A lead magnet gets your ideal audience to sign up for your email, but what then?
In another one of our insightful articles, we discussed what a lead magnet was and how it could help your business or organization. An email lead magnet helps provide an incentive to entice someone to sign up for your email newsletter. But what then? When you have someone signed up, do you email them one at a time? Surely not. Especially if your lead magnet is highly effective, and you get dozens of sign-ups a day. You certainly don’t want to be writing dozens of emails, right? No. That’s why most email newsletter services, like Mailchimp or Aweber, include an email automation sequence, also known as an email drip campaign.
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An email drip campaign is a series of automated emails that culminate in a call to action.
Chances are if you have email, and if you use the internet at all, then you’ve signed up for a 20% off coupon or something of the sort.
Then after that, you get emails from the company with more coupons or items they have on sale.
That is an email drip campaign in action.
There are many different types of drip campaigns:
- Onboarding Campaigns
- Promotional Campaigns,
- Seasonal Campaigns
- Abandoned Cart Campaigns
- Educational/Training
But we’re going to focus on the onboarding, also known as a welcome email campaign. This is generally the first campaign someone is likely to see in your marketing funnel.
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An automated onboarding campaign can help you engage with your audience.
When someone gives you their email address in return for your lead magnet, it’s like they’ve entered a brick and mortar store for the first time.
The last thing you want to do is immediately shove your product in their face and expect a sale.
Instead, you want to treat them with respect, allow them to get to know you, and make them feel special.
This is the power of an email onboarding campaign.
Through a series of emails, you thank them for downloading your lead magnet, you introduce them to your business, and provide value to them. This makes them feel special and unique.
This series of emails should be consistent and rapid, one email a day or one email every other day.
Wait too long, and your audience starts to lose interest.
After you have established trust and built up excitement for your product, then you culminate your email sequence with a special offer.
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By providing value, you build trust and prime your audience for the ask.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is thinking they can go straight for the ask once they have an email.
Again, we don’t want to shove the product in the customer’s face as soon as they walk in the door.
Instead, you want to build trust and get your audience to like you.
To build trust, first, you must provide value.
You provide value when you give someone the lead magnet, but they already expect that.
They’ve given you something for the email.
Instead, you want to give them even more on top of the lead magnet, like another amazing downloadable to supplement it.
This is called over-delivering.
By over-delivering on your promise, you not only build trust, but you start to make the audience like you. They feel as if you have gone above and beyond, and they instinctively want to reciprocate.
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Get to the ask sooner than you think.
In your series of emails after you have over-delivered and introduced yourself. After you have provided value and shown you can be trusted.
Then you go for the ask.
This works great when you have some sort of limited time offer. You can give them a set amount of time and email them in a countdown fashion.
Only 3 days left to get this special offer…
Only 2 days left, one day left…
This is your final chance!
At this time, you also do things like introduce social proof and extra benefits of your service or product.
The idea is to take advantage of the reciprocity the audience feels for the value you provided before the ask.
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You won’t sell everyone.
Not everyone will go for the sale. But stat’s don’t lie.
Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. Emails are 5 times more likely to be seen than a Facebook post.
- 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. – Monetate
- Email marketing has an ROI of 3800%. – DMA
No. Not everyone will buy your product or service, but if you aren’t using email marketing you are leaving money on the table.
Clean up your email list.
Having and building a great email list is integral to email marketing, but if you don’t clean up your email list you could be harming your email marketing bottom line.
A list with emails that are inactive or that don’t open, costs more money.
Many list services, such as Mailchimp, charge for how many people you have on your list. It’s great if the majority of your list is active, but after a few months, you could be paying for a portion of your list that is dead weight.
If you use your list for Facebook or google ads, a clean active list helps you build a better and more rabid audience.
By keeping your list fresh and culling people every few months who aren’t active, you have a more engaged audience. When you share that with Facebook and run Facebook ads using their lookalike audience, you’ll get your ads seen by an audience that is more prime for your product or service.
Too many inactive emails decrease the chances people will flag you as spam and increases your reputation.
If your email recipients keep receiving emails from you and they have lost interest or just have not been opening your emails, then the likelihood of them flagging your email as spam goes up. The more your account is flagged as spam the lower your rating, and the more likely your emails will go to spam folders.
A good rule of thumb is to clean your email list every 3 months. Get rid of anyone who hasn’t opened your emails, unsubscribes, and consistent soft-bounces.
This will lead to a much more active and engaged list.
