Good afternoon. Welcome back to the Smart Send Authority series, the place where we help you build your email marketing programme for free.
If you haven't done so yet, check out the first three blogs in this series. How to write content, the five emails that you need for the basics of your marketing, and when to send them.
Let's start with what automation is.
It's simply a series of messages, sent at a certain time and place, when your audience needs them.
Now, the trick here is to use more than one channel, to lightly remind your audience that you exist and you can help them. Emails offer a deep dive into your work. They are great of people who are ready to watch a video, read a blog or sign up to an event. But if they are just dipping their toe in the water, you may scare them off. This is where micro-messages like banners or push notifications work so well.
You can’t be intense all the time. In every song, action sequence or story you’ve experienced, there are lighter moments to trade off against the dramatic scenes. It’s the same with the marketing.
Give people a big piece of in-depth content with your email. Then small light touches and triggers, like push notifications or retargeting. Thanks to technology and AI automation, this has become incredibly easy.
Here's a few different automations you can use to whet your appetite.
This is one of the most popular, highest converting, highest performing email automations you can do.
It takes between three and five emails. This is triggered when a lead submits a form or signs up and the aim is to introduce your brand, set expectations, deliver value as a first impression and get them to trust you through things like quotes or case studies.
The keyword here is; “new”. They are getting to know you and need to be handled differently from everyone else in your list.
This is someone who knows about you, knows they've got a problem, but don't think you're quite the right fit yet, or they're still mustering the courage or the money to buy your services.
In this case you want to draw them in, like a taste explosion at the centre of a chocolate bonbon. Think webinar attendance, content downloads, extra resources. Your aim is to overcome their objections to your product.
Lead nurturing emails are fun to build, as they have a warmed audience and a specific goal in mind - for example a workshop or a programme. It’s also a place where you can remind people about your lead magnets, if they have not used them already.
I know this sounds really weird, but you want the exact right fit for your course or programme, or one-to-one offer.
You don't want people who aren't ready in terms of capability, budget, or business level. So you can use lead nurturing to exclude that particular bit of audience from that offer.
They literally will self-select for you.
The second thing you do is set people up and get them ready for entrance into that program. So it might be an introduction to your terminology, or a mindset shift. It can be as simple as pre-event preparation and setting time aside in their diary.
This happens a lot, typically, for five-day challenges, or the follow-up from a workshop. If you're doing anything that's likely to require intensive training, you need to have a lead nurturing program:
A, to get them on board, and
B, to remind them.
If you go into any long-running program, you'll see a few of these, regardless of what system you use.
Lead scoring is knowing, for example, how far or close people are to you in the sales cycle. Let's say in a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is someone who's new, just come into the funnel, and doesn't know a lot about you. 10 is someone who has been with you several years, bought your programs, and left referrals. And they’ve even left you a testimonial.
You can use all sorts of ways for it. The simplest way is to simply tag them, such as high, medium, or low or colour-code them red, yellow, green.
Onboarding emails can make or break how well your business works in terms of efficiency, so it’s worth doing even if you are a solopreneur.
Now, consciously or not, you already have an onboarding workflow. So, what you want to do is formalise your onboarding workflow. For example, a consultancy onboarding will go through contractual details, invoicing, and diary planning.
If you offer any form of online or digital content, you also want them to be able to access that. So it might well be that you will send them login details, pre-recorded videos or access to a Notion board.
Onboarding can be as simple as maybe two or three templated emails that just get sent out on demand for consultants. For software as a service, it’s more likely to be another automation directly after someone signs up, with the login details generated from the database.
Onboarding emails need to be immediate because you want people to take action while they are still enthusiastic. Delays cause friction and cause people to drop out of your system.
So, in the same way that you send an instant welcome email, you want an instant onboarding email. This needs to be helpful, direct and easy to consume.
AI chatbots are brilliant at this. It's one of the reasons why they're transforming the industry. You can train chatbot on your materials and then integrate it. Just please, put some guardrails down so a chatbot doesn't hallucinate and promise something you can't deliver.
These are date-driven events, which you can set up at the beginning of the year, check and then just send out. The popular ones are:
Quiet customers are not necessarily happy customers.That triggered email could be the thing that brings their attention back to you, allowing you to touch base, upgrade or downgrade or solve their problem.
Have you ever cringed at the “We’ve missed you!” emails? Me too.
Re-engagement campaigns usually miss the mark because they are too late to the party. You want to watch your data and reach out when they first go quiet, not as an afterthought 6 months down the line. Unlike the anniversary ones, they are action-triggered (e.g. 6 weeks with no activity), and the aim is to get them back into the habit of using your advice or service.
You want to be a result rather than a cost centre.
And that's when re-engagement campaigns come in. For a course, you want check-in points and a trigger if they have not moved on to the next module or download. For a service, it’s going dark across a reporting period. For a consultancy, it’s being ghosted.
That’s when you want your response ready. It can be quick, simple and to the point. “Have you thought about x?” “What about Y?”
I use a gamification system for my courses that’s doubled my students’ completion rate and that’s down to re-engagement touchpoints with small rewards and emails at each level.
As always, keep it simple - then improve. One email at the right time can have an amazing effect on your retention rate. Three emails and a retargeting ad can even double it.
What if you want more people coming into the front of the funnel, which you absolutely do?
Remember, you've got an attrition rate going on here. Your email list will die by up to 20% per year if you don't have enough people flowing in to the front as leads.
This is where going broad, with light-touch notifications, really works.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, choose multichannel options that don’t cost you a lot of effort or cash. Consider:
Go where your audience are, so you can quietly remind them how great you are together.
I find that the marketing trifecta for most of my clients has been a mix of emails, targeted banners and retargeted ads. This is less work than you think as the same segment criteria applies to all three channels (e.g. “everyone who has clicked this link in the past and lives in this region.”) and you are using your own database. Your CRM or email provider will allow you to integrate with other apps - for example, HubSpot will allow you to run retargeted campaigns from their interface to Google and Facebook. The same applies to Mailchimp.
The result is a tactful campaign where each channel reinforces the others and the results build upon themselves. It’s why I love multichannel campaigns (and you should too).. You can actually watch them work together.
I’ve thrown a lot at you. If you are feeling a little punch-drunk, start at the beginning with your customer journey. Go from your welcome series, to your lead nurturing sequences, to your onboarding workflows, and then do your lead scoring.
Then, like a cake, layer in the extra bits. Add in a few push notifications on your website. Set up a banner display. Test out a new message on Facebook.
You don't have to do everything at once, as long as you do something new consistently.
The only thing stopping you is organisation and fear. It's not even time anymore. You can start for free with many of these systems and hire freelancers to help you with set-up. As long as you book a date in the diary, you can do this.
Go forth and automate.