Techniques To Maximise The Power Of An Email Marketing Wait List

Can you use an email marketing waitlist for your next big launch? Maybe you have a membership or a course and want to generate excitement, curiosity, and demand. Can a waitlist help you do that? Also, how do you keep people on your waitlist warm? How long should you run a waitlist for, and how often should you contact people on it? We answer all these questions and much more...Are you ready to get all the good stuff?Let's go!SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:08) Grab our amazing resource Click Tricks totally for FREE!(4:18) Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course?(11:17) When should you use a waitlist?(14:08) How do you get people on your waitlist?(15:22) Where possible, reward people instantly! (17:50) How we use waitlists in our business?(21:18) Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist.(22:52) How do you keep people on your waitlist warm?(30:07) What's the dual reality principle?(32:47) Subject lines of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Should you have a waitlist for your membership or course? Between the two of us, we’ve had experience selling courses and memberships for years, both with our current and previous businesses. And one of the strategies that go with opening the doors to your new product is having a waitlist. Do you absolutely need to have one? Unless your membership or course is capped in terms of the number of people who can join, we don’t think a waitlist is strictly necessary.A waitlist helps you create demand in advance, which is why we use this strategy as a key component of a couple of the email marketing campaigns we teach. It can be a useful tool to gauge an interest. Is your audience interested in your upcoming product? By joining a waitlist, people make a micro commitment – they're deciding they want to find out more about something you're about to offer.Plus, if you’re new to the world of online memberships and courses and aren’t sure whether something will sell, a waitlist is a low-barrier entryway to help you figure that out. Once you develop more experience, you’ll develop a level of confidence and awareness of what’s likely to work. But if you’re just starting, you can build this awareness with a waitlist.Where will you talk about your waitlist?Should you talk about your launch only to the people on your waitlist? Absolutely not! If you're only marketing to your waitlist and not the rest of your audience, you’re leaving money on the table. Because there will be people on your email list who would never sign up for a waitlist. And yet, they might be interested when they see your sales page. You also need to think about what advantage you'll give to the people on your waitlist. Why are they on the waitlist in the first place? Will you give them early access? Does the waitlist serve a real purpose or are you just “dressing something up in marketing”?A great place to promote your waitlist (and your upcoming launch) is on your social media. If you have a podcast or an active social channel, you can start talking about your membership or course a couple of weeks before you open the doors. Start inviting people to jump on your waitlist - it's a great call to action and a good way of attracting those with a level of intent into your world.When should you use a waitlist?We have a waitlist for our Email Engine Accelerator, which is a capped programme. We can only take a small number of people each time we run it (three times a year), and demand is high because people get results. So when we talk about it, our customers want to know when the next intake is. We have a good reason to ask people externally (on our podcast, for example) to join our waitlist to be informed about the next opening.Before you decide to start a waitlist though, you should think about what you'll do after the launch. Because you can't suddenly take people from your waitlist and start sending them daily emails as part of your email marketing. If you want to do that, you have to frame that transition first. You can even sell them something else if the product they joined the waitlist for isn't available anymore or they didn't buy. But you have to tell them that's what you're going to do - you have to salvage that relationship first. A way to do that is via a welcome sequence. Ours is called the Get to Know You sequence, and it's a 4-part campaign that can act as a bridge for people who transition from a waitlist we created onto our daily emails. What is a waitlist good for?A waitlist can give you an idea of demand and a sense of confidence. When you ask people to join a waitlist to be informed about a product you're about to launch (and they do), it tells you they're interested and that you have a viable product.Plus, a waitlist gives something importance - it elevates it. It tells others that what you have is important and exclusive. It means you have a bunch of people who've raised their hands and expressed an interest. And the next time you launch something, you can also go back to those same people again.  How do you get people on your waitlist?Give people a good reason to join your waitlistIf you want people to join your waitlist, you have to give them a good reason to do so, such as an emotional reason (or a bunch of them). For example, in our Anticipation Action sequence or our Book Launch campaign, we ask people to join a waitlist. If it's a book you're launching, you can offer people some chapters of the book ahead of publication, for example.If you’re selling a membership, you may offer little samples of the programme or ask people to express their preferences and get involved in specific parts of the creation process, which generates buy-in. Or you could offer a free gift to the first few people who join your waitlist. It could even be a video tour of your membership!Where possible, reward people instantly!Although it’s not always possible, try to give people something as soon as they join your waitlist. If you’re launching something live (and your product isn’t going to be available for a while), you could, for example, run a group call for the people on your waitlist and give them a preview or an outline of what’s to come. We do this in the shape of a webinar with an informal ‘behind the scenes’. Or you can give them instant access to the list of live calls.Whatever you give them doesn’t have to be ‘big’ – it’s just something in return for joining your waitlist so they don’t feel they got nothing for that effort. It provides people with certainty, and it doesn't leave them feeling like they’ve been left alone after they gave you their email address. When you give people something in return, you trigger a sense of satisfaction.For example, if you’re starting a live programme in a month, but you're giving people on the waitlist the calendar of calls now, they can start figuring out how your membership or course fits into their lives. They sell themselves in advance. Plus, if you’re giving them the information now, you’re answering questions they might have down the line, so you save yourself some time, too. How we use waitlists in our businessThere are two different ways we use to get people on waiting lists. In a couple of cases, the waitlist is already baked into our email campaigns.Otherwise, on a subtle level, every once in a while, we’ll send out a pre-framing email that goes out before a sales campaign or just casually. This could be, for example, before our Black Friday campaign. We might send an email ahead of time and ask people to let us know if they want to be told about our Black Friday offer one hour before everyone else, for example. We don’t call it a waitlist, but the application is similar. So we have two different circumstances – in one case, we’re asking people to click a link and send them to a dedicated page where they have to enter their name and email address to join a waitlist. Generally speaking, that’s not a great idea because people sometimes click on links by accident or may be using a piece of technology that clicks on links for them.What you want instead is the extra commitment that someone needs to take with you when they type their name and email address and actively decide to join your waitlist. You could even add a PS at the end of one of your emails and ask people to click on a link so you can let them know an hour before your offer opens. It adds a bit of spice to the campaign. Another thing you can do is to give people a bonus (something valuable to them) for joining your waitlist. This way, you build a waitlist full of people who already appreciate the value of your product. You’re pushing the psychology of someone’s commitment a little further because they're joining your list to get a bonus.Give people a genuine reason to join your waitlist!When creating a waitlist, one of the most important things to do is to wrap it around a genuine reason. Why do you have a waitlist in the first place? Sure, it can create desire and anticipation. But ultimately, you’ll probably tell your whole email list about your product anyway. So it’s important to have a specific...