We’re diving into drip marketing automation and how you can use it to generate more profit without needing MORE traffic… How to set it up. How to use it.
The basis of this live stream is the Complete Guide To Drip Campaigns and Email Marketing…
Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s episode of Get Shit Done Daily. So today we’re going to talk about marketing automation and drip funnels, drip marketing, and drip email. One of the things that we’ve been getting a lot of calls in lately, well the last couple of days, more or less, is automating the marketing process so that you don’t actually have to do the work. Do you know what I mean? This is huge right now because we’re working at home and because office buildings are empty and because stores and businesses are shut down.
So if you have a piece of software, a piece of technology that can do that automation or do that marketing for you, then awesome. Right? So for those of you who are new to GSD Daily, we get new people signing in all the time. This 10:00 AM daily show really revolves around one thing, making sure you’re actionable and getting you online, moving your business online. Because at the end of the day, my goal, my purpose, my why is really about helping businesses scale online.
So whether that is through doneforyou.com, whether it’s through sales funnels or marketing automation or traffic or whatever, that’s what we do. So that’s really, it’s kind of where we’re going to start. Now up here in the link that I shared with this entry, there is a marketing or a post that here, I’m just going to go ahead and send it out through the comments. If you are on my personal profile, then you might have to move to a page in order to comment on. We were doing some tests yesterday and it wasn’t really working all that well.
So here’s the blog post that we’re going to be talking about. Post. I just sent that out. It should hit up YouTube and the pages and all of that other stuff. And then if you have any questions just go ahead and let me know. So the idea with drip marketing is somebody comes in, they become a lead on your website or in your business. They give you their email address, they give you permission, quote-unquote, they opt into receiving marketing messages.
Then what happens is the first day, usually, they opt-in for whatever thing you were going to give them. So for example, yesterday we talked about lead funnels, we talked a lot about lead magnets. Now a lead magnet is a report or a piece of software or something that you give away in exchange for somebody’s email address.
So that first email really is… I mean it’s self-explanatory. They opt-in, they get that email and then they’re off and running. Do you know what I mean? But what happens on day two? What happens on day three? And day four and day five and day 60 and day 90 and day 180, way down the line, what happens to this prospect? As long as they’re still a prospect, as long as they haven’t opted out. And that’s where these drip marketing email campaigns come in.
That’s where this stuff tends to take hold. So if you click through to this drip marketing campaign and email automation, there’s a couple of things that need to take place in order for drip marketing campaigns to work. First of all, you need a CRM. You need a solid CRM. You need something that allows you to do campaigns. Allows you to do automation, all of that stuff. We have ours, it’s called Axis. There are a lot of other brands out there, some high dollar, some low dollar, whatever.
But the thing is you can’t just do this from Gmail or Outlook. You can’t automate these emails and send them out. The other thing is you need to think not only about what your prospect is doing right now and what they need tomorrow, but you need to think about where they’re going to be in two weeks and a month and two months.
So what do you have in terms of assets that you can send this prospect to convert them to buyers? Now typically what we do is we give them access to that lead magnet and then we send them through a webinar, an automated webinar that plays on autopilot. Or an automated sales funnel, an automated sales video that has upsells and downsells and all that other stuff.
So that’s typically what we do to automate the first week or two of that campaign of this drip marketing process. Then after that, a lot of times it really just depends on what they click on. It depends on how they fill out surveys. It depends on what they’re interested in. That’s how we end up going down through. But if you scroll down through this article, there’s basically you need a lead, of course. You need email copy, a lot of email copy in order to pull off these kinds of drip campaigns.
You also need a trigger. The trigger is the important part because the trigger is how an email marketing campaign starts. If somebody does this, then this happens. For instance, they go to this URL, then they get these three emails about the offer that they just visited. Or they just opted in for this lead magnet, which means they get access to this PDF and all of the relevant marketing material. Or they just bought this thing, which means they’re getting access to this membership site.
There’s always an if-then statement. There’s always a trigger and the trigger then reinforces the drip marketing message. A lot of times how we like to do it is if somebody fills out a survey this way, they are interested in let’s say green energy. Then if they’re interested in green energy, then they receive all of the green energy affiliate emails or all of the green energy internal promos.
If they say that they are interested in disaster survival, then they receive all the disaster survival emails. We like to automate based on buckets and surveys. And even chatbots now. That’s oftentimes how a lot of our triggers go.
Now, how is email marketing different from drip marketing campaigns? So one of the things that have absolutely driven me crazy about email marketing when I first got into it like forever ago, was people would send out email blasts, they send email blasts. Like that’s, “Oh I’m going to send an email blast to my list,” or, “Oh, do you have a list that I can blast?” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s not how email marketing works anymore.” So your deliverability is really largely influenced by how engaged your email list is. For instance, we throw away any lead that has not opened an email in 90 days or more.
So if they haven’t done anything, then we just cut them. Because it doesn’t make sense for us to continue emailing them and driving our sender score down if they’re not even going to open the email and read the email. What this does is it sucks the first couple of times you delete these people out because really it’s just you work so hard to get an email, to get a lead. And then if you’re just literally wiping out two and 300 and 400 people, off of your list forcefully then it’s not a whole lot of fun.
But at the same time, it makes sure that your sender score stays up and your emails get read and delivered and all that other stuff. So that’s a good thing. But these email lists, so from an email marketing standpoint, you can send broadcast emails. The broadcast emails that go out are one-to-many.
If you have a product promotion, then you send one email out and boom, it opens up to everybody. That’s oftentimes the email marketing. Now a drip marketing is about really minimizing, narrowing your focus on just a few engaged prospects who do something. They opt-in for something, they hit a landing page, they buy something. They do something that then triggers another thing to happen. So that ends up being the drip campaign.
And there are lots of different examples. You can nurture leads through drip campaigns based on when they sign up. You can welcome them, you can onboard them. It’s really big from a software standpoint, onboarding them through a user onboarding process. So showing them around the software, showing them around a membership site, whatever.
Abandoned carts are ridiculously big. If somebody clicks a button, adds something to an order form and then doesn’t purchase, you send them emails out based on trying to get them to purchase then. Renewals are another big one.
I actually just read yesterday that Visa is enforcing people who sell free trials to now send an email seven days before that trial is about to actually rebill, telling the person that it is going to rebill. It’s part of their compliance now. So renewals is a big one. You’re going to see a lot of renewal stuff coming up. Engagement is another one. Basically getting people engaged. Courses. Whenever a new module drops, you can drip it out. SAS, businesses, realtors, there’s a lot of different ways to use drip marketing.
So how to create successful drip marketing campaigns. First of all, you wanted to determine your goal. You want to make sure that you know what it is you want somebody to do. So in the case… I just realized I wasn’t sharing my stream here, so I’m going to add this blog post to the stream. Okay, cool. So we can make me small. Yeah, I like that. We’re going to do that. That’s cool.
Okay, cool. So when you are creating these drip campaigns or you set up a goal. The goal is going to be when something successfully happens. So oftentimes the goal for a drip marketing is going to be they sign up for a webinar, they buy something, they become a lead, they visit a webpage. There’s always a trigger that basically shows that they accomplished the goal that they set out to accomplish. And so if they’re in a webinar promo sequence and they’re dripped out emails to then sign up for the webinar, once they actually sign up for the webinar, then you want to take them off of that first list and put them on a second list. Or if they buy something, you want to take them off the prospect list and put them on the buyers’ list.
One of the things that we do is we actually add a tag whenever somebody is in a promo sequence, so they’re not getting double emails. They’re not getting the normal email marketing broadcast emails and also the drip marketing emails. So that has worked out really well.
You want to optimize your messages, you want to write good copy, you want to focus on your CTAs, of course. The frequency and the timing is interesting though. Because when you’re setting up drip campaigns, oftentimes I bundle a bunch of emails really, really quickly together. So day one, day two, day three and then after that then we usually have a small break and then we start in the next broadcast. It tends to be a little quick for some email lists. Or lists, business lists, tend to really like it that way, especially because not everybody opens their email every day or things just get busy and they might miss one but then read the next. So it works out pretty well.
Segmenting your list is really important from a nurturing standpoint. Let’s see, an example of a drip onboarding sequence. All right, so we’re going to go through some different examples. Now, there’s a welcome email drip marketing sequence, which is basically like an indoctrination sequence.
When somebody signs up for your list and they’re new to you, you don’t necessarily want to launch them directly into a product purchase sequence. You want to indoctrinate them, you want to introduce them. Talk about who you are, why you do what you do, what you stand for. If you’ve ever read the book, Start With Why, which I have it somewhere around here. But basically you start with your why. You say, well why do you do what you do? And then you talk about how you do what you do. And then you end with what. What. What ends up being your products and your services.
You also, from a current customer standpoint, you want to retain them. You want to keep them on board or you want to keep them in your mix. Let’s see. Acquiring referrals, offer and promotion drip. This is the big one. So after somebody is welcomed into your world, I mean, the goal of marketing is to generate revenue from that marketing. So email marketing is great from a conversion standpoint. But when you use paid traffic and ads to grow your email list, there’s always a cost to carry that traffic.
Meaning, if somebody signs up for your email list and it costs $5 a lead, $5 per email lead. Then they go to $5 an email lead. Then they are emailed for let’s say they go through a five-day welcome sequence that introduces them to you. And then you start promoting a product on day six and after. That means you’re carrying that ad spend for at least six days, probably more because they’re not going to buy as soon as you offer them something to buy.
And the longer it takes for you to get to a product promo, the longer it takes for them to turn into revenue for you. So if it takes two weeks, then you’re going to be carrying that ad spend for 15 days. Now if once you get a good flow going, then it doesn’t necessarily matter because you’re always, you’re burning money. You’re basically generating revenue and turning that back into ad spend, more leads. So it ends up being a nice cycle.
But when you first start off though, sometimes it can be a barrier to entry. You can’t scale as quickly as you could otherwise. So you want to make sure in any example from a product purchase standpoint, promoting webinars, promoting sales videos, promoting flash sales are another big one.
So let’s see. Some lessons from Neil Patel, which are fantastic. Now drip marketing software. So we talked a little bit about Axis. Axis is ours. So the CRM that we used, we created, built for automation. It’s got some email scripts in there and page builder and some other cool stuff.
There’s some other software out there that we use. ConvertKit is a good one. Drip is a good one. SendX is a good one too. And that’s for the low-end CRMs. For the upper-end CRMs, which I would consider Axis as being an upper-end CRM or a midtier CRM. Infusionsoft is good. Oh, it’s Keap now, but whatever. It’s always going to be Infusionsoft to me and the other marketers who have been calling it Infusionsoft for 15 years. Ontraport is another one that we like. We actually use Ontraport for some of our marketing because we don’t have order forms in Axis yet. But those are some of the good ones. Some of the ones that we like. we try to stay away from Mailchimp, although Mailchimp does work.
And in terms of measuring your campaign results, we use what we call UTM variables. The UTM variables or basically you can append to any link inside of an email and it tracks all the way back to the email. Inside Ontraport, you can actually see which email, what campaign, what email campaign email resulted in a sale based on these UTM variables. It ends up being a nice way to do it. Those UTM variables. Also a pickup in analytics too, Google Analytics.
So some things to watch out for. The open rate is a big one. So right now, right as in the last two weeks, open rates are through the roof just because everybody is home. Businesses are doing business out of their house. There’s a very captive audience online right now. Your bounce rate is, you’re going to see that inside of your Google Analytics for your page.
So bounce rate, the number of people who hit a page and then leave without doing anything. The Click-through rate is huge. The number of people who click-through an email address or an email and then do the thing you want them to do. Typically open rate is normally between 12 and 20%. Really, really engaged lists will be 20, 25, 30%. the longer they’re on the list, the lower the open rate goes, usually.
The Click-through rate really depends. The whole goal of an email is to get somebody opening the email and then clicking through. So that’s really the entire goal of why you send out emails is to get them moving from one to another. But the thing about email is it is our recession-proof marketing method. I mean because you have an email list and that email list is yours, the data is yours. You can email the list whenever you want so you can promote whatever you want whenever you want.
And that’s the beauty of email as opposed to paid traffic where click costs are going to go up and click costs are going to go down. SEO organic listings, which Google might have a bad day and rewrite the algorithms and then poof, you’re out of luck, you’re out of business. No different than what’s actually going on in the physical world right now. Your email list or your customer list, your database, is your saving grace in terms of how you can market, which is important.
So the unsubscribe rate. You want to keep that down, of course. Your conversion rate, conversion rates going to happen on your sales page. So the number of people who click through to the sales page and then bounce. Growth rate.
And then we’ve got some video transcripts here. And so all in all from an email marketing standpoint, I always, whenever I talk to somebody who comes in and they’re not building an email list, they’re really just hanging out driving traffic to a paid platform. They’re driving traffic to whether it’s a straight-up sales video or an affiliate product or whatever.
The thing that I’ve just seen so many people, like media buyers, who are driving traffic to advertorials and sales videos and then they aren’t converting those people. Or they are converting them. They’re taking the revenue that those people are generating, but they can’t reach out to them. So that person is gone forever.
Yes, they generated revenue. But the fact is that that person could have bought three or four or five products. Could have bought many, many, many things over the course of their life with you if you would have put them on an email list.
So now, especially having the database, having the email list and being able to grow that database and email list and then mail to that database and email list. I mean, you’re infinitely better positioned for any kind of turmoil or epidemic or pandemic or whatever, because you can always email that list.
You don’t have to sell your own products. You can sell affiliate products. We talked a couple of days ago about affiliate products. So you can absolutely do that if you have an email list. But if you don’t have an email list and you don’t have any traffic coming to your website, then the only thing you’re really left to do is either, A, do content marketing and blogging or, B, do pay traffic campaigns.
So those are the only, only really two ways to get traffic coming in so that you can then convert them into services, convert them into physical products or paid products or whatever. So that’s the beauty and benefit of email marketing and drip campaigns and drip marketing really is how do you keep them engaged while they are with you until they unsubscribe? And that ends up happening from time to time.
So really, the email marketing piece, it’s just so beneficial because no matter what happens, you can always mail that email list and promote products and promote services and promote webinars and all of that stuff. In fact, there’s been a couple of times in my life where it’s business has been really weird or whatever. And the email list has literally been the only thing that has pulled me out of it because you could always email an email list.
Even if you’re transferring business models, changing websites, changing whatever, you can always email the email list and then move into a new direction. Not everybody is going to move with you of course, but enough people are going to move with you that it ends up buying you some time.
Now, which actually brings up another interesting point. So there’s a couple of ways of generating. We should do a lead generation landing page. Maybe we’ll do that on Monday. Maybe we’ll do landing page layouts. We’ve talked a little bit about lead magnets yesterday, but we didn’t talk about how actually to generate email leads.
So there are some really interesting ways you can generate leads. I’m just going to preface it. You can do a landing page of course. So the landing pages themselves, basically you send somebody to a landing page and then they opt-in. That’s one way. It’s the way that is most normal.
But then there are all little weird things that you can do to generate email leads like exit pop plugins. So when somebody leaves your website, you throw up an email address or you throw up an email box and then they can sign up for your email list. You can do stuff inside of a blog post. You can do hotlinks. So somebody clicks a link and then a button pops up. All kinds of different ways to pump up your email list. We should talk about that.
Let’s see. So we’ll do that on Monday. We’ll do landing pages. If you guys have any questions go ahead and let me know. Go ahead and drop them in the box here. Questions or comments. All right, now let’s see if I can find a landing page. Let’s see what I got from a landing page standpoint or lead generation standpoint I can riff off of on Monday. Because getting that email lead is super, super important.
Create a landing page that converts. That must be it. Yeah, that’s it. All right, cool. So do you need a landing page? Okay, cool. So we’re going to talk about this on Monday. We’re going to talk about landing pages and getting in to grow your email list. I’m going to show you some examples of landing pages that have worked for us, webinar registration pages and whatnot.
If you have any questions at all, go ahead. Go to doneforyou.com/start to fill out a little form and book a call with my team and I. And then that way we can put together an action plan on getting you online, getting your business online, building sales funnel for you, doing a website redesign, whatever. Whatever you need to do to get you online like we want to do. And if you have any questions for the next episode of GSD Daily, then go to doneforyou.com/gsd and I will talk to you soon. All right. Thanks. Bye.
