CASE STUDY: Have You Built A Mailing List That Doesn’t Share Your Values?

I’ve been working with a group of business owners who are doing their first webinar ever to promote their good work.

They wrote their promotional emails, reached out to promotional partners, wrote swipe copy for those partners, wrote an opt-in page, and a follow-up email sequence.

But the thing about taking on a project like this is that you never have 100% certainty how it’s going to turn out. You do the work. Hope for the best. Then watch and see what happens.

That said, you can be sure that if you pay attention, you will always, always, always get what you need to move forward.

Side bar: I’ve worked with so many business owners who tell me that when their online launch bombed, they took it personally. They felt so ashamed and embarrassed, they stopped trying to win business online entirely. For years!

Then they come and work with me, and we fix it.

I have one client who has 160 people signed up for her first ever webinar. Another woman had 360 people signed up for her first webinar, for an opt in page she wrote with me. Those are great numbers (my first webinar had 12 people signed up), but that’s not the only way to measure success.

Take one woman I’ve been writing with, a whip smart business coach in Texas. She has had great success booking and delivering talks in her local community to drum up private clients.

But when she’d tried to win business online, none of the 4 launches she tried resulted in any business. She kept hearing, “oh, I wish I had the money to work with you” in her sales conversations.

She implements like Elvis – who bought his living room furniture in 15 minutes, or so the story goes on the Graceland tour.

So when we worked together, she wrote her opt in page, promotional emails, got her team working on Facebook ad buys, and gave her webinar in 30 days, flat.

She offered initial sessions and got two buyers.

While this may not sound as epic as some of the testimonials you read on people’s sales pages, about how they sold a bazillion dollars overnight and it was so easy, we celebrated her progress.

“Well, now I know that I can sell online,” she told me.

“And now we have confirmed your hunch that your ideal clients are not on your house mailing list,” I added.

Her main list building strategy was to collect email addresses from the people in her talks. But those people weren’t biting at her webinar, or any of her follow up offers.

It wasn’t her copy.

It was her list.

Simply put, they didn’t want the same things she wanted.

They didn’t value the same things she valued.

So it didn’t matter how real or spot on she was coming across.

It wasn’t resonating.

Over the course of her writing, she uncovered her message – and more specifically, the thing that sets her apart in the marketplace.  She realized that the whole reason she makes money is to improve the quality of life for her family – and provide for what she calls “life’s little luxuries.”

Seeing this, she also has the hunch that her ideal clients share this value of family and belief in money as a tool for contribution, in the service of what matters most.

But this was not the group that she was getting into the room at her local speaking gigs.

I’ll venture a guess. Chambers and general business groups are less interested in the idea of money as a tool for family contribution and nurturing, than a group of coaches, personal development experts, online entrepreneurs and lifestyle businesses.

And while it’s a bummer that she didn’t put 15 people into her group from an online strategy, she got a big, fat clue for what’s wrong… and how to fix it.

We made a plan for what’s next. More speaking engagements locally, since that is working well. But I advised that she refine her strategy and instead of booking gigs at chambers of commerce and general business groups, she focus on women’s entrepreneurial groups.

Sometimes, when we put our stake in the ground and claim who we are and what we stand for, we discover that we are not in front of the right people.

That’s all part of the learning process.

Never, ever berate yourself for results that aren’t what you’d hoped. It’s great to put the big numbers on the board and have one of those hard-to-be-believed whopping testimonial success stories. But to get there from where you are now, you need to cultivate your ability to learn the lesson of what you need to tweak for next time.

This is how the success sausage is made.

And remember: Just. Keep. Going.

 

Mighty thanks to Nichole Burrows via flickr for “Values”