QA 74 – Should I have my email marketing autoresponder set up if I'm not selling a product yet?

In today's Q&A, we are helping Rina figure out what to do with her email autoresponder even though she doesn't have a product to sell. Here's a hint - Have your autoresponder set up from the very beginning. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "You should have an autoresponder set up from day 1, even if you don't have a product yet."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's question from Rina at rinaorellanaflamenco.com/ Podcast on Sales Funnel Aweber Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Our question today comes from Flip Your Life community member, Rina Orellana and I cannot pronounce that name, I am not sure what that is. Her website is rinaorellanaflamenco.com; not flamingo like the pink things you put in your front yard but the flamenco dancing. JOCELYN: Sounds like fun. SHANE: Flamenco dancing. And her question is, "I am working on my product right now, dance lesson videos and I have a small email list of less than 500 people. I am working on my lead magnet as well. My question is, should I have an email list and an autoresponder series at all if I don't have a product to sell yet? What should that look like? I have heard your podcast on sales funnels and I thought it was fantastic, but I'm wondering how to apply it to myself when I don't even have a product to sell?" JOCELYN: All right, so I think that you should definitely go ahead and have an email autoresponder series even if you don't have your product quite ready yet. The reason for this is to get people just more acquainted with you, and get them to know you, and when you do have your product ready to sell, you'll already have your email list there and you would already have been talking to them. In the meantime, what you can do is just introduce yourself and give a summary of what all is included on your website and where people could find it. And then also you can communicate with them and get them to tell you more about themselves; what they are doing in the dance world, what they need help with, what are their pain points that you could possibly solve with a paid product. SHANE: Yeah, one of the very first things that you should do when you are starting an online business is start collecting emails whether you have anything or not. Even if it's just the old, 'Sign up for my newsletter' or email list or anything – and you are going to get an opt-in done fast, we want you to do a lead magnet, we want you to have a product mentality first and get something up there that you can exchange for an email address. But you've got to have something on the other end of that email collection that's going to happen over time. Even if it's just – this is not a great way to do it, but even if you are just broadcasting every week, 'Hey, here's my new blog post', or like Jocelyn said, if you are just asking them a question like, you know, 'What is the one dance step you have the most problem with?' I'm not exactly sure, anything about flamenco dancing, but something where you could open that dialogue, keep people coming back, you definitely don't want to get people's emails and then never talk to them again until you have something ready which might be months down the road because if you do, those leads are warm, that's why they gave you their email address in the first place, but they do cool off over time. So your email autoresponder can also include things like, 'Hey, here's my Facebook page, follow me there' or 'Hey,