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Emails are great and all, but what about when you want to do some magic with emails? I’m talking all about email automations and how they’re going to rock your world, and most definitely your business.
One reason I love email so much and how much email marketing can do for your business because of the way you can set up automation to make it do amazing things. So today I want to break down some of the most common email automation that you may or may not be using in your business.
**Now disclaimer as with most things, this does NOT mean you have to go set up all of this automation right now. But they are all really great ideas of things that you can use in your business eventually or the things you might want to work towards or have someone set up for you. So let’s just get the wheels spinning today.**
I have seven different types of automation that I’m going to walk through.
Delivery Email Automation
Let’s start with the obvious one here. This is the one that almost every single person listening will probably be familiar with. That’s the delivery of a product or a freebie email, right?
When someone opts into something, even though someone buys something, right, this that can really cover two types of things. So when we’re talking about automation for these types of emails, a lot of times these are going to be kicked off automatically based on what you have set up on the back end of your system.
This automation’s the easiest because it can literally just be one email. Basically, it’s just making sure that people get whatever it is they need to get from you whether that’s something they bought a download, a freebie, an email series.
One way to look at automation is its a way to keep everybody happy and thriving and nurtured in your business through email magically delivered like your robots running around. That’s why I love it so much.
Because people get angry when they don’t get stuff delivered. People get angry when they don’t get the freebie they download it even though it’s free, right?
We all feel that way like, “Oh my gosh, it’s been two minutes, where’s that download? I really wanted it!”
And we don’t want to let people down. So this is the first one at a minimum. Every single person should have this setup on all of your things. Make sure that it’s automatically delivering things to your people and email. Even if it’s a responder just like Hey, I’ll get back to you in five minutes or two hours or I’m going to give you a call or whatever it is. People just really like to know what’s happening next to make our brains feel better.
The Welcome Automation
The second type of email automation that is super important is going to be your welcome sequence.
I’m often surprised when I start working with clients to find out most of them don’t have this one set up already. It seems like it should be really commonplace if you create automation in the order you need it, but that’s not how we think.
We kind of like to put out fires mostly in our business especially for working on the backside.
A welcome sequence’s purpose is to initiate or introduce yourself to whoever is just joining your email list because often, people are scrolling by and they happen to click. But they may have no idea about you or who you are, you may have just appeared in their feed, or you could be running conversion ads, it could be on Pinterest, there’s like it could be sent to them from somebody else, they may have no idea who you are from Adam or Eve.
You need to introduce yourself to them, help them get warmed up to your list, find out who you are and decide if they want to stay. That’s really important if you haven’t paid attention to our email series last couple weeks, because we want people on our list who actually want to be there and open our emails, right.
It’s not the goal to collect as many people as possible on our email list. That doesn’t really serve us in any way in our business unless they’re active, engaged and ideal clients who would want to buy from you in the future. So it’s really important to make sure that we’re warming them up in a way that introduces us to them. And allows them to interact with us as well.
One question that comes up is: How long do I make a welcome sequence?
I’ve seen people do it anywhere from two emails to 50 emails, and let me just say that 50 feels like a lot. So don’t feel like that’s a number you want to shoot for.
Basically, it’s a handful of emails as with any other kind of writing role, write enough to convey the point and not a word more. You don’t want to belabor the point but you do want to make sure you get your point across.
I believe mine is somewhere between four to six emails in my welcome sequence. My goal with a welcome sequence is to get new people introduced to you, move them along in their journey to getting to know you and help them decide what’s the very next step.
I think a lot of times people get really confused about how to make email sequences because they don’t know what to say.
To make it really simple, you just want to make sure you’re taking them along the journey to make a decision about you in whatever way shape or form that is.
So for me, in order for them to get to know me really well, I want to make sure that they’re get ingrained into my community and where I hang out a lot. If someone meets me through the podcast, it’s usually a pretty good lead because you’ve heard my voice hopefully a couple of times, and you can make a decision pretty quickly about whether she’s a crazy person or a good fit. T
I need people to decide immediately whether they liked me or not because I don’t waste time. So I really want you to decide immediately, before we even talk or connect, like, it’s like you’re stalking me through the podcast, right or stalking me through my videos or in my group. And I want people to just know, know that they’re for me or not, does not hurt my feelings.
If you join my list and bounce. That just means I’m not your cup of tea. That’s okay.
So the welcome sequence sets the tone so they can figure out if they like you and what you are all about.
The reason welcome sequences are important beyond setting the tone is to help them learn to open your emails and like you. If someone just joins your list and then the next thing they do is they get just a random email sent out to your list, it’s going to feel a little bit disconnecting, and they’re not going to feel the need to open the emails or remember who you are even because they haven’t been introduced to warm up to you.
So on that delivery email sequence, we just talked about, introduce the welcome sequence when you say, “Hey, here’s your thing you wanted. By the way, I’m going to send you a couple of emails to let you know who in the world I am. And if I’m not for you just click unsubscribe anytime at the bottom.
This teaches them Oh, something’s coming to my inbox, don’t freak out. I’m going to open this one from her because she seems okay.
The Segmentation Automation
This type of automation helps you to put your people on your list in the buckets so you can serve them better. This type of automation isn’t for everyone, but it works really well if you have multiple businesses or serve two different audiences. Knowing who is on your list helps you figure out what to send them, and protects the integrity of your list because you don’t have to blast your email list all the time, you can send segmented emails to one section.
It works like this: You send an email and ask them to click a link usually, and it tags them if you have a tagging system. If I haven’t mentioned it before I use Active Campaign. *I love it and I cannot recommend it highly enough, I will drop a link in the show notes for that as well and tell it to every single person and try to convert you to Active Campaign that I can. But that’s what I use. And I love it because it has such a robust tagging system and segmentation automation and visual automation. And I could just geek out for a really long time on their features.
The Client Check-In and Client Follow Up Automations
These two automations are tied together. For my business, I have a pre-session questionnaire that includes two or three questions to help my client who is doing a strategy session with me get in the frame of mind that I need you to be so we have a really productive strategy session.
It’s not very fun or easy for us to be like, “Okay, great. You paid me for this time what are we gonna talk about?” and you’re like, “Ah, that’s what you’re gonna tell me.”
That’s gonna waste a lot of your session and we don’t want to do that.
So before I walk into a strategy session, I make sure that they have these questions and can figure out how to get the most out of our time together.
On the flip side, after a session, I make sure to follow up to make sure that we covered everything they wanted to, did this bring anything to mind we need to be aware of, Is there something else you want to talk about next time… like those kinds of questions.
This helps to neatly tie a bow on sessions especially if you’re a coach and consultant. I do this with one on one client work, I do this with my coaching clients in the mastermind, and I definitely do it with any strategy session.
I just want to make sure that I’m doing the best that I can to my ability to serve you and answer questions and all that good stuff, but also help you process what we talked about.
I know being on the end of coaching calls with my own coach, it’s like a fire hose shooting at me, there are so many things going through my head.
I had this an epiphany this summer when I realized I can’t do the work for my clients. Unfortunately, I can’t run their business, I can’t make them be successful. I can’t make them see what I see or see how amazing they are.
They’ve gotta figure it out themselves. I can give them all the tools in the world and the manual. But if they can’t put it together and their own terms and ways it makes sense for them that it’s just not going to work.
So figuring out how to really empower the people you work with, to make those leaps and to make those connections and get excited and take the action is really important
You could also use these types of automation with products, following up on a purchase, following up if they met you in person, following up when you give a speech, any kind of event type thing; there are so many different ways you can use it.
These two automations could be a one-time thing, or it could be on a schedule, like every 30 days or 90 days, whatever fits your business. But those are really important to have because if you don’t get feedback, and if you don’t help people process how they work with you and what’s going on in their life, then they don’t make progress and blame you for not making progress.
Onboarding and Offboarding Clients Automation
The next important email automation that I want to talk about, again, is in the client category. In the same way, the follow-up and checking in is important, so is onboarding and off boarding.
If the welcome sequence sets the whole tone for people who are brand new to you, how you onboard clients, how you offboard clients after their experience with you, also sets the tone with how they feel and think about you and see their experience and recommend you to others.
So I have a whole system and process, shout out to Natalie Gingrich for helping me set up this in her amazing A-Team.
Thinking through this type of automation requires you to ask: what’s important? How do I want people to feel every step of the way? What are the most important details I need to get so that I can help them be successful? What are the things I’m going to pepper into surprise them? What are the touchpoints going to be so if they start to drop off, I can keep them moving forward?
So one thing I didn’t talk about, not only can you do email automation that actually sends just emails, but you can also trigger them to send you emails and reminders to do things and put things on your calendar. If your mind hasn’t exploded yet with all the things you could possibly do, that little taste of one is going to blow your mind. You’re going to be going through Zapier forever tonight trying to figure out what in the world could you make your emails do to make your life easier.
But onboarding and off boarding is important again, because you’re getting feedback and you’re setting the tone. If you haven’t figured it out, that’s the theme here. We’re just making sure we’re making our people feel really comfortable and confident in what they’re doing and what you’re doing.
Sales Automation
This last automation/funnel is equally important but often does not fall top of mind to people because it feels a little bit hard. A lot of times people set them up either prematurely when they don’t have everything in place. And so it doesn’t work out. And then they just think they suck at sales.
Other times, they just don’t have enough stuff to set it up yet. Sale automation work when you opt into a list for something and then you’re shown an offer for something small that’s related either on the thank you page or after a couple of emails.
In my opinion, you have to be amazing at copy and emotions to write these well. Most people who want to set them up want passive money, but don’t know their business and audience well enough to pull off a passive sale. When done correctly though, these can work really, really well.
This topic of email automation is just scratching the surface of what’s possible with email automation in your business. Look at how you can just with just one new email automation and see how much easier it makes your business run, then try out other ones.
About Marketing Magic:
The Marketing Magic podcast is where women entrepreneurs trying to do all the things come to get inspiration, business strategy, and on-air coaching on how to get their business noticed and growing. If you have a business that people need to know about in order for it to grow, you’re in the right place. This is the place to uncomplicate your marketing. Be sure to listen, subscribe, and leave a review! Join the conversation of other unapologetically successful women in her Facebook community, The #girlboss Club.
