If you’re a business owner, chances are, you’re aware of the benefits of email marketing. Growing your database and nurturing them with strategic content are essential to your sales and marketing process these days, especially when you can’t always rely on being seen on social media.

Even though it’s been around for a long time, email marketing is still an essential component of your online marketing and there’s no excuse to not be doing it, because…

• Collecting emails from your current and potential future customers will grow and nurture the relationship, and will result in more sales
• Social media platforms are less ideal places to build the relationship, because someone else owns them and you can’t control what the platform does with your content, your page, or your followers
• If you build your business on social media and the platform you are using closes or decides to shut down your profile, you will have to start your business from scratch
• Your list is golden – it has real value (literally if you ever decide to sell your business)

If you already have email marketing going, go you! But don’t stop there, because you can really step your email marketing up a level higher than the basic weekly/monthly newsletter.

Going deeper into your email marketing is an amazing opportunity that 90% of business owners aren’t doing yet, even though many of them already have the tools to do it within their existing email marketing platforms.

An automated email sequence is (usually) a series of 6-8 strategically written emails that go out to your audience in a particular order, with the goal of nurturing them, building the relationship steadily over time, and helping them get to know, like, and trust you.

The coolest part is that it is all set up to happen automatically. Boo-yah! Technology, right?

Obviously, there are loads of benefits that come with using this kind of system in your online marketing. The main benefits are:

• You do the work once and get the benefits over and over again
• You turn every new prospect into a “warm lead” so that they are ready to jump right in by the time they contact you
• With the right strategically written email content, you will build rapport, demonstrate your credibility, and be positioned as an expert
• They set up the perfect moment to invite potential customers to explore your offer
• Done right, you can make every single person who gets your emails feel like they’re the most important person on your list
• If you set it up properly, you can avoid common communication errors like accidentally resending emails, bombarding contacts with too much info, or sending out irrelevant content

Do any of those benefits sound like something you could use in your biz? If the answer is yes, stick with me, because I’m about to dive deeper into this topic with some practical whys and hows of email automation.

It takes a fair bit of effort to attract a quality lead, get them to put their email into a form, and give you permission to contact them. I’m not here to tell you about how to market yourself to attract leads (that’s a whoooole other blog post or 10), but so many businesses are doing this part well, then neglecting the follow up.

If you’re going to the trouble of collecting someone’s email address, it just makes sense to go one step further and use a system to make sure you are making the most of the opportunity by:

• Nurturing the relationship
• Giving value and demonstrating your expertise
• Strategically selling your services

Setting up and automating this process is the logical thing to do so that you get the best return on your investment. Do it once – experience the results again and again. So, learning how to set up, and use your automations properly, is 100% worthwhile for your online business success.

So, how exactly can you get your email automation set up? Let me give you a simplified version of how you can set your nurture sequence up:

Write 6-8 emails that flow together to help a new contact get to know, like, and trust you. Start off the sequence by building rapport, demonstrating your expertise and proving your credibility by telling your story, adding loads of value and showing the types of happy clients you have worked with.

Follow on with continuing to build reciprocity by being generous with the information and resources you provide. Usually, by the end of the sequence, you have positioned yourself as an authority they can trust with solving their problems, and your contact is ready to hear about your specific solutions.

Ensure your contacts start receiving the sequence after they opt in to your offer or email newsletter sign up. Decide on a logical schedule so that a new email comes about every three to four days (depending on your industry and audience behaviour). Done well, you can stretch your initial nurture sequence over a month. That’s one whole month of building the ‘know, like, trust’ factor on auto-pilot. Schedule everything in using your email marketing software (I use ActiveCampaign, but most good email marketing platforms with autoresponders can do this).

My final tip for putting together your automated email sequence is to aim for done, not perfection, because you can always tweak the details later on.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Every day that you don’t set up your automated emails is another day you have to spend grinding away at menial tasks OR missing golden opportunities to authentically connect with your potential leads and make more sales.

If you’re feeling a little lost in the tech-speak and steps you need to take to get your email sequence set up, I can help. Find out how we can work together here >>

It’s totally do-able and you can start benefiting from email automation almost right away, so let’s do this!

Claire