Last January, I gave a presentation on growing business to a roomful of more than 200 entrepreneurs. I laid out emailing marketing tactics for getting more leads to convert to prospects and prospects to buyers.
Now I want to give you a closer look at one of those tactics. I know this tactic is going to be a game-changer for you, so I’m laying it out here so you can swipe it, deploy it, and grow sales in your business.
What to Do With Leads Once You Have Them
There is a lot of noise about when to email and how often you should contact a prospect or client. Emails are yielding fewer and fewer results, so some people advise sending daily emails to get the same results you previously got a few years ago. Others advise sending weekly emails, and a few people think once per month is the right number.
So, What’s the Answer?
That depends — doesn’t it always? You will get a better response if you send daily emails as long as you can add value and keep them interesting. If you can’t, you will have a bunch of annoyed prospects. Let’s break down the options.
Daily
Do prospects really want 365 emails from you per year? Are you a disciplined writer who produces engaging content? If you are, you can do well with this approach. If not, this option should be avoided. Personally, daily is a bit much for me, and I will unsubscribe even from things I’m interested in with daily emails, but I have heard of them working for other audiences, so it may be worth a test for you.
Weekly
In my opinion, this isn’t frequent enough. Unless all you’re doing is sending offer emails, this just isn’t going to move the needle for a prospect unless they are hot. Furthermore, it will be difficult to get someone excited about your products and services if you mail weekly, because even if they do gain interest, within seven days, nearly all of that excitement will have evaporated.
Monthly
This is crazy. Right now, it takes 16 touches for someone to even be aware of you. Unless you want to wait years to make a sale, this is not a smart option. Don’t do it.
For most businesses, none of the above strategies will be good enough.
Here’s What We Do at TNP
We mail in cycles of 45–60 days 2–3 times per week for promo-based emails. In addition, we send whole-list emails, like our Weekend Reading email, which hits every Friday afternoon, and our HTML newsletter, which is sent the first of every month.
We’ve found that this frequency is just right in the B2B space. We average about 0.5 percent opt-out per month, but that’s on 50,000 emails sent.
How We Structure Our Prospect Emails
During this email cycle, we typically use a “gain, logic, fear” sequence — in that order. For example, if this were a “gain” section, we would talk about all the benefits of taking action and how their life or business would be positively affected by taking action. We may send five or eight emails in the “gain” section. In the “logic” section, we talk numbers, stats, and facts, so the prospect has the info they need to make a logical decision. In the “fear” section, we talk about how things may go bad if they don’t take action and talk about the loss of bonuses or other items of value for not responding.
What Should You Do When They Don’t Respond?
Most of your prospects simply won’t respond, which sucks. So, what do you do? Once the first email cycle has been completed and no action has been taken, we give a small break in the emails (typically one week). Then we drop the prospect into a new lead generation campaign and attempt to have them opt-in for new information to re-engage with us.
During the re-engagement campaign, we provide additional value and run the “gain, logic, fear” campaign again based on those emails and that lead magnet’s offer. Once you’ve created 4–6 of these campaigns, you can simply cycle prospects through them. This will allow you to educate and provide value at the same time, which has the added benefit of building trust if they read and engage with them. Trust is a must for any sale to happen.
Of course, the next question follows logically:
What Do You Do When Someone Has Completed All of Your Campaigns?
This is where people get stuck the most, but let me share what we do. (And it totally works.)
We simply start the campaigns over and offer to let them opt in again, even for the same lead magnets they already opted in for.
Sometimes, when I share this idea of restarting the campaigns, people think the prospects are going to be mad because you’re sending them the same stuff. Nothing could be farther from the truth for 99.7 percent of prospects. The reality is that most people aren’t even paying attention to you, especially via email. Even if the prospect did opt in, it’s unlikely they consumed the lead magnet and all the emails. If they were fully engaged, wouldn’t they have bought from you already?
Let’s take it from this angle: How many times have you downloaded a report, MP3, or webinar without watching, listening, or reading any of it? Or maybe you started it and didn’t finish it. This is a common practice for most people. If they don’t buy when you have a product or service that could help them, you have to assume they simply aren’t paying attention.
I have seen people watch three webinars, open every email, and get my newsletter for a year before they decided to buy. At the end of the day, people are ready to buy when they’re ready to buy — not when you’re ready to sell to them. This is why you need a solid online and offline follow-up strategy.
Bonus Tip
If you really want to crush more sales, take everything I just shared with you and add in a print newsletter. Don’t just send it to customers; send it to prospects too, and use an FSI (free-standing insert) for prospects to support the offers made in the emails.
Still not sure any of this will work? A few weeks after I gave my presentation at Momentum, I got an email that inspired me to write this article. Here’s the email from Stephanie Holmes of TheMoneyFinder.ca. (On a side note, if you’re a financial adviser in the United States or Canada, you need to know Stephanie):
Hey Shaun,
Just wanted to send you a little thank you! We’ve been using a lot of what you shared at the last Momentum. We’re running a 45-day every day campaign with a pattern of gain-logic-fear … and it’s working! We put nearly 3,000 people into it. We’re at day 12 … ZERO unsubscribes, a ton of opens, new free trials, and conversion!
You had some great advice to share at Momentum, and I just wanted to say thank you and tell you we’re having some good results so far.
–Steph
You want to know the real lesson from this email? Stephanie sent this to me three weeks to the day after I gave this presentation. She didn’t wait six months to try something. She was on it that weekend, and in just nine days, she had kicked off the campaign.
Can you imagine how much larger your business would be if, starting now, you took action and completed one idea per month? Even if two-thirds failed, how much better off would you be with one-third of the ideas working and bringing in more business?
(FYI — if two-thirds of the ideas you’re implementing are failing, we need to talk about either how you’re implementing them or where you’re getting your information. But both of those will have to be conversations for another time.)
This is a simple idea you can have up and running in short order. Even if you’re not the best copywriter, done always trumps perfect, because perfect never seems to come.
Here is a list of the items you’ll need to run this campaign:
- One lead magnet (you may already have this)
- 15–20 emails
- One editor (outsource this so you don’t have bad grammar in your emails)
- 30 minutes to load the emails into your CRM (you can outsource this as well)
- One landing page and copy (don’t forget to also edit this)
- One newsletter (go to TheNewsletterPro.com/schedule to chat with my team about getting a newsletter for your business)
The good news is this task takes 4–5 hours tops. You’ll get more engagement from prospects and convert more of them to customers. Wouldn’t this be worth a day of your time?
