The creative process to produce daily emails that keep customers engaged, entertained and informed.
ActiveCampaign – Email Marketing and Automation at an affordable price
Hi, this is Stephen Pratley, and welcome to another edition of the Automatic Business Show. Today, I want to run you through how I managed to create email campaigns that I send everyday that take less than 20 minutes and don’t annoy my prospects and customers.
It all starts with this little notebook here where I keep a little tally of things that have happened to me during each day that have just stopped me in my tracks and made me think that’s either something really good or something really bad. It can be just about any kind of life event. Last weekend I was at a spa break with my wife because it’s her birthday. For example, there, there were 2 instances of customer service, one really good one and one really bad one. So, I’ve taken each of those and said, “Okay, in an online environment, what’s the lesson that we’ve learned from these 2 particular instances and how can we use email marketing [inaudible 00:01:17] automation to solve those in an online business environment?” Then, I’ve taken a link to resource which will help carry somebody further. That’s it, 3 steps: something that’s happened to you, what the lesson is from that, and how you can apply it in the business.
You can sell every single day off your emails by using that third one to point your product or service that you provide. Now, eventually, I’m going to be selling some online courses about email marketing, but they’re not quite ready yet. At the moment, I’m just putting links out to other places on the web where you can actually get some more information about what I’ve spoken about. It doesn’t have to be my contact, and that will be giving value to the people on the list. So, if you sign up with automaticbusiness.net, you’ll see a couple of those emails that have been written and the kind of format that that takes. That’s step one.
The trick to getting emails out fast is preparation, and the preparation just takes these three columns. That is the thing that happened to me, the lesson and the relevance to mail, and the product or benefit or feature in my product that will help solve that. That could also a benefit or feature of somebody else’s product.
Giving you a couple of example: Taking our own champagne to a hotel, so saving 20 pounds on a weekend that probably cost us a few hundred. So, what’s the lesson in that? People like a deal. They like a deal even if they’re making relatively large spend, so 20, 30 pounds here can actually make somebody feel happy about a thousand pounds spent. It makes virtually no difference to your product. The lesson from that is splinter bits out of your product, and use those to build up to a high ticket one to show value. So, that’s hopefully what I’m doing in some of my emails is taking a little bit of my [inaudible 00:03:17] giving a little bit of that away for free to giving you trust in a higher value product.
There’s another 5 here that I wrote down in one go while I was sat having a coffee the second morning of the weekend, so get those bits set up. Sign up for the emails at automaticbusiness.net and you’ll be able to see this pattern in each of the emails that go out. They go out each day. Each one has got a story to it of some sort, and you can find these in all sorts of walks of life. There’s 1 that I wrote, I saw 2 really fat people walking up the street and turned that into a story about how 1 size fits all is just not true, and how you can then segment your customers and drop off the outliers from your market if it doesn’t suit them, all sorts of different inspirations you can find. Once you get into the habit of it, it’s very easy.
How I physically do it then is, you can just go straight into your email campaign tool. I use Active Campaign. There’s a link to that on this post on my blog. You can just rattle your emails into there. Personally, I have a way that I have set up where I type the emails into a WordPress blog, and then I can pick my emails up from the same text there. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just go in, rattle those off. Set yourself a time at first for 20 minutes. That’s it. When you’re done, finish writing, hit send, end of story. It’s done. Each of the campaigns I’ve done on this have taken me 20 minutes. It took a little bit of setup at the start, maybe a couple of hours to get the whole systems in place, but I can now churn through those and do an email every single day with something creative in it. It’s entertaining. It’s informative. It’s not going to annoy people. I haven’t had anybody unsubscribe from my list yet.
And that’s how I do it.