Email marketing is one of the best ways to scale your passive income as a small business owner. Today, we’re chatting about three things I’ve implemented that have been a game changer for my business to help me automatically make money – even when I’m not working. These strategies are more advanced and a bit deeper than I’ve gone into before, so I’m really excited to share how you can see dollars in your bank account too! Let’s dive in.

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Strategy #1: Tripwires

The first thing to implement in your email marketing for more sales is freebie tripwires. As a reminder, a freebie is something valuable that someone gets for free – from you – in exchange for their email address. This could be a quiz, a guide, a template, a free video training… there’s a lot of options here. Now, a tripwire is a paid product that a person is pitched as soon as they get your freebie. For example, when someone downloads our 10 Free Reels Ideas, we immediately pitch them an upsell – like our 100 Plus Reels Ideas for $27. Someone can then say yes and immediately download that paid product. Personally, we pitch a few products back-to-back because if someone’s going to pay for one thing, they may pay for another. Implementing this has really helped us generate more income for the business, especially when I came up with the 10 Free Reel Ideas.

We’ve done this in so many ways for our business. But literally all I’m doing is having someone download the freebie and then redirecting them to a sales page that offers that product. We have it set up with a specific checkout link so I can track where the sales came from and know if the trip wire is working.

For about 2 years, we’ve used this strategy. I wanted to share some of the numbers with you! So, someone downloads the 10 Free Reels Ideas and is pitched the 100 Plus Reels Ideas. Lifetime, we’ve seen $12,366 in sales from that tripwire. From the Reels Cover Photo Templates too, we’ve gotten an additional $1,458. They’re smaller products, each around $27. Over time, it really does add up! This is a great long-term strategy for seeing additional income.

Strategy #2: Automatic Sales Funnels

The next strategy I want to talk about is automatic sales funnels. Essentially, when someone signs up for one of our freebies, they get put into a sales funnel that runs automatically. Basically, someone will get pitched the relevant products we have after they download our freebie. It’s a 5-day email series that has tons of free value and within that, we mention our other products. The first three days are purely educational and we’re giving away free value on the topic (like Instagram Reels). We talk about the struggles people face and solutions. Then we begin to talk about how we can help fix it and the pitch comes really naturally after that.

We build these automatic sales funnels using Flodesk, which is my favorite email marketing platform. I’ve been using it for 3 years and I LOVE it (get 50% off here!). Flodesk is super easy to use, creates beautiful emails, and it’s just a great experience.

Using Flodesk

Inside Flodesk, it’s super simple to setup your forms and workflows. I love that Flodesk allows you to create sign up pages in their software for your freebies, so you can publish them and use them automatically! You don’t have to worry about your website.  All you have to do is copy the final link and you can start growing your email list TODAY! Flodesk now also has analytics for you to review, which is amazing.

Strategy #3: Nurture Sequence with Strategic Links

Strategy number three that I want to cover is s nurture sequences with strategic links included. First of all, a nurture sequence is a workflow that has email going out about once a week to your audience between any major campaigns you run. These emails are meant to support your audience – inspire them, educate them, support them however makes sense with your brand. There’s a few ways to do this. One is to create new emails every week. Another is to really put your nurture sequence on autopilot.

Now, most of our emails relate back to a offer that we have, or an affiliate link that we have. This requires us to think what the email’s purpose is: whether it’s educating on certain topic, talking about something particular, inspiring them in a certain way, or a natural link to click on. For example, if I’m talking about best practices for your website, the most logical thing for me to link is my affiliate coupon for Elizabeth McCravy’s designs. That brings me money (and helps her out too!).

If you are doing some sort of automatic nurture campaign, I recommend making the first 5-6 emails super strategic. These should feature things that will generate the most sales for me.Every email has a very specific objective and should have an opportunity to click on one of those things. Throughout the rest of the nurture campaigns, l sprinkle affiliate links and offers. You need to find that sweet spot, though, and make sure you’re still making providing lots of value. That way, when you do share your offers, it’s makes it a no brainer for someone to want to join it because they loved the education and the value that you’ve already given them.

Other Resources 

If you have any questions about Flodesk’s email marketing workflows, sales funnels, freebie, tripwires, anything that we talked about in this episode, be sure to drop it in the comments or email us at [email protected]