Your sales funnel is essentially the sales process that you have in place for your prospects. So that would normally mean anything that was automated such as your initial offer, upsell, etc. But it could also include real time promotions if that was something you were doing on a predictable basis. But it's also often just used loosely to mean the entire sales process, automated or otherwise. So it's not exactly about the emails, but they are very close to one and the same.

My best advice is to go back over this training module. It covers it better than I can in a forum comment: https://www.mmmanifesto.com/in.....-musicians

It typically applies to new subscribers but you could have a different sales funnel just for customers if you wanted. The goal there would be to start everything over again with the focus being on an upsell or second product. But it all comes down to the AIDA sales funnel no matter what your doing.

What I would be doing in your shoes is setting up a simple funnel like in the copywriting video which is designed to make that first sale. I'd add product package options and an upsell like you did on your launch. Start driving traffic NOW and get that list as big as you can. Then, when you are ready to launch your next album I would simply send out a few pre-launch emails to warm people up to what was coming, get them excited, increase the bond, etc (like you did with the first launch but maybe a little shorter. The whole thing could be done in two weeks).

When you do the launch for your next album you might segment your list so that you are only emailing people who signed up more than 3 or 4 weeks prior. Otherwise it would seem like you were dropping two emails on top of each other. When it got really close you could just start a new list and do something more like what you did on the initial launch.

And then yes, I'd send out regular content emails at least every two weeks.

But I feel like breaking it up like that makes it sound more complicated than it is.

Keep focused on this...

1. drive traffic all the time, every day, consistently. Build your list.

2. New subscribers get run through a 4 - 7 email series that is designed to create awareness, interest, desire, and action (buy your stuff).

3. Present buyers with an upsell and/or package options.

4. When you get close to your next release you could either kill your autoresponder sequence or just remove the stuff that applies to your old album.

5. When your new album is ready, launch it using an LTO (and you'll probably want to get folks excited about what is coming in the week or two leading up to it.

6. Once the album is live, change up your autoresponder series with emails that support the new album.

As for how often you can do an LTO, totally depends on your relationship with your list. It's really about the balance between your content and your promotions. You just can't have a channel that displays nothing but commercials. I'm just saying this off the cuff so don't take it as gospel, but something like 70% of your content being just valuable content sounds about right.

Julianna Raye said

Many thanks Kat! Just checked out your squeeze page... looks awesome! 🙂

Wow this is rich stuff… gonna digest too and review the module. The link got cut off John… which module is it? I see copywriting for musicians… is it that one?

Yeah, sorry. It's the copywriting module.

Charley Langer said

Kat Parsons said

Hey John and Insider Circle!

I had a great sales funnel in place before the release that went like this:
#1 - immediately - free song
#2 - 4 days later - free song
#3 - 7 days later - fun get to know kat video (your great line about elephant's tongue!)
#4 - 7 days later - blog about song on old album (No Will Power)
#5 -  7 days later - blog about funny show in Brunei
#6 - 7 days later - another blog about song on old album (No Will Power)
#7 - 7 days later - LTO
#8 -  48 hours later - final notice LTO

 

John, that seems like a heck of a long time to ask for a sale. I remember when we talked before you interviewed me, you thought I *might* want to compress things a tad (but it was working well, so you hesitated to actually make that recommendation), but I was already directly asking for a sale by email #4. I was subtle about it in emails #1 through #3. So the first part of my series is:

#1 - immediately - free song (subtle pitch for album)
#2 - 3 days later - free song (subtle pitch for album)
#3 - 5 days later - video (subtle pitch for album)
#4 - 5 days later - LTO (Buy My Album!)
#5 - 2 days later - LTO followup (Buy My Album!)

I'm not saying she should change it. It's just way different than mine. Is her purpose different? Is she risking satisfying people's curiosity too much before asing for a sale?

Hey Charley, this was a launch funnel, not a general funnel. So it was all about warming her list up and building anticipation with people who had been on the list for some time, but never had an album to buy. Different process than an evergreen funnel for sure. I would go into the sale much faster with an evergreen funnel.