Having an email newsletter or a blog broadcast has worked great for me over the years, but I need to change things up.
There are a few challenges with using incentives to get people to want to join your email newsletters, though, some of them pretty new:
- People sign up with throwaway email addresses just to get the freebs.
- Folks who want your free stuff at the time of signup and then they forget about you.
- Information overwhelm – more education is probably less and less appealing.
OK those are problems. What can we do about them?
There are a few answers but they mostly boil down to …
Ongoing value or utility.
It is one thing to make your restaurant and menu mouth-watering, but if your diners don’t dine, or even leave, then there is no point.
So once people are in the door, we need to do whatever we can to get people to enjoy what they order, and if possible tell all their friends.
Free ebooks won’t go away
But I am changing things up.
First, I moved from AWeber to FluentCRM so that I have more visibility and control over my contact data.
Don’t get me wrong, AWeber has been amazing, I have been with them for almost 20 years.
But things are getting more complex as people and services become more privacy and spam concious, which hurts our legitimate practices and reach in the process.
Consider things like tracking pixels and links. It is easy for a service to filter or block them because they do not match the domain of the sender. Having your own CRM on your own domain helps with that.
Personalising WordPress
Having your own CRM also helps with information about your contacts, if they are subscribed or not.
Lastly, integrating your CRM with a membership or course management system, makes the whole thing even better.
When you can take someone from an email to logged in, your whole site can respond to what the person is most interested in seeing, when they are most ready to see it.
Utility or Utilities?
As I am a developer, I naturally thought of tools I can add to my member area.
Protecting these tools behind a login will hopefully protect my servers from being overwhelmed by bots.
Of course, some tools will cost me money in terms of Third party services, APIs, compute, and hosting, so they will be reserved for clients, but there are still a lot of things that I can share here or as a download, for members only.
I will leave the reveal of the tools later, but for now know that is something I will be working on going into beta very soon!
Awkward Interim
My main challenge today as I write this is I have both opt-in routes running, which means you get both welcome sequences. I need to figure out how to suppress one if you are going to get the other!
Tech Stack
Other than WordPress and FluentCRM (with FluentForms for even more CRM goodness), I have being trying out WPFusion (thank you David Risley and his great WordPress newsletter for the recommendations), but in the main I am going with LifterLMS for sites with both memberships and courses.
I will follow up with anything I change, add, or experience.
Want to try it?
Even if you are already subscribed, you can go ahead and test the free member area out as things currently stand and let me know what you think.
