Let’s talk about three email marketing automation ideas.

Idea #1: Nurture Your Leads and Prospects 

The first idea is to create a series of emails for your leads and prospects.

When you get a new lead or a new prospect, set up some automation so that when they’re added to your CRM, they get a series of emails automatically.

Think about what their needs are and what they’re looking for.

When they become a lead, what are some of those questions that they have? They might be questions like:

What do you do?
What are some of your success stories?
What are some of your reviews?

Think about the questions that your prospects might have, and use that information to create a series of emails for your prospects that you can automatically send them.

Maybe you send them one the first day that just talks about the next steps after signing up and what they can expect.

Then maybe the day after that you send them some of your best reviews and best case studies.

And then maybe a few days later you send them your top products and services and what advantage it is for them to go with you as opposed to one of your competitors.

The goal is just to keep dripping on them with emails to basically work them through your sales process. Essentially think of the email automation for this as your virtual assistant. When you get a new lead or a prospect, you enter them into your CRM, and this activates the rest of the email marketing so that it’s just automated dripping to them like a virtual assistant helping to aid you in the sales process.

Idea #2: Ask for a Review

The second idea for email marketing automation is to create a series of emails for your customers asking for a review.

The perfect time to send this is when you just completed a project – maybe you just sent your product in the mail or just finished providing a service for a customer.  You want to be able to toggle this on so that you automatically send emails asking for a review.

The best way to do this is to have an email with a thumbs up and a thumbs down in it.

They can quickly rate their experience with you as a thumb up or a thumbs down. If they hit a thumbs up, take them to a landing page on your site with quick links to your top review sites, such as to leave a review on Google or your Facebook business page. Make it super simple so they can click and go to leave a review where they’re comfortable leaving a review. This helps distribute your reviews on all these different review sites and really build your reputation up online.

If they hit the thumbs down take them to a page on your site asking for feedback so that it remains private to your organization. And you can use that information to get better but doesn’t necessarily publicly post it online on a public review site.

When you create this automation, send two or three requests for a review – no more than that. Typically you will want automatically remove them from the review automation if they click ANY links.  So if they click the thumbs up or thumbs down, take them out of the automation so they don’t continue to get asked for reviews.

If they don’t click anything, keep sending that email until they either do click or the journey ends after asking two or three times.

Idea #3: Monthly Evergreen Email Marketing

Lastly, set up email marketing automation to send to all of your subscribers at least one email per month for the whole year.

One way to think about this is just leverage the holidays. Every month of the year has some kind of holiday that you can talk about. This could be one way to get an email out to your customers – but make sure that when you’re sending these emails out with interesting information that is useful. It could be educational, motivational, maybe funny. It’s got a value or a deal or something of worth in the email.

Don’t send an email just says “Happy Fourth of July.” You might send, “Hey Happy Fourth of July. Here’s a 10% discount” or “Happy Fourth of July. Here’s four tips on how you can XYZ.”

Think of something valuable to send to your list so that they don’t just unsubscribe but they see value. The value of this is it keeps you top of mind so they’re always thinking about you, and your brand, and when they need the products and services that you sell, they think of you first.

Another way to think about coming up with ideas for these types of emails is seasonality. Just think about the different seasons of the year. Maybe there’s certain needs that people have, or things that people might be thinking about that you could tap into. If you’re a coach that supports educators, for example, you provide different services during different parts of the year. You have back to school strategies in the fall, and in the summer you might have summer survival and strategies to recharge your batteries. You do different things throughout the year. That’s another great way to think ahead on your email marketing strategy and what you might send each month of the year to keep you in their mind.

So that’s it.

There’s three ideas for email marketing automation that you can set up, or we can do it for you!

It’s automated and it keeps you in the minds of your leads, your prospects, your customers, and also ask for reviews to build your reputation online.