Email Sequence Strategy
The email sequence strategy kicks off your relationship with your prospects and entails taking certain steps to optimize the process of nurturing prospects into clients. The correct time, diversity of emails, tailored content, and email automation are all examples of these. In today’s episode, we’re talking about content marketing: the email sequence strategy.
Quote:
“Look at the data to really determine how often you should be emailing your people because every audience is a little bit different.”
Topics and Timestamps:
- Solid series of automated messages (0:53- 1:33)
- Importance of data in emailing (1:34- 2:07)
- Welcome email (2:08- 2:48)
- Brief business overview email (2:49- 4:02)
- Categorization email (4:03- 5:28)
- Call to action offer (5:29- 6:13)
- Email sequence writing in action (6:14- 7:20)
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Transcription
008 | Content marketing: Email Sequence Strategy
Are you ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, using tried and true methods and emerging trends? It’s Ashleigh and you’re listening to the Digitally Grounded podcast. We’ll talk about all things digital marketing from sales funnels and flywheels, social media, email marketing, and more. So if you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level, keep listening.
Hey, it’s Ashleigh again and in today’s episode, we’re talking about content marketing: the email sequence strategy. So in the previous episode, we talked about lead generation for your business, and we discussed how to create an offer that would be super juicy and appetizing for your potential clients. And now, we’re going to take it to the next step.
You have this amazing offer that functions as that delicious appetizer, and they’ve said yes, I want that. They’ve given you their contact information. They’ve given you their email address, and now you’re ready to build this relationship with this prospective client. One thing that I like to mention to everyone that I work with is making sure they have a solid welcome series for their email list. So when you sign up for the email list as a prospective customer, you’re going to get a series of automated messages that are relative to the lead-generating thing that you downloaded or that you accessed in exchange for that email address.
Start with a minimum of five and space them out, you know, you don’t want to have in some cases, not one email a day for five days unless that works for your business. It’s different for everyone. You have to really look at the data of your previous emails and say, you know, do people open weekly emails, or is it on Wednesdays at three o’clock? I don’t know. But look at the data to really determine how often you should be emailing your people because every audience is a little bit different. But you still want to have some basic email strategy.
Here are a few things to consider within that strategy that you could include. The first thing you want to do is have some sort of welcome. They’ve just joined your email list and this is when they are the most excited about you and learning more about you and what you offer. So you want to give them a couple of different resources to explore while they’re waiting for the sequence to follow through. So give them the thing that they downloaded or that they requested. So if it’s an ebook, if it’s some sort of report, you know, delivered in that first email and welcome them, they are now a part of your community and so you want to thank them and show that gratitude and give them what they asked for number one.
Another thing to consider is giving a brief overview of your business, yourself, and how you help people like them. This is another great thing to do. You can do it in email one but you might want to wait until email two and sometimes you wait, you know, maybe till day two or day three to send this email because you want to give them time to read the thing that they downloaded. And in my example, I’m going to use an e-book but just know that it could be any form of content. It doesn’t have to be an e-book. So what I like to do is suggest that maybe Hey, you know, I sent you that e-book a couple of days ago, I hope you had a chance to take a look at it and I wanted to just send you an email and let you know a little bit about me or a little bit about my business or how we help people like you just do a brief, short email but don’t have to be miles and miles long, but share some information and then if there are relevant blog posts or prior content that you can put in there, you can share links to that, links to your other social media channels, and just give them a bunch of different options where they can try different modes of connecting with you on different channels.
The next email should be something a little more specific, or something that categorizes them further. So if you have an e-book that talks about I don’t know two or three different topics, you might want to, in this email, discuss, you know, I want to be specific with what I’m sharing with you via email. Are you the type of person that falls into Category A, Category B, or Category C? Let them sort of self-select, that will help you, and if you, depending on your email provider, a lot of them have tags and what you can do is tag someone based on the links that they’ve clicked in an email that will further help you when you’re writing emails out to your list you can classify and send certain emails to certain people who have certain interests. So at this stage, we want to categorize them as early as possible because you don’t want people to drop off your email list because they’re getting too much content that isn’t relevant to them. Once you’ve done the categorization email, I’d say maybe two to three days after the prior email, depending on your business again, this is all relative because every business is unique and you need to look at your data and how you connect with your customers and how regularly you do so before you know, you take this as gospel, but just know that this is a framework that we’re going through for the sake of example.
Once you’ve done that, and they’ve categorized themselves, you’ve made that tag and they have self-selected, then one of the next emails is the next step in the funnel, the next offer, so if they’ve gotten the lead generation offer and the next step in your funnel is for them to book a consultation with you. Then, you want to start talking about the value of those consultations and invite them to book one with you. If the next step is buying a low-value product or renewing a service, talk about the benefits, always talk about what’s in it for them first, and then at the end, you have your call to action to whatever the next step in that flow is.
Now we’re going to take some action, open up a Google Doc, no distractions, just that tab and start to map out or type out what sorts of information you’d want to share in each part of this welcome email sequence. I like to write it all into one document and then make my edits and then move it to the email processor or the email service. Because sometimes it gets overwhelming when you try to go right in there and just type. Use a word doc or a Google Doc or something like that and just get all your ideas out and start out with an outline and then just flesh it out and try to start with five emails. It doesn’t have to be complex. Down the line, you can always add more, make them more complex, but just to get started have something like that and then, you can start to make tweaks as people subscribe to the email list. You can look at the data and see what emails are people dropping off, if they are, or if people are replying to the emails, what are they saying? And then you can further refine from there.
So that is the end of this episode. I hope that you’re inspired to start writing those amazing emails for your clients. And we will finish up with the next episode in the content marketing series in the next one. Have a great day. Bye!
The Digitally Grounded podcast is written and produced by me, Ashleigh Lindsay, our editor is Jessica Marshall, and our music is ‘Summer Hip Hop Upbeat’ by Lightbeats. Thanks for listening!
