A question comes in about turning skim milk into butter:
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I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.
I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?
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The answer in short is “probably no.”
If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.
But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.
It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.
But it’s never as easy as right at the start.
And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.
So what do you do?
You got a couple options.
One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.
Or — and this is where my butter analogy breaks down — you can create new offers. There’s no law saying you can only sell people things once. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.
I’ll have more to say about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products. That’s something I have been thinking about a lot as part of my new “hot seat coach” role within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.
But that’s for the future.
For now, I do have a very high-quality ladle to sell you.
It will skim off the cream from your list if you’ve never emailed regularly before… it might pull in occasional sales even if you never do anything more to grow your list… and it will be an indispensable part of launching new offers, in case you ever do decide to do so.
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