3 Ideas for Quickly Creating Your First Email Autoresponder

Subscriber Jason is rapidly building an audience in a hot niche:

Programming for virtual reality.

His email list is growing fast—and now he has a problem.

He writes:

I’ve been trying to follow your advice and blogging pretty consistently as well as doing some promotion for the site.
Daily unique user count has gone up from 2-10 to around 50-60. On days when I put out a new post it bumps up to 150-200 for a day or two. The peak day had 531, which was great.

I also ran a few giveaways to get more email signups. The first time I ran, I only got about 50 signups. Last night though, someone with a lot of followers apparently shared their ‘lucky url’ and I’ve got 300 new emails in the last 14hrs. From what I can tell, they seem pretty legitimate (lots of retweets, many of them have their own referrals), but I don’t really know yet.

The only thing I’m not sure on right now is weekly emails. I don’t have anything really good figured out for that yet. I’ve setup Drip, but should probably build a good campaign for when people come on. Right now, I just lead them to the giveaway and WordPress emails them about new blog entries, but that feels pretty underwhelming.

Jason is suffering from a common problem—”email list guilt.”

This kind of guilt sets in after you’ve got your list growing, and you realize that now you don’t quite know what to say to them.

And so you say… Pretty much nothing at all.

Here’s my 80/20 recommendation on this:

Focus on nailing the first 10-14 days after a new subscriber joins your list.

Ideally you’d like them to hear from you at least 10 times in that first couple of weeks.

After that, you can space the emails out more, or even just do blog updates (assuming you’re a consistent blogger like Jason).

Three options for what to do in that first 14 days are:

1. Rehash your lead magnet.

Do you give your subscribers a 10-page PDF when they sign up?

Pull out a few pieces from the lead magnet and blow ’em up into full emails.

2. Chop up your lead magnet into an email course and drip it out over 2 weeks.

You already know how I feel about email courses—they’re a great option for many entrepreneurs.

3. Answer questions on the topic of the lead magnet.

Take the most common questions that people ask you around the topic of your lead magnet and answer one per email.

Remember, when someone joins your list, you have their attention.

Make the most of their attention and interest by keeping the conversation going for 2 weeks.

After that they’ll remember you, even if they don’t hear from you every day.

Related posts:

  1. What the heck should I use for a “lead magnet”? While I’m making embarrassing admissions, here’s another one: When I launched this blog there was NO way for people to opt-in to my email list. The reason? I couldn’t decide what to offer as a “lead magnet.” I wasted MONTHS thrashing around over this. After all, I knew I needed...
  2. How an Email Marketing Disaster Ended in Relationship-Building Brilliance Got a massive kick out of this from reader Jason: Subject: Auto-responder disaster and the kindness of friends Hi Josh I wanted to tell you about my brief, disastrous (and not so disastrous) foray into email auto-responders. So I finally plucked up the courage to create my first list auto-responder...
  3. What Happens If You Run Out Of Ideas For Your Marketing Emails? In college my career dream was to become a journalist. So halfway through my sophomore year, I took a job as the assistant editor of the student newspaper. There was a lot about this new role that intimidated me. Like calling strangers up on the phone and grilling them for facts and...
  4. The X-Files Secret for Must-Read Autoresponder Sequences Should you try to connect all of the emails in an autoresponder sequence together? Or is it OK to build a “sequence” of one-off emails that don’t interrelate? That topic popped up a few days ago in a private forum I belong to. Both approaches *can* work, but in my...