As a result, we created a follow-up email sequence.
In other words, if you create your emails in advance and set them up with email marketing automation, you can follow up with prospects at scale… without being the one who keeps hitting submit.
Reading: How to create an email sequence
On Feed. At The Agency, we created our own follow-up email sequence — using HubSpot Sales’ free email template tool — that generated $100,000 in 30 days. Our overall revenue has increased by 215% since we started sending these templates in a sequence.
To create an effective email sequence, you first need a few tools:
- Lead Generation Form: Before you start worrying about your content, the platform you’re using, or how your lists are segmented, you should decide how you’re going to collect the information you’re getting from these emails. Imagine working backwards from the end goal, email.
- Email Builder: Choose an email builder tool that has list segmentation capabilities , an intuitive design interface, and a reasonable sending limit for your pipeline are the top priorities to pursue.
- Subject Line Checker: The subject line is the first part of your email -Sequence determined by you Readers will see – whether they open the email or not. So take some extra time to get it perfect by using a subject line testing tool.
HubSpot’s email marketing tool is a great place to start to start creating personalized email sequences targeting your prospects or customers.
Try HubSpot’s free email marketing tool
Let’s assume , You create a nurturing email sequence to urge a prospect to action. Such an email sequence should do a few things:
- Educate them on their purchase journey
- Deal with any objections they may have along the way
- Establish your authority and credibility in the industry (making you their vendor of choice when they are ready to buy)
- Keep track until they are ready to buy
You don’t want to do too much in a single email, so each email needs to be designed to matter in getting the prospect from where they are to get it where you want it.
But the number of emails and how long it takes depends on several factors. For example, a first-time homebuyer may start buying years before attempting to secure a mortgage loan, while someone seeking an emergency HVAC repair is immediately ready to take action (and therefore requires no care sequence at all). .
In addition, someone who has downloaded an e-book for How to Prepare My Loan to Buy a Home is much earlier in the process than someone who has filled out your contact form and is still is not ready for sale.
In other words, how long has your shopper been shopping, where are they in the process based on what you already know about them (actions they’ve already taken on your site) and which ones information do you need to know during this time? Understanding these factors can help you determine how long a sequence should be.
How to create an email sequence
Now you have an idea of what email mail sequences are and in what situations you would use one and how long a sequence can/should last, let’s talk about how to set one up:
1. Determine the purpose of the sequence.
In general, most email sequences (especially those created in a sales context) have the broader goal of generating new business. However, there are many ways to “get new business” and context is key to delivering the right message at the right time. Refining your reasons will help you structure your automation logic, craft your emails, and measure success.
For example, let’s say you want to create a straightforward follow-up sequence that designed to turn a conversation into a conversation a demo. In this case, success would mean that the prospect books a meeting through your scheduling software.
Alternatively, you may want an automated nurturing campaign to be triggered after they download an e-book or content offering. Success for this would mean turning them into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), so you would provide them with information and opportunities to take action and meet your SQL criteria. Once that’s the case, you can have your system pass it to sales.
The possibilities for targeted experiences are endless if you’re strategic.
2. Identify the registration criteria (or triggers) for the sequence.
Automation software can’t read minds (yet?); As with any tool, we need to let it know when and how it works.
This is where the registration criteria come in.When you set up your sequence, you specify the conditions that must be met for the automation to trigger. For a sales follow-up email sequence, it can be as simple as registering them manually with your CRM or email marketing software.
Alternatively, you can use advanced criteria if your automation software supports it allows. Examples of triggers are:
- When a contact fills out a form
- When a contact visits a specific page
- When a contact enters a new lifecycle Phase
- When a contact books a meeting
And many more. If your CRM records this and the data in your CRM is reliable, you may be able to automate it. (If you use HubSpot, learn more about HubSpot’s registration criteria here.)
3. Determine the duration of the sequence and the number of emails required.
As mentioned earlier, there is no set time frame or number of emails. You need to be strategic about the required touchpoints and their frequency.
For example, if I know that the average sales cycle for my buyer persona is 30 days and I have touchpoints twice a week, I would need about 8 emails depict. This provides a framework to plan out the messages needed to get the prospect from A to B.
On the other hand, if it’s a follow-up email sequence after an in-person interview , you might consider fewer emails before reminding yourself to call in (yes, that can be automated too).
4. Write the emails for the sequence.
Once you have your framework and what emails are needed, it’s time to get pen to paper.
Here are some helpful resources you out of:
- The ultimate guide to email marketing
- Sales email templates with 60% or more open rates
Remember that each email is sent to multiple prospects, probably at different times. Your emails should be evergreen and the information you provide should be universal enough to apply to any prospect who meets the criteria you set. However, personalization tokens can be added to add that custom touch.
The delicate balance between universal and specific is how you can scale while making every potential customer feel like you’re speaking directly to them .
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An additional tip: Every email should have a purpose. Don’t water down the message by overloading every email with information. By narrowing it down to a purpose, goal, and call-to-action, you eliminate confusion and increase the likelihood of success. You can always add more emails if one email alone is too much work.
5. Compose the emails using email software.
Once you have all your emails in text form, it’s time to insert them into the system.
- With sales emails, it’s often better to keep things simple than if an employee personally sent the messages from their inbox.
- However, marketing emails have more room for Branding flair and eye-catching graphics.
Whatever your approach, you can copy and paste your text into your email builder. If you put them in your system, you can tell your automation software what to send.
6. Set up the automation.
Think of this part of the process as instructing your automation software, step-by-step, on how to perform the tasks you want. This includes:
- Determining the registration criteria you have decided on
- Determining what actions (e.g. sending e-mails) should be performed and when
- Set up how much time should elapse between each action and what to do when certain scenarios occur (if/then logic)
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Automation software is extremely literal, so make sure you don’t take anything for granted or leave rubbish unturned when creating these “instructions”.
Here are some resources for working with HubSpot’s automation tool:
- Creating Workflows
- Creating Sequences
7. Test the sequence.
If you are able to, it helps to test the sequence before you start it to see if it behaves as you expect. You can do this by making it live and registering yourself.
Alternatively, you can send test emails. You should make sure that the emails look good on all devices and that the personalization tokens work properly.
Believe me – testing saves a lot of heartache.
The Success Behind this sequence is their ability to influence your prospect’s psyche. Pride, gratitude, and regret are powerful emotions that can lead people to take actionable steps. The following sequence attracts prospects by living up to their pride, providing them with content to be grateful for and leaving them with feelings of regret if they miss the opportunity.
Ready, to see this sequence in action? Here’s how we made $100,000 in 30 days.
Step 1: Find prospects to be featured in the news.
As a branding agency in the healthcare industry, most of our clients are doctors or dentists. The first step we take in this sequence is to find messages that mention doctors. As soon as we can secure a list, we reach out to congratulate them. Not only does this warm up the first email and grab their attention, it also alludes to their pride. Many equate a mention in the news with success, and chances are your prospects will too. They’ll likely be proud of that mention, and congratulating them will open doors to connecting.
Google Alerts and Feedly are two resources for monitoring the news. With Google Alerts, you can monitor the web and receive email alerts for specific keywords. Creating a Google Alert is easy. Enter the keyword and save the alert to send it to your email address.
In the example below we are tracking the keyword “orthopedic surgery”. After entering the keyword and my email address, I click Create Alert. Now I get a notification every time an orthopedic surgery or surgeon is mentioned in the news.
Feedly is another tool for monitoring news topics. It’s a space where you can privately organize and research topics that are relevant to you. It’s an alternative tool that the agency uses to find doctors who are featured in the news. To use the platform, add websites to your “feed”. When a website you monitor publishes a new article, you will receive a notification within the platform.
One example of a website we follow in our industry is KevinMD.com. To add it to our feed, here’s what I do:
- Click +Add Content
- In the search bar, type the URL: KevinMD.com
- Click green +Feedly button
- Click Add
In these four steps we have added KevinMD to our feed. TEDmed.com, AdWeek and Advertising Age are other websites we have used to acquire new customers. They are examples of other websites that I’ve added to my Feedly account.
To see the content of these websites, I click on the Health tab, which shows all content at once.
Step 2: Send an email congratulating them on their coverage.
Once you’ve found a prospect, send the first email along Sales Hub’s free email template builder.
Here’s our most powerful first email template:
Step 3: Send a follow-up email Mail with helpful content tailored to the specific industry.
If you d hat can enrich a person’s life or job, it will increase credibility and strengthen the relationship. That’s why this email template always gets a ton of replies.
For example, I’m sending doctors a valuable branding survey tool that we use to help clients differentiate themselves.
Here’s what that might look like:
Add names whenever possible. Adding a doctor’s name to the survey sent our response rates skyrocketing. Although it was a small change, personalization is a powerful tool. If this email doesn’t get prospects to respond or book time on my calendar, I’ll send a second follow-up email using the “Attempt to connect” email template.
Step 4: Send the “Try to Connect” email template.
For those who haven’t responded yet, I will follow up with this email template:
This single email has the highest response rate of any template. Why? We can’t say for sure; however, offering extended hours might be key. Without explicit hours of operation, prospects could automatically assume scheduling hours would be during their business hours Offering times outside of the regular “9 to 5” hours can persuade potential clients to take action.
Step 5: Send the final “Permission to close your file?” template.
If silence affects you, you want send a final email prompting them to respond. We’re addressing this with our final follow-up, asking permission to close the file.
This email is working fine. Why? I think it’s a combination of two things. First, it could be FOMO, or the fear of missing out. Nobody wants to feel like they’re missing out on an opportunity.
Second, some people want what they can’t have.Once an opportunity feels like it’s going to elude, some potential clients might jump on it. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. I assume they’re realizing, ‘Oh, I’ll never hear from this guy again. Maybe I should check out the offer…”
Once you’re able to get a prospect’s response to respond or close the conversation, the final step is to evaluate the performance of the email Measure email templates.
Step 6: Improve your email templates by measuring their performance.
With HubSpot’s free email template tool you can measure opening rates and click rates. With feed. As an agency, we constantly measure email performance and make improvements at our discretion.
Measuring email performance will help you understand which templates work best and which ones improve Need to become. Without this tool, it would be extremely difficult to make decisions due to the lack of data.
The return on investment from this sequence has been tremendous, but we are still early in the process. We will continue to test these templates until we find the “perfect” email.
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We were able to close $100,000 in just 30 days. These templates give you the opportunity to achieve similar results. Try it. Create a free HubSpot account, open the email template tool and click send.
Example email sequences
Although we’re using a Once you have sent a follow-up email sequence, there are a few types of sequences you can send to engage prospects.
1. Nurturing email sequence
A promotional sequence introduces your company to the prospect. They may have downloaded an e-book or opted into a content offering, but they aren’t ready to sell yet. A nurturing sequence aims to get them there by providing social proof, handling objections, and setting values.
Example of an email in Moment’s nurturing sequence:
Image Source
This email sequence is best for companies with short sales cycles such as many consumer products or even simple B2B digital technologies. To get the best results from a nurture email sequence, focus on educating your prospects rather than selling to them. This creates trust and familiarity between your brand and the recipient. When they’re ready to buy, you’ll be at the top of the list.
2. Engagement Email Sequence
An engagement email sequence uses email to build a relationship with prospects. The idea is to engage them with your content to generate interest and keep your organization in mind. This type of sequence can help you identify engaged subscribers who open, click, and take action on emails so you can include them in other sequences tailored to their specific journey.
Example of an email in an interaction sequence from a children’s book About:
Image source
The engagement email sequence works well for Brands with frequent events. These emails are best used when the relationship has been established and the recipient is looking forward to your emails. Ideally, an interaction email sequence should be sent after there has been a meaningful interaction with previous email sequences.
3. Conversion email sequence
This sequence is used when you ask your prospect something (e.g. book a call, book a meeting, or schedule a demo). This means that you focus all of the text on a single call-to-action and use the sequence to get the recipient to take that action.
Example of an email in a conversion sequence from Yokel Local:
SaaS companies and other service providers that rely on booking calls and demos to close deals will value a conversion email -lay template.This type of email should be the last in your email sequence as it no longer informs or inspires the prospect – instead it is asking for something, their time. So make sure this email sequence is reserved for those who have opened, engaged, and even replied to previous emails.
4. Follow-up Email Sequence
Just because a prospect doesn’t respond to a sales contact email doesn’t mean they’re not interested. They may need a few “senses” before they notice and take action. A follow-up email sequence comes back and touches base with your prospect after a few outreach attempts. This allows sales reps to reduce the number of emails they manually send and the administrative work they need to do.
Template source
Almost every company can benefit from a follow-up Email sequence benefit. If you find that your prospects have otherwise had great engagement and open rates, but still haven’t taken any action on a conversion email sequence you’ve already sent, a follow-up message can be a nudge in the right direction. This type of email sequence works well when it’s personalized and sensitive – have a positive intention and really relate to the person on the other side of the inbox.
5. Reminder Email Sequence
Whether a lead has booked a demo, signed up for a webinar, or even snagged a seat at an event, your business has a chance to delight that person (and possibly their to earn business). However, you cannot offer that joy if the lead forgets to show up. Small reminders over time can go a long way in contributing to attendance rates and increasing the number of opportunities you have, so to speak.
Reminder emails are a frictionless way to ensure that leads are doing the remembers the event or the appointment and also gives him all the necessary logistical details.
Example of an email in a Dyspatch reminder sequence:
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Reminder emails are similar to follow-up email sequences as they are a best practice when communicating with prospects. The key to the success of these sequences is to keep the subject line simple, the body straightforward, and the call-to-action emphasized. Remember, the goal here is to engage the prospect in a conversation they’ve already agreed to.
6. Re-engagement Email Sequence
Of course, to get results from email as a channel, you need a healthy database. However, over time, email addresses change and potential customers lose interest. The average email database loses contacts at around 25% per year. So, of course, even if you’re generating new leads quickly, you’ll still get some data skew from uninterested or stale contacts.
As a last-ditch effort to win back some of those contacts, you can employ a re-engagement sequence. The goal of this type of campaign is to prompt the user to open emails and take an action. otherwise, the result is that you remove them from your database. This will help you keep your email list healthy and accurate.
Example of an email in a Return Path re-engagement sequence:
Image Source
If your brand sees an opportunity to engage prospects with an email sequence, you want to make sure your messages aren’t going to the wrong person go or worse, bounce. It might seem counterintuitive to intentionally ask people to unsubscribe from your email subscription, but it can do wonders for your engagement metrics. Instead of having a bloated list of contacts, you can focus on the people who are interested in the email content they receive from your company.
Create your own email Sequence
Email sequences can turn your leads into customers without having to write a new email every now and then. Take the examples above and start your own sequence to attract customers.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for completeness.
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