Found some good advice on e-mail management: Managing e-mail realistically It might seem strange, that someone who is an advocate of e-mail marketing is linking you to someone who advocates deleting anything that even looks like a marketing e-mail. In his own words: If I’m likely to care about it, someone I like more than you will tell me about it. But that’s the challenge – be the person that the customer likes more. If...

A while ago, I posted about how copy was all about taking your prospect on a journey, so it was important to understand where you want them to go. There’s another side to that, of course. You’ve got to understand where they are now. Whenever I’m talking students through creating a sales page, I’ll have them create a customer avatar, as detailed as it can be. Essentially I’ll have them create an imaginary friend,...

The first draft is pretty much done, so it seems a good time for a run-down of how I went about putting together the JV page. What’s often forgotten is that your JV page is still a sales page. You’re trying to sell your offer to potential affiliates, and convince them that your product is the one they want to promote to their list, because a) it’s an awesome product and b) they’ll make money when they do. Like any sales...

Starting a new project is always a good feeling. Uncharted territory, working out how you’re going to approach the product and the audience… In this case, the product is a sales funnel and the audience are affiliates. My job is to persuade as many of them that they want to promote this offer as possible. It’s a market I’m familiar with so I already have some idea of the target customer. And that means the first thing I...

Whenever you write advertising copy, you should be taking your prospect on a journey. Right now they’re at point A. You want to get them to point B. So before you do anything – and I grant you this seems obvious, but coming to writing copy for the first time a LOT of people seem to forget it – make sure you know what point B is. What action do you want them to take? And I don’t mean eventually… I mean right now,...

Got a bit of data for you. Good marketers test. You know this. They’ll try out lots of different approaches to see what works. In terms of e-mail marketing, this means splitting your list into random segments of equal-ish size, sending slightly different e-mails to each and tracking click data. From the results, you can tell which variation works best. There’s a neat little statistical tool called a T-test you can use to judge the...