You may wonder what your autoresponder sequence has to do with getting more subscribers. After all, you’re building the list before anyone sees what type of emails they’ll receive. What happens once your ideal customer joins your email list is just as important as what happens before. You want to keep engaged members on your list in order to build a robust list of hungry customers, and the type of messages you send can help.
First, you need to know the goal of the list. You may have goals such as keeping contact with your subscribers, promoting other products and services (yours or an affiliate’s), and providing more content to your subscribers. Not only that, you can use your list to bring people back to your content on your website so that they can see your offers.
The best way to choose a goal is to go with the goal of the opt-in you create. So, if you have an opt-in designed to build your list and promote your signature product, it’s a lot easier to figure out what needs to be said once you attract a subscriber. Who is the person who wanted that opt-in, and why did they want it, and what do they hope will be accomplished by acquiring it?
The order of operations looks like this.
Marketing Content
This content markets the lead magnet or opt-in. This can be a landing page, a blog post, social media posts, and more. In fact, the more points of entry you can create to lead to the opt-in, the better. Always create a landing page for each lead magnet just like you do for each product or service you sell.
Opt-In or Lead Magnet
The freebie you’re offering will need to be created before you start anything. The freebie itself is going to help you choose the messages to follow the opt-in. For example, a Yoga instructor might offer a freebie PDF download with drawings of 5 daily poses that help lower back pain, or perhaps you might want to offer a download that is a guided meditation to help reduce anxiety.
Whatever it is, the problem you want to solve with this freebie is essential to understand in order to create the follow-up autoresponder series. From there, you can better understand how each email will help guide your subscribers to take future actions such as reading more of your content, buying your signature product, or using products you recommend.
- Welcome Email – The welcome email should be particular based on how the new subscriber has signed up. If it’s due to the freebie, you need to mention that freebie. If it’s due to a product, they purchased that should be mentioned too. Whatever it is, mention it by name and explain to your subscribers what to expect from you going forward from the first email.
- Download Page – You can include a link to the download page in your welcome email, or you can tell them in the welcome email to be on the lookout for the download link for their freebie or product. However, it’s always best to send them to a download page instead of attaching the freebie. You can use automation to deliver it immediately, too, if you use software like Leadpages.net, for example.
- Content – Send them some information about their problem, or the product that they downloaded and the ways in which it can help them. Ensure that the information you send is relevant based on how they got on your list.
- Content – Send more content related to the reasons they downloaded or received the freebie. For example, a blog post with tips regarding relaxing to reduce anxiety that goes along with the freebie and helps them get the most from the freebie.
- Related Promotion – After you’ve warmed them up, you can send related promotions of products and services you have created or that others have created as an affiliate marketer. For example, you might want to send them a link to that awesome app you are using that helps you stay mindful all day.
- Content – Do the same thing. Keep sending them related content, articles, news reports, blog posts, and tips related to the initial issue you wanted to help them solve while tipping them off on the next problem you can solve.
- Content – Keep teaching, informing, and engaging with your subscribers by sending only relevant information via email. Keep the emails clear. You want to avoid being long-winded in email. Use subject lines that make them curious but are straightforward. Cross-promote your social media platforms to help your audience engage with you more.
- Related Promotion – Every couple of regular emails that you send, you’ll want to send a promotion for a product or service that you recommend whether you’ve created it or not. Remember to set up your autoresponder service to automatically tag or segment the list members based on their behavior.
Create a new sequence like this for each product, service, or behavior you want your subscribers to perform.
For example, if you ask them to read a blog post and they click through, your email marketing software can allow you to tag that person differently from someone who did not click through, which can enable your system to automatically send even more messages to them designed to move them through their buying journey and your product funnel.
The reason this works is that the more engaged your subscribers are, the longer they stick around, the bigger and stronger you can build your email list, earning that first 1000 subscribers or next 1000 subscribers in no time.