Today, I had an exchange with a coaching client who I’d advised to send out some handraiser emails to his list.
(Handraiser email = email that invites people to reply with a “yes” if they are interested in learning more, or if they fit a certain profile.)
My dude sent out his handraiser email. He got a bunch of replies that said “yes.” He followed up with those people but then, like a pigeon with two broken wings, response fell off a cliff. Almost nobody replied.
My dude wrote me to say:
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What I’m coming up against is a sense that I really don’t know how to create a conversation with next-to-no interest from the other person. If the other person gives almost nothing in the form of effort or interest (which fits when I ask them a yes/no question) I’m struggling to manufacture that interest without being manipulative.
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There’s a “glib” and a “responsible” way of dealing with this problem.
The “glib” way is a marketing and business practice I call factoring out.
For my math nerds out there, factoring out goes back to the heady and self-conscious days of 7th-grade algebra:
If you have an expression like 2x + 2y, in algebra they teach you that you can turn that into 2(x + y). You can factor out the 2 so that your inside expression (x + y) remains blessedly free of 2.
Simple enough, right? I hope it’s simple enough to use as an analogy even for the non-math nerds.
In any case, here’s what factoring out translates to your marketing and business:
Rather than hoping that your prospects will do action X at some point down the line, you can force them to take action X as a condition for engaging with you at all.
So for example, rather than hoping for people to reply to your followup question, make answering your followup question a condition to even replying to your email in the first place.
Instead of saying, “Reply to this email and say MORE INFO NOW”… tell people, “Reply to this email and tell me a little bit about your current situation.”
In other words, the factoring out solution to the problem of creating a conversation when people just reply “yes”… is to stop having people reply with just “yes.”
It’s a super effective and practical technique that goes way beyond handraiser campaigns. But maybe it’s a little too glib for you in the present situation.
Like I said, there’s also the “responsible” way of dealing with this problem.
That’s about having a structured way of engaging people who reply with just a “yes,” and guiding them in a proven fashion from that curt reply all the way to an actual sale, even a high-ticket sale, all over email.
Is this something you want more info on?
I have a resource to point you to.
It tells you exactly what to say over 1-1 emails to get people to engage with you in a way that leads to a sale.
It’s not free or even cheap.
If that doesn’t deter you, reply to this email and tell me a bit about your situation when it comes to selling over email.