If you own or operate a business, you’ll hear plenty about generating leads. It makes sense, considering that leads often turn into customers and sales. Without customers and sales, it becomes difficult to stay in business, let alone stay ahead of your competition. There are many articles and documents available online that lay out what programs to use to gain leads or how to get them more naturally, but most of those articles leave it at that. It’s not enough to simply get leads; you have to turn them into prospects and eventually buyers.
Articles, podcasts, and YouTube videos often tell you how often to contact a prospective client. Since emails don’t get as much attention as in the past, some people suggest sending daily emails in order to achieve the same results you would have achieved years ago. Others advise you to send emails every week or every month. With so many differing opinions, it’s not crazy to ask yourself, “Which is the best option?”
The unfortunate reality is that every situation is different, and you really have to think about what will create the best results for each particular client. Sure, daily emails will provide a better response, but that’s only if you can make them compelling reads every day. If you’re unable to do that, those potential clients may just send your emails to the spam folder. We’ve broken down the daily, weekly, and monthly email options so you can understand exactly what you’ll get out of each one.
Daily
Are you a good enough writer that you can create engaging content 365 days a year? If so, then this approach could actually work out fairly well for you. If not, you probably want to find a different method that works better. If you’re contemplating doing daily emails, you should ask yourself if you would want to receive 365 emails from a company throughout the year. While it has worked for some businesses, most will find their emails end up in their prospects’ spam folders.
Weekly
For many businesses, weekly emails might not be frequent enough. Unless a prospect is already considering doing business with you, this is probably not going to encourage them any further. Additionally, if someone is getting excited about the offers, products, or services, their excitement will wane over the next 7-day period while they wait for another email.
Monthly
To put it simply, monthly emails are rarely going to work for any business. On average, it takes 16 touches for someone to even become aware of your business. If they’re only getting 12 touches per year, they aren’t going to give you a second thought. If they do, it may take years to turn this lead into something more profitable.
Now, you’re probably looking at those 3 options and thinking that none of them is the perfect option for your business, and you’re not necessarily wrong. You have to find the right timeline to reach out to your leads in order to maximize your opportunity at turning them into prospects and buyers.
At Newsletter Pro, we don’t use any of these options. Instead, we mail in 45-to 60-day cycles about 2–3 times per week for promo-based emails. Additionally, we also send out whole-list emails once a week, and our HTML newsletter is sent out at the beginning of every month. For B2B campaigns, this frequency works out perfectly. We average about 0.5% opt-out per month on 50,000 emails sent.
Structuring Prospect Emails
For our email cycle, we normally use a “gain, logic, fear” sequence. When we start with the “gain” section, we talk about all of the benefits that come with taking action and how their life or business would be positively affected by taking action. We’ll usually send 5–8 emails in the “gain” section. For the “logic” section, we talk stats, facts, and numbers, which gives the prospect the information they need to make a logical decision. Finally, for the “fear” section, we talk about what they’re missing out on by not taking action or how things may go bad.
What If They Don’t Respond?
So you’ve spent all of this time and effort creating this email cycle but aren’t getting the responses you expected. What should you do?
After the first email cycle finishes and no action has been taken, we stop sending emails for about a week. We then drop the prospect into a new lead-generation campaign where we try to get them to opt in for new information and reengage with us. Throughout the reengagement campaign, we provide additional value and rerun the “gain, logic, fear” campaign based on the new emails. With time, you will create around 4–6 “gain, logic, fear” campaigns that you can cycle prospects through. This way, you’ll be providing them with value and new information while also building trust if they read and engage with your campaign. Trust is important because, without it, you won’t see any sales.
Of course, this brings up an important question: What happens after someone has completed all of your campaigns? We see this all the time, and we simply restart the campaigns and offer to let them opt in again. You may think that this would make people mad, but that’s not the case. Most people aren’t even paying attention to you or your business, especially if they’re only getting emails from you. Even if they did opt in, there’s a good chance that they didn’t consume all of the emails. If they had, they would have bought from you already, right?
As a final note, don’t waste time; get started with your action plan as soon as possible. Just imagine how much larger your business would be if you took action and completed at least one idea per month. Even if most of those fail, you would still be left with some successes that would boost your business.
To effectively run this email campaign, you only need these few things:
- One lead magnet, which you might already have
- 15–20 emails
- An editor to ensure you don’t have poor grammar in your emails
- 30 minutes to load the emails into your CRM
- One landing page and copy (This will need to be edited as well!)
- One newsletter (We can help with this!)
This process only takes 4–5 hours at most and could completely change your engagement with your prospects and bring in more sales. Starting this campaign now will boost your business before you know it.
