Have you ever stopped to consider your email signatures? Every day you send dozens of emails, and these emails are a golden opportunity to not only provide stellar support, but they’re also a vital part of your passive income plan.
You can create sales opportunities in a variety of ways in an email:
- By offering (linking to) related products and services
- By making recommendations for further reading/learning
- By linking to a well-monetized blog post
- By recommending a free download
- By helping your buyers make good use of your products/services
You can do this in the body of the email, or in an automated signature or standard P.S. For example, you can set up your help desk responses to automatically include in a P.S. invitation to check out your latest course offering. Create a link redirect using Pretty Link (for WordPress) and update it each time you create a new course. Then you can simply recommend that your reader “check out my latest training here,” and it will always be updated.
Don’t forget, you can do this with your email marketing, too! Make sure the signature of your newsletters and other messages have some call to action and a link, even if it’s to your Facebook Group or other social point you can use these techniques.
Alternately, you can design multiple signatures and rotate them out by month. For example, your December signature might recommend ways to avoid stress and eat healthier at social events, while your April email signature might have your bikini body bootcamp link.
If you use a service such as WiseStamp to build your signatures, you can automatically insert your latest blog post in your email signature. If you’re using good calls to action and content upgrades in your blog, this can be a great way to drive traffic into your sales funnels.
Finally, train your support team to make logical recommendations for other programs and services — both yours and someone else’s you’re an affiliate for. Create a shared Dropbox or Google Drive file so your staff has access to your affiliate links. Whenever someone contacts your desk asking for recommendations, your staff will know exactly what to offer.
Not only does this help establish you as the go-to person in your niche and offer much-needed support to your customers, but it also helps grow your passive income and turns your help desk into a profit center, rather than a cost center.
Wait! How do I make signatures?
As mentioned above, there are services like WiseStamp that will help you create a signature, no code required. The caveat is that the free version is limited, so you may want to upgrade to their monthly or annual Pro version. HubSpot has a similar service available here.
If you’re really fancy you can go the full geek version and code your signature in HTML. Again, copy and paste will be your friend here, but most don’t want or need to go this route.
You can also build your own right in Word or Google Docs. Simply create your signature with the formatting you want and add your links like you would with anything else. Then open your email program/site of choice, open the signature editor, and paste your new signature in.
For more detailed examples, here are directions: Outlook | Gmail | Apple Mail | Android | iPhone