Cold traffic, warm list.
Facebook ads were filling Guitar Institute's list. Subscribers who'd been asked what they needed bought at 15%, against 4% for cold traffic.
Jason Resnick
If paid ads fill your email list, ask new subscribers what they need before you sell to them. Guitar Institute added a 26-day nurture sequence that used questions and links to learn each subscriber's playing level and what was holding them back, then pointed them to the products that fit; in a one-week flash sale on a $20 product, nurtured subscribers converted at 15% against 4% for cold Facebook ad traffic.
In early 2021, Guitar Institute had a problem plenty of businesses would love to have. Ian McIntosh and Jeffrey Kunde, two Grammy-nominated producers, ran a membership and courses that teach people to play guitar, and they were good at filling their list with cold traffic from Facebook ads.
What happened after the ad was the part nobody had looked at. Every new subscriber, whatever they wanted and wherever they were as a player, went into the same welcome emails and the same weekly broadcasts as everyone else.
The ads were filling the list, and nobody was asking those new subscribers what they wanted before trying to sell to them.
A wide spectrum.
A list of guitar players isn't one audience. Some are hobbyists and some are performers, with a wide spectrum in between, and each of them needs something different from a course.
So I built a 26-day nurture sequence with questions and links worked into it. Every click recorded something about the subscriber.
- Their playing level
- Where they were as a guitarist today, from hobbyist to performer.
- What was holding them back
- The one thing standing between them and the next step.
- The products that fit
- Where the emails pointed, based on both answers.
From there, each person got a version of the sequence written for where they actually were, pointing to the products that fit them.
The flash sale.
In March 2021, they ran a one-week flash sale on a $20 product. In Ian's words, it "netted well in the 5-figures in just one week."
The sequence didn't replace the ads. It made every subscriber the ads brought in worth more, because by the time a sale came around, the emails already knew who they were talking to.
If you're paying to fill your list, ask yourself one question.
What happens to a new subscriber after the ad does its job?
Jason “Ask First” Resnick
P.S. It doesn't take long. This was 26 days of emails, and every one of them learned something about the person reading it.