A niche mini-course is a way to entice your visitors to give you their email address in exchange for a series of emails offering them a variety of solutions for one of their problems within the niche. We have touched on other offers we can make to subscribers, but the mini-course utilizes previously published content.
I get messages from my subscribers regularly asking for the best way to offer content to subscribers. It is ideal to try several options and monitor their success, but if you have enough content on your site, try the mini-course.
The reason for this type of offer is delayed gratification. If you offer an e-book, once they sign up they can grab the book and then unsubscribe. Getting them used to reading your content every few days is a way to establish a relationship!
You will need one problem to solve and five to seven ways to solve it. Giving visitors more of what they came to your site for is the fastest and most productive way to establish a relationship with them!
1. Establish the relationship
I think that most of us would say that we want to establish a relationship with the people who visit our site. You do that by telling the visitor about yourself, and offering them assistance.
The first item to be sent is the welcome email. This is a way to reach out and inform your visitor of how much you value them for opting-in. Every-one wants to be valued, and your understanding of this should be reflected in your introductory message.
Tell them how you can help them (your expertise), how often you will be helping (i.e.twice a week) and then tell them something personal that relates to why you want to help them. A little story about how you needed help with something and how you found that help and how you now want to share that help is ideal, but be honest and from the heart.
Your goal is to get your subscriber to stay subscribed and to open that next email! Your first email should be designed to show the subscriber that you are a real person, and have solved real problems and now you want to share with them how you did it.
2. Build on the relationship with the follow up emails
During the course of the series, you will give your subscriber personal stories that relate to the solutions that you are offering. Do the best that you can with this, as not all situations will be covered with personal experience. Your stories can be silly or serious, as long as they are heartfelt.
The stories do not have to be about you; they can be stories that you heard from friends, or something funny that you saw in a movie. The story should related to the content you will be giving away for that day.
You want to tailor the series based on solving one problem that the subscriber has with several different solutions. For example tell a story about training one of your dogs, and then lead into your other content; what to do with a dog who won’t listen; a dog who chews furniture; a dog who barks way too much. Each of these problems is based on a dog who needs training.
You may have noticed that it is going to require some work on your part to organize the series in a way that makes sense and gives your subscriber the information in an orderly fashion. Writing out the steps for training a puppy, or applying multi-color hair colors or buying camping gear piece by piece will help you figure out how best to give this information to your reader.
3. Keep developing the relationship
You are providing this information to your subscriber as a way to (1) establish a relationship (2) build trust to the point where they will seriously consider purchasing something from/through you. Number two will not work without number one.
Continue to offer personal information about yourself; what motivated you to start your website, why you want to help people, or what your hobbies and interests are. Give them more information about you, and attach the course topics to this.
If you have an affiliate program that you are going to sell to your visitors, do this in your last email. Save a great story to tell within this email and how it will tie into the program or product. If you have used the product that you are selling, be sure to mention this in your letter!
The final email should reinforce everything before it and again offer the item for sale. If you have done your homework and are offering a product that your subscribers will want, they should be ready to purchase by the time they get the last email.
Be sure to ask them to message you after they have tried to product to offer any comments or suggestions. This is beginning of your relationship, not the end! As well, you should be proud of the products that you sell, so if you can get some real world feedback, this will be invaluable for your business!
This is part six of my series on email marketing and I hope it answers some of the questions that you might have had from my previous posts. If not, please message me at support@fearlessaffiliate.com. I will be happy to consider any topic related to my website for future posts!
You can find links to the previous posts in this series here.
Please comment in the comment box below and share any stories you have about email marketing and how it has worked for you, either in the past or currently.