I don’t email you enough…
I know. That sounds crazy. I send out emails Monday through Friday.
Very occasionally, two emails per day.
Since 2014, those emails have shared over 1.7 million words of valuable marketing advice, plus marketing messages.
But I should be doing more.
Specifically, I should be using one particular email strategy I haven’t implemented yet for my Breakthrough Marketing Secrets readers.
Behaviorally-triggered email campaigns…
I had a phone call with an Aweber user experience designer this morning.
We chatted about a new feature they’re developing, to trigger new email campaigns based on a specific action.
The feature isn’t public and I didn’t ask if I could talk about it, so I’m not going to go too deep into how that particular feature works.
But I will talk about behavioral targeting — and what it’s such a powerful strategy.
Most of my emails are broadcast emails…
That means they go out to everybody on my list at about the same time. About 4 PM Central every weekday.
These are great for a lot of purposes.
Sending out content works well in broadcast form.
Doing calendar-based promotions and campaigns works as well.
Or, simply sending out any message you want all of your subscribers to get at a specific date and time is a best-fit for broadcast email.
There’s another common way that emails are scheduled…
When you’re brand new to Breakthrough Marketing Secrets, you also get a welcome sequence.
These are specific emails that go out a set period of time after you sign up.
So you get one immediately, and one the next day, and so on.
These are meant to introduce you to me, and what I do.
And these are the standard email autoresponder campaign.
Someone signs up, and they get a series of emails.
Here’s where things get crazy…
In the last few years, another form of autoresponder campaign was created.
It used to be that if, say, I wanted to send you another autoresponder campaign, I would have to send you to another sign up form, and you’d have to sign up again, on a new list, to get that campaign.
Then, someone got the bright idea of tagging subscribers based on any number of factors…
Did they open this email? Tag them.
Did they click this link? Tag them.
And so on…
When an email subscriber interacts with an email in a certain way, they’re tagged.
And then, based on the tag, you can start a brand new autoresponder campaign sequence.
Here’s an example of how this might work…
Let’s say you run an investment publishing business.
In your product line, you have services focused on a variety of different topics. There could be tech stocks, pot stocks, income opportunities, trading, ETFs, and so on.
At any given time, some segment of your audience is going to be interested in these different topics.
And so whenever you talk about ETFs, for example, you could have a link that says something like, “Click here for our 5-day email course on building the perfect ETF portfolio.”
Again, just throwing an example out there.
The link would go to a page that said, “Congrats, you’re in! Check your inbox for your first lesson on building the perfect ETF portfolio.”
When the subscriber clicked that link, something interesting happened behind the scenes. Because of how you set up that link, it tagged the subscriber in your email service provider, using a tag called “5-day ETF course” — or whatever name you choose.
And when they were tagged, it added them to an autoresponder campaign set to send that 5-day course out over email.
Now here’s how to make this strategy even more powerful…
As you can see, I didn’t position this as, “Click this link to get sold all our ETF products.”
That’s in line with what I recommend in The Value-First Funnel Strategy.
Promise — and then deliver — real value to them. But throughout that course, you can start to mention your ETF products, or link them to specific current opportunities in the ETF market.
And after the course, you could add even more emails to the campaign that make more explicit offers for your ETF-related products.
Not only that, the more you do this, the better your list intelligence becomes.
For example, based on some really early tracking I implemented in Breakthrough Marketing Secrets, I learned that the vast majority of my readers are copywriters. Which has allowed me to cater more of my messages to this core audience over the years.
The more tags you have, the more you can see the unique characteristics of your email audience. And the more you can use that to cater general content and offers into the future.
Not only that, you can also create and send future messages just to these tagged subscribers, when relevant.
Worried about email overwhelm? Here’s how to beat it…
My friend and occasional copy review client Perry Marshall has a neat trick to avoid email overwhelm when using a similar strategy.
Maybe your first emails are dictated based on a daily email for a set number of days. Such as the 5-day email course explained above.
But after that, you can use a math concept called the Fibonacci Sequence to reduce the likelihood someone will feel like you send them too much email.
The Fibonacci Sequence is a very specific series of numbers, that very accurately describes patterns that show up all over in nature.
You come up the numbers in sequence by starting with 1, 1, and then adding the last two numbers in the sequence to get the next one.
So…
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144… And so on.
For the purposes of this application, I probably wouldn’t go beyond 89, and I’d simply repeat that at the end.
Here’s how you set it up. When you do one of these behaviorally-triggered email campaigns, you send the initial sequence. Then, use the Fibonacci numbers to dictate the gaps between future emails. So you send out one the next day, and one the next day, and one 2 days later, and one 3 days later, and one 5 days later, and so on.
If you have a number of these running at the same time… And you spread out the days they’re triggered… Someone could easily be in the middle of 5 or more of these campaigns and it would be unlikely they’d get more than 1 or 2 emails in a day.
The other thing this does is strike while the iron is hot. If I’m interested enough to click on something, I’ll be open to more messages in the next few days. And so the short gaps early are simply serving my active interest. But as time goes on, I may only want the occasional reminder. So much later in the sequence, emails coming out every 3 months is just enough to remind me of my previous interest without being annoying.
And perhaps those later emails could have their own triggers, and so on.
Done right, and as a total email marketing strategy, this creates a massive customer-responsive email system that is always delivering messages based on what people have indicated the most interest in based on their behavior.
And that is a truly powerful breakthrough of a strategy…
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
