anyone during a launch. I’m not immune, and neither are you.
But having an email list allows you to recover from any marketing mishap (and even a crashed product launch) with preternatural speed like a business “Wolverine”.
The secret “healing factor” is not the list itself.
It’s the relationship you have with that list.
If you have something they want and they know, like and trust you, they will buy.
If you have something they want, but they don’t know, like or trust you, you’re probably dead in the water - even if your emails are stuffed with credentials and proof.
As email marketing pioneer Ben Settle points out, “Relationships are everything in this world of online selling via email where nobody gets to meet you or talk to you in person.”
The easiest way to develop this relationship is through consistent, daily contact that is appreciated.
But contact isn’t enough on its own. You need to be sending them emails they actually look forward to reading each day.
I won’t lie to you:
Doing this consistently is tough.
Heck, doing it once a month is difficult enough. But daily? It’s a challenge.
But only if you don’t have an endless supply of email ideas to draw from
… and thought-processes to shape those amorphous ideas into stories
… and battle-tested templates to whip those stories into emails in as little as 15 minutes.
That’s where Email Reliquary comes in.
It’s the world’s first battle-tested collection of email templates, swipe files and call-to-action arsenals that work *especially* well with smaller lists.
Swipe, send and potentially put money in your piggy bank the very same day using the 15-Minute Email Engine that powers all the templates in the Reliquary.
(Assuming, of course, that you're selling something people want and you have an email list to sell to - however tiny it might be.)
All the templates are based on actual emails to my list, which made money the same day they were sent.
This week’s “relic” is “Ganesha, the Storyteller”.
It’s reverse-engineered from an email that took me 23 minutes to write, was sent to a tiny list of 1,200 people, and brought in $793 in sales.
That translates to an “hourly rate” of $2068/hr - not bad for a quick email, eh?
(And it wasn’t even part of a “launch sequence” - just a standalone email.)
Bottom line:
Most online businesses cannot recover from a failed product launch. The expenses become crippling, and they have no way to generate revenue without doing another full-on product launch.
The solution is to have a list of prospects on speed dial, who know, like and trust you - and want to buy from you.
As a Knight of the Email Reliquary, you get a new email template each week, which makes it almost effortless to stay in consistent contact with your list and build that buying relationship of trust.
Best of all, no one can take the relationship you have with your email list away from you. It’s not subject to changes in algorithms, or market conditions, or platform infrastructure.
Once you have that relationship, and you’re selling something they actually want, you can send an email and watch the sales roll in.
You’ll never lose sleep over marketing mishaps again.
One ad campaign failed? No worries. You can go back to your list the very next day, and test a different product or a different sales message.
Just pick up a battle-tested template from the Reliquary, swipe and hit “send”.
You can even do that “on the fly”, without having to map out a complicated product launch first.
To see how I’m doing it, check out:
http://trial-eureka.teachable.com/p/email-reliquary/