Are you building email sequences and sales funnels to streamline your inbound marketing, content marketing, or paid advertising efforts?
If your answer is yes, you are well ahead of a lot of businesses already. Just by choosing to use email marketing the way you should, you are on the winning side. On that note, you’d want your email sequences and sales funnels to be anything but “salesy”.
Sales funnels are named that way but you don’t want to push too hard, sound desperate, and keep bombarding your email subscribers with autoresponders that are all about “making a sale”.
It’s called “nurturing” for a reason: you’d want to “pull”, entice, educate, teach, inspire, and educate some more with your lead nurturing. Occasionally, you’d want to include a soft pitch or two but the focus shouldn’t be on “selling”.
Chase money, and you won’t get it.
Chase sales figures, and you’ll soon alienate your subscribers.
Push too hard, and you’ll lose whatever little you now have with you.
Your funnel blueprint should aim at being holistic, strategic, and planned.
It can nurture and “sell”; it can educate but still bring in “sales”.
Learn all that you need to about funnels from our Funnel Factor Report. If webinars are your thing, check out our sales funnels webinar and get into the groove of building funnels that work.
When your email sequences, email copy and sales funnels add real value (without asking for anything), you’d gain more. Period.
While sales funnels do work as well as they should, most businesses overcomplicate their funnels and end up not doing anything at all. Strategic sales funnels are nice to have but if you don’t have a single email going out to nurture your leads or subscribers, it’s inexcusable.
There are some simple and yet powerful ways to ensure that you can keep your subscribers or leads nurtured at all times, automatically.
Here are some mandatory and yet simple email marketing sequences you should have running:
Email sequences: Pre-populated workflow autoresponders
Digital sales funnels are powerful for a very specific reason: email sequences can be planned, written, and lined up to nurture leads in a way they choose or in a way that’s very relevant to each of them.
Let’s say that you have a report on WordPress Security as a free giveaway on your website (and let’s assume that your entire business revolves around something to do with WordPress security — a plugin, a hosting service?).
When users sign up for your WordPress Security download, they are letting you know that they are keen on keeping their websites secure. Your entire lineup of emails following that download then is going to educate, teach, and inform your subscribers on security insights, tips to keep their WordPress websites secure, and more.
On and off, you could send in a freebie, an offer, or a call to action that points them to purchase your plugin, service, or tool.
If you more than one offer, you’d have dedicated email sequences or workflows for each of those offers (based on what your subscribers signed up for). These sequences are set up inside your email marketing software.
Here’s an example from Drip:
RSS-to-Email Sequences
As you keep publishing on your blog, you’d normally expect visitors to read what you just published.
But they might not. Occasionally, they’ll discover your content on their own or maybe they click-through your social updates to read your recently published content.
Most times, they just miss your recently published blog posts.
RSS-to-email updates automatically fix that problem for your business.
Most email service providers provide you with the features and templates you’d need to launch RSS-to-email sequences. An RSS-to-email sequence is a digest of your published posts in a single timeframe (like a week).
Using your blog’s RSS feed, your blog posts are auto-populated as a digest of your previously published blog posts. The email digest (with your blog posts listed) is sent out the next week on a particular day and time you’ll establish.
When you set it up right, it looks like this (credits: Campaign Monitor):
By sending out RSS-to-updates to your entire list(s) of subscribers, you achieve a few things automatically:
- Your emails are automated and regular. This lets your subscribers know that they are valued and cared for.
- You are able to send out email updates that aren’t all about “sales”. You won’t be pushing at all. They are only prompted to read more and gain insights.
- You get a chance to stay in your subscribers’ inboxes without breaking their trust. By staying in their inboxes, you are able to boost your brand recall.
Regular broadcasts
Most businesses rarely send out broadcast emails.
Your subscribers have given you an opportunity to get in touch with them when you have new updates about your products or services; when you have something important to share with them; when there’s news about something worthy that they should know about; and more.
All email service providers allow you to send out broadcasts. Make good use of these features to write out personalized emails and customized email copy to send to your subscribers, users, leads, or customers.
Here’s what Landbot.io does:
Transactional Emails
By default, any action taken on your website will have a transactional email going to out to subscribers, users, leads, or customers.
Transactional emails are notifications, reminders, and other “service” emails such as registration emails, order confirmation emails, confirmation emails, surveys, reminders, etc.
Based on their actions, you’ll have transactional emails auto-triggered. According to Experian, transactional emails tend to have 8X more opens and clicks. If used well, they can generate 6X more revenue.
Most businesses don’t make use of the power of these transactional emails. You could make them more lively. You could add some personality. You can also upsell using transactional emails.
Here’s a transactional email (shopping cart abandonment email) from Birchbox that’s directly used to make sales happen.
See that? There’s that email which addresses you by first name; it’s relevant and targeted; it’s relatable and personal; and it arrives just in time.
Are you getting these basic, simple, and yet effective email sequences working for your business? If not, what’s stopping you?
If you’d like a hand in getting an email marketing campaign or a sales funnel set up, schedule a call and we can work through it!
