Why Your Email Subscribers Aren’t Buying From You
You're awesome at list building. You can grow your audience, no problem. But when it comes to launching your course or selling your services or actually converting those subscribers into paying customers? You're stuck. It feels like no matter what you do, your list just isn't buying.
Stick around to learn 3 reasons why your subscribers aren't converting and what you can do to fix it.
Messaging Mismatch
One reason why you might have an engaged and growing list, but have trouble converting them is that there's a mismatch between the free content you're creating and what you actually sell. The freebies, content, and lead magnets that you're putting out could just be attracting really poor fits for your offers.
For example, maybe your freebies and lead magnets are how-to's aimed at beginners, but your paid offerings are high-end done for your services. That's not a match. The people that are going to want those freebies are going to want a DIY solution. And the people that want to just hire you to do it aren't looking for a how-to guide to tell them what to do. So if you're attracting beginners, but you're really selling to more advanced people, you're going to have a list that's not really filled with your ideal buyers.
The solution to this problem is to research. You really want to get to know who's in your audience, find out what they actually need, and what they want to see from you. Then can go ahead and create that perfect solution for them. Or if you find that you're attracting people that are just really poor fits for your core offers, you can tweak your marketing and the way that you are positioning your business so that you're attracting more of the right people from the start.
There's a lot of great ways you can research your audience. You can send out surveys to your email list. You can do customer interviews. Another really great way to research your audience is to mine the past interactions you've had with your audience. Go back through your Instagram comments or Instagram DMs, comments on your blog posts, people that have replied to your emails, people that have contacted you through your contact form with just like questions about what you do.
When you start digging into that data, you might see some patterns coming up. You might see there's a lot of questions about a specific topic. Or there's a lot of people that have this background. Maybe you're attracting a certain niche you don't even realize. It can be really eye-opening to actually sit down and look at all that stuff together.
Learning more about who's in your audience, where they're at, and what they're looking for from you is so valuable. It can help you create new offers that are solving a problem for them that maybe didn't even realize that they had. It can help you reposition offers and products that you already have.
Because once you find out what they're actually struggling with, what the pain points are that they're talking about, you can change your messaging to speak more to that and really meet them where they're at. It can help you write copy that actually gets them to take action.
Maybe it's not a problem that they're not a good fit for you. They just don't see it in the copy because you're not actually talking to them. And this is why every copy project I do starts with research because you really can't write copy that connects if you don't know who you're talking to. You can't just guess. That never works out too well.
If you don't feel really solid on who your audience is, what they actually want from you, and how they actually speak about those problems, start with some research.
Unclear Copywriting
Another reason why your audience isn't converting is that you're not making your offer clear. I see this all the time on DIY sales pages. You'll read to the bottom of the page and by the time you get there, you're still not really sure what you’re actually getting when you buy.
This is one of the reasons it can be really challenging to write your own copy because you have a huge blind spot when it comes to your own offers. You have all of the details in your head, so to you it might seem really obvious. But you might be leaving out key info or important messaging that would get someone to actually click through and buy when they hit that page.
The solution to this is to make sure that the copy you’re writing on your sales pages and your sales emails are crystal clear. You want to outline both the features and the benefits.
Features = what it is
Benefits = why I care
It's not enough to just outline the features: you get X number of modules and this many group calls and this much one-on-one time. Or the deliverables of a certain package. You need to take it a step further and talk about why that matters to them. But if you don't spell it out clearly enough on your page, you can be leaving people with a lot of questions.
What will they be able to do once they go through those modules? What will they be able to do once they have that deliverable? Why does it matter that they buy this right now? What will it help them do or what will it help them avoid?
You also want to make sure that you're addressing the questions and objections that come up in your copy, so that as people are reading it and they have a question pop up, you’re addressing those questions as they move down the page.
Making your copy super clear is where a copywriter can really help. Sometimes it can just be really helpful to have a third party be that mirror for you and help you see that offer with new eyes. Someone else can see the stuff you're missing right away.
Lacking Personality
The third reason your subscribers aren't connecting with you and buying is that you're not letting them see the real you.
I see this happen a lot too with online business owners that create tons of checklists and guides and lots of free content. They’re always teaching and teaching and teaching. They're providing value in that way by showing their audience how to do this, teaching them all this amazing stuff, but they don't actually let people peek at the person behind the business. They're just always in this teacher mode. They think it's not about me. I'm just helping I'm getting value.
But when it comes to actually converting, people need to have that know like trust factor with you. If they don't actually feel like they know you it can be really hard to make that jump. The thing that happens a lot is people think well, it's not relevant to what I'm teaching or I'm boring. I don't have any kind of interesting story to talk about in this email.
Unless you’re the only one who does what you do, you really have to stand out as you. Otherwise, people can price shop and go with whoever is cheapest. When they start to get to know you, you become THE person they want to work with or the person they want to learn from because they connect with you on a deeper level.
The solution to this is to start building connections with your audience by sharing who you are. And it's not about going on about your life story just for the sake of telling a story. You can use your stories and your experiences and your perspectives to share a lesson, to introduce something that you're offering to them in a way that makes it more interesting and engaging to read. And you're still delivering value, but you're also sharing who you are as a person and making connections beyond just what you offer in your business.
This is when you start to get people responding to your emails like, “OMG, I'm the same way!” or “That happened to me too!”
They start making genuine connections with you beyond just consuming your content. And those people that do connect with you are going to have a much deeper connection with you and are going to be much more likely to buy from you the next time you make an offer because they'll have gotten to know you. You're not just some nameless faceless person that’s sending them free tutorials every week.
So if you've been struggling to convert your list or your list is not converting as well as you'd hoped, give these solutions to try and let me know how it goes.
If you're looking for a copywriter you can work with that can help you get more sales from your email list you found her — it's me! Get in touch with me here to find out how I can help with the strategy, research, and copy that converts your subscribers into buyers.