In a previous post, we introduced email segmentation and automation, concepts that can transform a mailing list into a powerhouse marketing tool for your business.
We covered segmentation in some detail, and in this email we’ll be talking about a practical approach to email automation.
We’ve all heard it over and over again, “just buy this new cloud based system, click three times, and sit back and relax while the magical money-pooping unicorn does his thing all over your bank account.”
What nobody ever seems to remember to mention is that most of that stuff, even if it actually does what it says, won’t make you any real money unless you already have a big list or a big social media following to market to. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, good quality products are easy to find and cheap to acquire. It’s the customers that can be hard to come by.
Building and growing your own list should be the top priority for every internet marketer. But getting subscribers on that list is just the first step. Building your autoresponder out with quality content and product offerings and managing it with segmentation and automation are the keys to creating consistent, sustainable income. It takes time and effort and some practice, but with a little experience a well-managed list can provide significant, sustained income with a lot less effort than chasing your tail trying to buy and sell product after product..
Truthfully, we kind of “got it” and were working along until we took a training course with successful marketer John Thornhill. As a result of that course, we have a completely separate list that literally runs all by itself and generates steady income. The single most important thing we learned in that course was how to manage an autoresponder, and that wasn’t really what the course was about. It was second nature to him, and he just kind of built out the list structure as the course unfolded.
For us it was a serious “AHA!” moment, and we realized that a well-constructed and well-managed list is as close as it gets to “Just set it and forget it, and watch the magic happen!”
Now, let’s look at why you need to consider email automation for your business.
With automated emails, you can send highly relevant and timely messages that nurture your leads. Email automation makes it possible to create personalized email campaigns on a large scale, send relevant content to an interested audience and increase engagement, and can help get your emails opened, read, and clicked.
Value-based drip-feed emails keep your business moving along with minimal effort and help you sell easily.
You can set it and forget it (well, almost). It’ll keep working, nurturing, and converting your prospects on autopilot.
Hopefully you understand the power of segmentation and automation and how it could improve your email marketing game. So let’s discuss list automation, shall we?
Automated emails fall into two categories:
Event-based trigger emails and Drip-feed email content.
They can be used independently or together depending on what you want to achieve.
For example, when you have an email course, you could send an event-based trigger email (in this case triggered by the sign up) that enrolls the subscriber to a drip-feed that delivers the course content at the intervals you set.
Now let’s dig a bit deeper into these two types of automated emails.
Trigger emails:
Emails that are triggered based on your subscribers’ behavior (or lack of it) are called
trigger emails. These are the most common types of automated emails, and these emails
reduce the time-consuming process of creating and sending everyday messages.
Trigger emails include:
Welcome emails, on boarding emails, and getting started with your product or service emails,
Abandoned cart emails and Milestone emails (birthdays, anniversaries, and specific milestones)
You can also send triggered emails based on the actions taken by your audience. This is called behavioral email marketing.
According to Marketing Sherpa research, 39% of marketers believe that sending emails based on user behaviors is their most effective email strategy.
Behavioral email marketing strategy also helps in lead scoring and understanding where the audience is in the buying cycle for b2b businesses.
Drip – feed emails:
Drip-feed emails deliver a series of messages based on a time frame specified by you. The purpose of the drip emails is to move the subscriber to the next step in your funnel. When done right, drip-feed emails can be a source of extra revenue too because they nurture the prospect and make them trust you enough to buy something when you ask them. Drip feed emails also provide the ideal vehicle for low-key monetization, including product recommendations along with content rather than sending out “Buy This!” emails.
Drip-feed increases subscriber engagement because the content is delivered at an interval that
makes it easy for consumption by the audience.
That’s a short overview of what email automation is all about.
How you use automations will vary greatly depending on your own business, but here are a couple of general examples to think about.
Using segmentation tags, you can create automations to feed a separate sequence or campaign to certain subscribers, without manually sending those emails or creating a separate list.
Using links in an email, you can automatically allow subscribers to select content they are interested in, by triggering a sequence or campaign. Or use links in an email to let subscribers select the kind of offers they will receive: click and automatically get added to the “WordPress” product sequence, or the “Youtube” training video program, or the “Clickbank” tag.
Exactly what automations are available, and how they are used, will vary from one autoresponder to the next. We have tried several autoresponder services over the years and have found that there are several very good ones, a boatload of perfectly adequate ones, and some to be avoided.
If you don’t already have an autoresponder service, you should do some research and give it some serious thought before choosing. We aren’t going to make a recommendation here, but we discussed differences in the types of autoresponder services and various specific options in an earlier post.
If you do already have an autoresponder and you aren’t using segmentation and automation, you should be. Hopefully you see that an autoresponder is much more powerful than downline and credit mailers, and you should be harnessing that power to drive your business.
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