Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Des Traynor, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom. Intercom solves a problem that many companies grapple with – how to communicate with and support their customers who need quick feedback while they are busy using an application.
Tune in to hear Des explain what makes Intercom different from their competitors’ products, what they learned from their biggest marketing blunders and why they emphasize the importance of live events (as well as two reasons they don’t expect an immediate ROI from them).
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Today, I’m going to give you a little refresher (or crash course) on marketing automation and tailoring your email messages to people who behave a certain way on your website.
Take Single Grain, for example. If you visit our services page or our case studies page, you’re different from someone who has just visited our home page and bounced in a minute or less. So, as the site owner, I want to tailor my messaging based on visitor behaviors.
How many lead magnets does a visitor download on my site? What kind of content are they most interested in? Maybe they visited my SEO section 5 or 6 times. My goal is to find these interested visitors and tag them appropriately, then send them the correct message. That way it’s not just one general email nurture sequence for everyone. It’s tailored to what I think they want or need.
That being said, you should definitely still have a general email nurture sequence. Give people consistently useful content so they can raise their hand when they’re ready to buy from you. I’ll show you what that looks like. I’m also going to show you a little more sophistication with marketing automation, because a lot of the clients we work with don’t even have funnels built out and they need funnels.
If you need a little more elaboration on what marketing funnels are, just Google “marketing funnels.” We are usually the #2-#4 result (How to Create A Marketing Funnel That Generates Sales). Also check out AWeber and Kissmetrics because they also have great resources on this and they’re great companies.
Our email marketing solution, Drip (owned by Leadpages), is basically a cross between MailChimp and Infusionsoft (also known as “Confusionsoft”). MailChimp is a little too simplistic, but they’re getting more sophisticated. Also, I’m not going to hate on Infusionsoft because I’ve seen it do powerful things for Neil. But Drip is awesome because it gives you the best of both worlds.
Now let’s see how Drip works. If I go to the Growth Everywhere email campaigns, the content is basically my interview podcasts where I talk to a lot of different entrepreneurs. I’ve done over 200 interviews, so that’s a lot of content right there.
Related Content: Cold Emailing: Best Outbound Sales Automation Tools
The great thing about this type of content is it’s helpful to everyone who’s looking to learn how to grow a business, because I’m talking to these people, I’m getting their story, I’m finding out how they grew their business, how they started it, what struggles they went through, etc. The stories are evergreen. So it’s pretty easy for me to put all these emails into a general sequence (because everyone can benefit from them).
Here’s one: How a Middle School Dropout Built a 50 Million Pageview Site. Or how about this one: How Social Triggers Grew to 300,000 Subscribers Using this Formula. So I just keep going and going and I keep hitting them with content. This podcast is once a week, in addition to our new blog posts that are coming out regularly.
The idea is to keep hitting your list with incredibly useful, FREE content over and over and over. You don’t say, “Hey, come buy my stuff.” You keep giving value over time. And, naturally, your list will raise their hands when they’re ready to buy. Yes, you could throw an offer at them, like a webinar, but ideally you’re nurturing them through a sequence.
Learn More: Why Neil Patel Pays $30,000 for Content & Gives it Away For Free
One of the guys from Drip, Zach Grove, actually did an audit of our work flow. When Zach audited our account, he said, “Well you know, you have all these important emails, such as trying to get people to go to a webinar or trying to get people to check out a PDF. But in your current sequence right now, your general nurture sequence, you’re only hitting them once.”
They’re only going to see that email one time and then they’re going to move onto the next thing. Chances are, most people aren’t going to click these emails.
He was right. My open rate was 57% on the first one, but it started dropping and dropping until it was averaging around 20%. Instead, you should be hitting your list over and over with the same email (with minor variations, mostly in the headline), until they actually open it.
If they don’t open it over a 5-email span, we’re going to move them to the next sequence. But we want to give them more opportunities to view our main offers. That way we’re going to convert more people at a higher level.
So, after learning this from Zach, I made a Single Grain “important emails” workflow and anyone that opts into Single Grain or Growth Everywhere is going to move through this sequence.
If they subscribe, great, they’re going to be put into a delayed sequence. And then we’re going to send them a campaign, like a “13 customer acquisition campaigns” webinar. Once they open the email, they’re tagged and then they move to the next sequence.
I can also make a segment where if they’ve viewed all this stuff, I know that they’re really qualified and I’m going to try and send them additional offers because they’re further down the funnel.
But you’re not able to do this with a basic email marketing tool. You need something that’s more sophisticated, like Infusionsoft or Drip.
For access to Drip, just go to www.levelingup.com.
Eventually, once someone has moved through a lot of the workflow and they’re ready for more commitment, I start sending them to webinars. And then from the webinar we might send them our case studies or our marketing roadmap. I’ll send them a backlink campaign as well.
And if they view this backlinks campaign, guess what? I’m going to send them our Airbnb backlinks case study.
This is a study on 1 million backlinks, this is another one on 1 million Udemy backlinks. We have 10 of these studies, and this is just one sequence. Overall, we put people through 420 days of content.
That’s 14 months of content in addition to the general nurture sequences we run and that’s okay. That’s worth it, because a lot of our clients actually start working with us maybe a year or two in. Our sales cycle is pretty long; usually it takes about 3-4 months to close. And this is true for many agencies.
So, if you have all this content, why are you not doing a better job of getting it in front of the right people? If you have amazing stuff, it’s your job to put it in front of your audience.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Nuzzel, which allows you to discover top news from friends and influencers. Jonathan was also previously the founder of Friendster, which was a forerunner to Facebook and had over 100 million members.
Listen as Jonathan explains why you don’t need a social media account to engage with thought influencers and famous people, how word-of-mouth advertising and getting investors is easy when you’ve got something of value, what lessons he learned from founding Friendster, and how easy Nuzzel makes it to curate an email newsletter on your phone while standing in line for coffee!
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Jonathan Abrams Reveals Key Lessons Learned While Building Nuzzel (NYT Best App of 2016) and Friendster to 100M Users TRANSCRIPT
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today we’ll talk about how you can reoptimize your unopened emails. Whatever email service your using: Aweber, MailChimp, or another, you should be able to target your audience by getting specific and searching for people who haven’t opened your messages.
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Welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today I’ll talk about how I was able to increase my email conversion rate by over 500% with different tools and tactics.
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