How to build an email sales funnel

Hey everybody, Hope you're having a fantastic week so far. In today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, I'm talking all things email marketing and specifically the importance of an email sales funnel and what that consists of, what it means, and how you can go about building yours. This is a super practical episode with loads of tips and ideas that you can start implementing in your agency today, so I hope you find it useful. And let's get on with the episode. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach Rob DaCosta. I've been talking a lot recently with my self running agency Implementation group owners about the importance of email marketing. Now I know it's a topic I've discussed a number of times before on this podcast and I've written about it many times before as well. But I really wanted to revisit it because now seems like a really good time to do that. And you might be asking why? Well, first of all, it's because it's still one of the best, if not the best method for generating new business. And with stats like return on investment of 44 to 1 being banded around, it's no wonder that people are still using it as the central tenant of their marketing structure strategy. Now we got into this topic with the self running agency group members because like a lot of people, many of them up until now have been able to generate most of their new business through word of mouth and referrals. And this works really well in a time of abundance. But when we enter a period of scarcity like we are right now and I'm recording this during the coronavirus pandemic, those word of mouth and referrals tend to dry up. So suddenly we need to do something different. And looking back to some of the core marketing activities that are robust, sound and work even if they're not the most sexy things such as email marketing are things that people should be looking at. Which is why I wanted to revisit this topic today. Now, email marketing might have been around for a long time, but it's still very much alive and kicking. And although a lot of people communicate via other types of channels such as apps and social media, it's still worth noting that email marketing is still the top form of business communication. And something else to consider that should really veer you to focus on email marketing rather than social media is the fact that in social media you don't own any of the networks and the groups that you build up. You're renting that space in effect. And if any of those social media channels either come and go or change some of their rules and their strategies, then you could be screwed. Or whereas the opposite is true, with email marketing, you own 100% of that list. So that's why you should be focusing on email marketing. Now, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. You should be doing both. But I tell all my clients to focus on driving their social media engagement, pushing them to the website. And then when they get to your website, you're encouraging them to give you their email address in return for some value added content or access to some video training or a quiz or something like that. So you can still use social media, but just try and ultimately have a goal of converting those people who are following you, liking your pages, members of your groups or whatever into email subscribers to your list. Okay, so if you agree with that idea, you might be thinking, yeah, but Rob, I don't have a list. And my message to you is that it is never too late to start building your email list. So if you don't have one today, so set yourself a goal of building a list of 100 by the end of the month. And that shouldn't be too difficult, because if you sit down and you actually go through your little black book or your network of contacts, you'll soon find that you have 100 people who can join your list. And let's consider for a moment some other ways that you can encourage people to join your list. As I said, you might have good social media followers on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all the rest of it. And what your goal should be is to drive traffic from those channels to your website. And then when they get to your website, you want to be giving them a really clear indication of what you want them to do next. So what you don't want to do is drive traffic to your website and then just have them read something and go, oh, that was interesting, and then just leave. Because that is a waste of time and energy and money to drive traffic there for it to disappear. So what you want to do is when they get to your website, they read something and then you want to offer them what we call a content upgrade. They've read something you would be saying, if you want to learn more about this topic, download our free ebook on blah blah, blah. And then of course, they have to give you their name and email address in return for that. Remember, it's a transaction. I am paying you for this ebook, and I'm paying you for this ebook in return for my email address. And they'll know then they will receive some good emails from you. So that's certainly something you can do. So think about almost every page of your website having a way of capturing emails. Now, a couple of things about this. First of all, people don't, I don't think people sign up for newsletters. So having a button that says join our newsletter probably isn't going to generate a ton of email signups because they're not really clear what's in it for them when they do that. So I feel like it's better to have very specific content that they can access and that content should be context specific. So for example, if I was writing a blog on email marketing, then at the end of that blog I could say if you want to learn my top tips on how to rate, write a great email. Or if you want to get my five introductory emails, then put your name and email address into this box and I'll send it right over. So the content upgrade should be context specific to the topic you're writing about. And the types of things you could offer would be ebooks, would be cheat sheets, they could be free video lessons, they could be product reviews, they could be quizzes and a whole bunch of other things. So you just want to be a bit creative here and have a plan. But I would say on every page of your website you want to have something that is offering that upgrade and you don't want to be too annoying. Pop ups are great, by the way, but you don't want to have them be the thing that appears straight away that they have to fill in or work out how to close before they can read the content. I find them particularly annoying and probably cause people to leave your page quite quickly. So have them appear. If you are using a pop up, have it appear after like a minute of someone being on the page or if they scrolled 75% down the page, then you can add the pop up at that point. So that's some of the ways that you can grab email addresses from your website. And obviously in your social media channels you can be doing the same thing. So if I'm posting a post on LinkedIn, I might say you can read more about it here and then that link would take them to a specific landing page where they can fill in their information to grab a copy of that particular ebook. So use social media to generate leads and obviously when you meet people, when you can meet them face to face or virtually, you can ask their permission to add them to your list and so on. And so quite quickly you can set some goals on building your list. Like I say, if you have a list of zero today, sit down and go through all of the contacts and you'll immediately be able to get to at least 100 and then set yourself some targets of how many new leads you want to add per week, per month, per day or whatever. Okay, so now let's assume that you are starting to build your list. The next thing you've got to think about is what am I going to send them? Because obviously that's something that will stop a lot of people. Now one thing I would say that's really important here is that you need to be really consistent at sending useful information to your list. There's absolutely no point building a list, not mailing to them. And then one day you've got a new product offer or you're going to be an event that you want to invite people to. So suddenly out of the blue they've received an email from you. Because that just isn't going to work. Because like anything, we have to take people through this know, like trust journey. So they've got to get to know you, they've got to get to like you, they've got to get to trust you. And only at that stage will they consider engaging with you directly or buying from you. So we can use our emails as like, as a three stage nurturing funnel to take people through. And I go through what those three stages are shortly. It is worth remembering that every day around 294 billion. That's 294 billion emails travel around the world. And so that is proof enough that email as a means of communication is far from dead. And as I said, it's got such a great return on investment in terms of the cost and time that it takes to do versus the value and return you can get from it. And think about this, what's the first thing you do when you log into your computer in the morning or noon, or the last thing you do at the end of the day? I bet it's checking your email, right? And of course your prospective customers are doing exactly the same thing. When you sort of dig into the psychology of that, it's because curiosity or fomo, that fear of missing out causes people to want to keep checking their emails. And it's that same concept of missing out that persuades people to open your Facebook very first email communication with them. And that's why it's got to be good and good enough for them to want to open it and then good enough for them to want to read the following one and so on and so on and on that note, we need to think really carefully about the subject line that we put in an email because the subject line is like the headline of the newspaper piece. It's the thing that's going to make you want to read that email or just move straight onto the next one. So think carefully about the subject line and also think carefully about how much of that subject line it shows up. When you look at your emails on a mobile device, which is where a great many emails are read these days, you're going to get the first, whatever number of characters showing up. So you may need to make it very clear in that short subject line what you're talking about in the email. And it needs to be enticing enough so that someone actually opens it now. So, okay, so we've got started building our email list. We recognize the value of email. We know that we want to send some emails in a frequent basis. We thought about the subject line, but what do we send them? So we need to make sure we are sending value added emails to our audience. And there's a number of assumptions there that we're making. First of all, that we really know our target audience, which we should do because we should have done our work on our defining our customer avatar, ideal target customer, and we understand some of the pains that they have and we can write about those pains because in our emails we want to be adding value, but we don't want to just be sending emails for evermore adding value and kind of training your audience to only expect value added emails from you and never expect you to sell. Because when you do then try and sell, they will switch off. So you need to get this balance right of 80% adding value, 20% selling. So that means 80% of the time you're adding value, 20% of the time you're selling, or 80% of your email is adding value, 20% is selling. However you want to position that. And I would say that a good ultimate target for you would be to send an email every week to your list. But if that makes you kind of fall off the chair and think, oh my God, that's way too much, or I don't want to receive an email that frequently, or I haven't got anything to say, then, well, first of all, if you're sending value added emails, it won't matter that you're sending them every week. In fact, people will look forward to them. And you need to have a content plan so that every time you sit down to write an email, you know what you're going to write about. And the other thing I think is a good strategy for writing is this concept of write fast, edit slow. So write very quickly. As many of you know, I use voice to text when I write, which really speeds that process up. And then edit it slowly to make sure that you have got it right. In fact, a lot of the time I will write quickly, leave it alone for maybe a day, and then come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes and edit it slowly. So let's. I've mentioned a couple of times this concept of an email sales funnel and let's just consider why a strategy like that is important as opposed to just sending a random email or sending one or two emails over a few days and trying to get someone to buy. And the truth of it is is that the sales cycle for your sale or for my sale is usually much longer than a few days. In fact, if you do some work and do some analysis of on your past customers, you'd probably be surprised at how long the sales cycle is. As you'll know, I did that work myself and found out that the typical sales cycle is 13 months for me, which is kind of staggeringly long. That doesn't mean all of my sales are, but when I look over the last few years, the typical sale is 13 months. And that was quite surprising. And that means that I've got to be nurturing my audience through that no like trust journey so that when they get to the 13th month, I'm still at the front of their minds. And when they're ready to buy, I'm standing there going, hey guys, I'm here because people will forget you otherwise. So the concept of an email sales funnel is the fact that you are nurturing people through that know like trust journey over whatever the sales cycle period is for me, 13 months. So that you're there when they're ready to buy. And that's why short sort of email sequences don't necessarily work. And remember, people are ready to buy when they are ready to buy, not when you want them to buy. And that's one of the fatal mistakes that I see a lot of marketeers make. They kind of have an email sequence of maybe a month and then they want. They do hard sell at the end of that month. But you may not be ready to buy. You might be in month 11 and not month 13. So you need to make sure you're building an email Sales funnel that lasts the length of the sales cycle. Now email is really excellent top of the funnel tool for pushing people down the funnel for that game. That's the people getting to know you. And the top of the funnel is where you convince new customers that you're the good guy. It's that warm fuzzy place where no sales jargon should ever go. It's also the perfect place to engage customers, provide some genuine value and in return gain exposure to them for your company and get them thinking about your brand. Now of course, when you're thinking that about the top of the sales funnel and that initial engagement, probably social media is the medium that springs to mind and that's absolutely fine. But just bear in mind why you would want to be reaching out to a customer on that platform when it's filled with other businesses trying to do exactly the same and it's one that you don't own. Whereas when you are reaching out on email, it's a much more direct one to one communication. And as I say, that's not to say that you shouldn't be using social media to build up your tribe or your audience. But with email you have that one to one undivided attention. And if you continue to send them engaging value added content over time, you'll keep it that way. Now you want to personalize your emails as much as you possibly can because otherwise you will end up kind of sending very generic emails to people if you can't segment your list. And I'll give you an example of how I've got this wrong. So I've spent a long time over quite a few years building my list up. But when I first started my list I bought into the tenant of keep it simple, make it easy for people to sign up. So don't ask them too much information. Because you know, if I'm asking for name, address, phone number, company name and some other information, there's a good chance someone's going to get to that ebook and not download it because it's taking them too long. So all I used to ask for was their first name so I could personalize emails and their email address so I can send them emails. But the problem is that that didn't give me much information about their business. Now I target agency owners, so I could be fairly sure that most people joining my list are running an agency. But while I couldn't tell as much about them. So for example, if I was writing some content on how to deal with an underperforming member of staff, for example, what would be the point of sending that to a one man band freelancer. Now of course they might find it interesting, but there's also a good chance that they're going to receive an email like that and go, well, this isn't targeted to me. This is of no interest. So I'll unsubscribe to the list. So now when people sign up to my mailing list, they have to also tell me the size of their agency and I can now segment my list based on that so that I can send an email like Managing Underperformance to only people that have got more than say four or five staff. So you want to be be able to segment so that you can send sort of intelligent emails. Now the supermarket loyalty card has this mastered by them tracking the groceries associated with each swipe of the card. They can offer their customers only products that they are interested in. And of course, this has a double benefit. First of all, their customers look forward to getting those weekly emails with promised savings on things that they have bought before. And secondly, the customer appreciates the fact that the supermarket is treating them like an individual. So as long as their offers stay relevant, the customer will happily remain subscribed to that kind of email marketing. And this is the kind of personalization that really works. Simply adding someone's name to the first line of your email like Dear Rob, isn't going to win you any friends. So just consider what information you need when someone signs up and make sure that you're not asking for too much information. Every piece of information that you're asking them for, you need to consider how you will use it or how it will help you segment and personalize your emails. So back to the email sales funnel that I've been talking about in this part of the podcast. Each funnel has three stages, like the top of the funnel, which is the wide bit, the middle, and then the bottom piece which is the narrow part. So the top stage is the value stage. And this is where you are welcoming new subscribers into your tribe or into your fold. You can thank them for signing up, for downloading something from you, and then you can offer them something further for free. So what I tend to do is someone downloads an ebook and then they'll get a series of three or four emails over the next week, digging deeper into some aspects of the ebook and maybe even offering them something else for free, like a video lesson that's connected to to the ebook. So for example, you could download an ebook that I have on email marketing that will dig into three or Four points in more detail that are in the ebook over the following emails. And it might invite the reader to come to some free training as well. And this stage is all about building trust with your audience. It's about really showing them that you know what you're talking about and providing them with some genuine value. Then the stage to the middle stage, which is the like part of know like trust is where you start to build authority. And this is where you are educating potential customers and you start to refer to your products and services. So you, you want to continue to convince them that you know your stuff. And you can do this by adding more value, as I said in the first stage, but you can also do this by sharing case studies so that they can see that you have helped other people like them. You can use positive reviews, you can use guest blogs and other blogs that you've written, and you can start to put some low levels of self promotion into these emails as well. And then the third stage is the call to action. So this is the bottom of the funnel. So this is the know like trust part where you now want them to take some action. And this is where you start to introduce your products or services. And if you've done your job really well in the first two stages, your customers will trust you and they'll know that you've got their best interests at heart. So whatever you're trying to sell them or introduce to them, they'll know that it could actually be of value. So that's the concept of the email sales funnel. Now remember that the sales cycle can be quite long, so we need to have an email sales funnel that reflects that sales cycle and nurtures people through those three stages of the funnel, which is the value stage, the authority stage, and the call to action stage. And if you do that, then you are going to be building trust with your audience and they will ultimately want to buy from you. Now what I tend to do is that once someone's downloaded an ebook and they've been through that process, I then put them into my general list where they receive my weekly emails. And most of the time those weekly emails are just about adding value. And occasionally they are promoting some kind of sale. Like when I open the self running agency implementation group for the next round of enrollments, I will use a few emails that week to promote that and then I'll go back to my usual adding value emails. So that's an example of my 8020 rule. Okay, so that's the key points I wanted to make in this podcast. Remind you of the importance of building your email list. Remember that in times of scarcity, referrals and word of mouth don't work. So we need to have our own outbound methods. In fact, we should do that all the time. And email marketing is a super robust, great value approach to marketing that can complement social media and other things that you do, but you should focus on it even though it's not that sexy. You need to focus on adding new names to your email list. You need to make sure that you are getting enough information when someone signs up so that you can segment your list and send them intelligent information and then use the email sales funnel that I've just talked about to help nurture them through the know like trust process to the point when they are ready to buy that they remember you and they will buy from you. Okay, so that's all I wanted to say on this week's topic. Now there is an ebook you can download that digs into this in much more detail and if you download that, you will see how that email nurturing sequence works with when you join my list. So I will put a link to that in the show notes. And other than that, as ever, please share this podcast with your colleagues and I would love you to leave a review which as you know, helps me move up in the rankings and helps me reach more people with this podcast. But other than that, I hope you have a fantastic Thursday and Friday and a brilliant weekend and I will see you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast.