If you haven’t set up your first lifecycle email campaign (otherwise known as a “drip marketing campaign” due to the way you “drip” content out to customers), you’re losing customers. Regardless of your industry, you could be sending your visitors timely emails that will persuade your prospects and thrill your current customers.
Lifecycle emails and your business
There’s a common misconception that lifecycle email campaigns are only for software-as-a-service businesses (“SaaS” companies sell subscriptions for Web access to their software products). While the value of lifecycle email in a SaaS company is self-evident—you can track when users last logged in, how they’re using the software, and so on—these emails are valuable to a much broader range of businesses.
The key is to figure out what stage in the customer “lifecycle” (the model of a typical customer’s relationship with your business) a visitor to your Web site is at based on the pages they visit. A person viewing your pricing information is at a much different stage than a person visiting the “What is <your product>?” page. During my work with X-Plane, we doubled the likelihood of a demo user becoming a paying customer through these emails.
Anatomy of a lifecycle email campaign
Let’s assume you’re convinced of the value of using lifecycle emails. How do you start? What does one of these campaigns actually look like?
Your campaign should have the following features:
- Offer your visitors immediate value for signing up. A small percentage of your site’s visitors may find the prospect of getting your company’s blog posts delivered to their inbox to be valuable, but most will not. Instead, try offering:
- To extend or improve your product’s free demo.
- To send the user an eBook/guide/report written by the CEO on some topic your business is an expert at.
- To provide a free tool for assessing their business’s vitality in whatever domain your business is an expert in. (WP Engine is extremely successful at this. They offer a free web site speed report since “slow websites cost visitors.” After you sign up, they send you tips on improving your site’s performance, until eventually you say to yourself, “I’m just going to let them manage this for me.”)
- As a condition of getting this free, valuable thing you’re offering, require the user to agree to receive your email course. (That sounds much more agressive than you need to be. The incentive you’re offering should be directly in line with the emails you’ll send, so the opportunity to receive your emails will be a bonus to your users.) Your emails should be structured as follows (at least at first—you may find later that you want to depart from this structure):
- The first few emails should be almost entirely educational or value-adding, relating directly to the incentive you gave users for signing up. It’s okay to have a small reminder at the end of the email about how your product will improve the reader’s condition, but at this point, you haven’t established the trust required to make a sale.
- Shortly thereafter, you should have one to two emails worth of hard sells. For instance, in my lifecycle email course on how to get the most out of the X-Plane demo, the fourth email in the series is titled “The number one way to get more out of X-Plane.” As you can guess, that is to actually buy the product! At this point in the email course, you should have established enough trust with the user that when you say “This product will make your life better in these ways,” they’ll consider what you’re saying.
- Intersperse further educational content with a few more reminders of the benefits of buying your product.
Getting your feet wet: Writing the emails
Now that you’ve gotten an overview for what your lifecycle email campaign will look like, let’s get to the hardest part: writing the content of the campaign.
I recommend starting by creating the incentive that you’re providing to customers for signing up. This will help guide you when it comes to the emails themselves. Ask yourself what someone who got tremendous value out of that incentive would want to know next. (If you aren’t convinced of the value of your incentive, you should re-think offering it to your customers!) This might be information about a related topic, or a guide to evaluating different offerings in this category.
It’s a bonus if successive emails build on one another. This lets you say things like “Last time I emailed you, we talked about <some topic>. Now I’d like to tell you about <an improvement or addition to that topic>.”
Now, go outline both your incentive and your email campaign itself. When you have a good idea of where you’re going, write the content. Seriously, this is the biggest hurdle that most businesses face. If you’ll spend 8–10 hours getting the content together, the next steps will be a breeze, and you’ll be very motivated to get things done.
If you don’t have content written yet, do so now. You can bookmark this page and come back. Just get your campaign written!
Preparing for launch: Setting up an email sending service
With your emails written, you need to set up the service you’ll use to actually send them. I can’t stress enough that this is something you need to outsource. If you don’t yet appreciate how much work is involved in sending an email from your own server, read Jeff Atwood’s account of what it takes. (In short, it’s a lot of work with no guarantees that things will work in the end!)
Which email service provider (ESP) should you choose?
You want to pay someone else to send your emails for you. MailChimp is a popular choice, but its ideal use case is more akin to a marketing newsletter (or series of newsletters) than lifecycle emails based on customer actions. If you don’t plan to change the emails you send based on things like logging in to your site, purchasing products, etc., this is a fine choice. However, if you’re able to track these things (and you should, at the minimum, be able to track when a person who signed up for your list with email address abc123@mail.com purchased a product using the same email address!), I recommend looking elsewhere.
My own email service provider (ESP) of choice is a startup called Customer.io. They offer the most flexible segmentation of customers that I’ve seen. For instance, you can send a different series of emails to people who signed up for your guide to buying products like yours and signed up for the demo than you would to a person who just signed up for your guide. This can be incredibly powerful, and it lets you avoid sending people irrelevant emails.
(For instance, if someone has already bought your product, you probably shouldn’t be sending them emails convincing them to buy! In practice, this will only affect a small percentage of your readers, but they are likely your most important readers.)
I’ve endorsed Customer.io like this before, when discussing how to A/B test your lifecycle emails in order to better target them, but once again, I want to be clear that I’m not receiving any compensation from them for doing so—I’m just a happy customer who wants other people to get this kind of satisfaction.
Add your emails to your email service provider
This step will vary depending on which ESP you chose. You’ll need to enter your emails in to whatever system the ESP provides for editing.
In Customer.io, this involves going into the app, then:
- Clicking on the Behavioral emails,
- Clicking the New Campaign button,
- Setting up the campaign (the name you’ll give it, the user segments that will receive it, etc.), and
- Using the Add an email button to create the emails themselves.
Creating a new “behavioral” (i.e., lifecycle) email campaign in the Customer.io dashboard
Creating your first emails in the lifecycle email campaign (via the Customer.io dashboard)
Going live: Getting sign-ups
At this point, your email campaign(s) should be ready to accept signups. Depending on your goals for the campaign, you may want to use a dedicated landing page to get signups (for instance, by sending traffic from your PPC campaigns to the signup page), or you might put a signup form at the bottom of your relevant pages, with a call-to-action like “If you found this page useful, sign up for more great content like this, delivered straight to your inbox.” (You should, of course, use a description of your actual content and its benefits, instead of the generic “great content.” Yuck!)
A few things to keep in mind when asking for the signups:
- You need what’s known as “affirmative consent” before sending your emails. People who sign up should know exactly what they’re going to receive. This means if you promise your incentive plus a 3-week course on improving some aspect of their business, you can’t send them your company’s monthly newsletter. Likewise, if the text on your page only discusses the immediate incentive, you can’t send them a 3-week course!
- Reduce the perceived risk of spam by promising never to sell or share the user’s email address. Likewise, promise that they’ll receive no more or less than what you’re offering (incentive + x future emails, or incentive + course on your topic + occasional updates).
- Make the immediate value of signing up eminently clear. Try something like “sign up now to receive <your incentive> instantly” in a big, colorful font.
- Make it clear that this course is completely free. The words “completely free” might help.
Assuming your incentive and email campaign are nicely aligned with the content on the page, and that your sign-up is featured prominently, you should expect signup rates in the region of 20 to 30%. You’ll probably want to A/B test a number of variations of your sign-up copy to find the one that works best with your visitors. Also consider tracking sign-ups as micro-conversions on the path to a sale.
Where to go from here
After you’ve established a baseline of sign-ups to your lifecycle campaign, I suggest improving the marketing power of your emails using A/B testing.
One particularly interesting test to run is using radically different content lengths in your emails. Have one version that takes 1 to 2 minutes to read, with another that takes 10 minutes or more. You may find that your audience strongly prefers a quick read, with a single link for more information, or long content with the “full story” on whatever your topic of the day is.
I’d love to hear in the comments about your business’s success with your first lifecycle email campaigns!
More resources
- “A/B Testing Lifecycle Emails to Skyrocket Value,” here on the Conversion Insights blog. Once you’ve set up your drip email campaign, learn how to improve it and get even more value for your business.
- “Converting people in a lifecycle email course,” from Customer.io. This is good advice for that all-important stage of an email campaign: asking for the sale.
- “The dumbest thing Customer.io has done to date,” from Colin Nederkoorn of Customer.io. The founders of Customer.io lament the fact that they spent so long not emailing their customers. As Colin says, “You could be printing money. Why haven’t you built this yet?”
- “Intro to Lifecycle Emails” from Patrick McKenzie. This is aimed primarily at startups, who can Patrick offers a $500 course in writing lifecycle emails which, by all accounts, is doing wonders for both his business and his students’. It’s no wonder—$500 is a piddling amount compared to what most businesses stand to make in the first month from lifecycle emails, and Patrick knows what he’s talking about.