In the previous part of the email marketing strategy tutorial series we took a look at:
Now we have the foundations setup we can take the next steps to start automating our relationship building while extracting as much value from subscribers as possible.
What Will I Learn?
In the previous part of the series we explored the magic of autoresponders & how I use them personally.
Remember, an email autoresponder is just a pre-written series of emails that gets sent to every new subscriber on a schedule you decide.
Taking the time to setup an email autoresponder series with email marketing automation is a critical step in your email marketing campaign as it will help to build relationships on auto pilot while bringing constant streams of traffic, comments, social signals, sales & more!
Once you have set your email marketing automation sequence up you can forget about it and let it do the heavy lifting for you day in day out while you spend your time doing other things.
It is always a good idea to get a feel of what your competition is doing when it comes to doing anything online which holds true with email marketing & autoresponders.
I suggest you setup an email account dedicated to this and sign up to as many of your competitors email lists as possible to build a collection of their email marketing templates.
Spend some time going through the emails you receive and note down what you like and what you don’t like about each of your competitors approaches.
In the internet marketing world you will get flooded with long promotional hypey buy this product type emails, usually every single day of the week without fail rarely offering any value.
You will also notice that if you try to reply to most emails in this niche they bounce back & it is difficult to contact the sender. Email is a 2 way communication method, it is not a 1 way street.
This will vary niche to niche so sign up to all of your competitors email lists and see what types of email marketing templates you get remembering to note down what you like & don’t like.
The goal here isn’t to copy what your competitor does, you will fail if you do that – but to get a feeling for the ‘experience’ they provide to their subscribers for you to build your own email marketing templates around.
Once you have a good feeling for what your competitors do with their subscribers you should define what your rules of engagement are for your own email marketing automation strategy.
What we want to create here is a short list of rules that we will apply to our email marketing to make sure we don’t fall into the same pitfalls as our competitors.
These rules of engagement will allow us to stand out from the crowd.
We want our email subscribers to open every single email we send to them, in fact we want them to be hungry for more!
There is no point building an email list if people just ignore, delete or even worse – mark our emails as spam.
Looking through the list of things you like and don’t like about your competitors approaches come up with rules of engagement for your own subscribers, here are mine-
Putting those rules in place will ensure your email list is always responsive & provide life long benefits to you/your website.
Don’t get me wrong, I could make a lot of money if I sent out an affiliate offer directly but if you use email as a sales tool your subscriber list will lose it’s value over time.
Instead, use it to connect & engage with people – treat it as a form of social media!
Now we know what not to do and have our own rules of engagement in place we can spend some time designing our autorepsonder sequence.
The first thing you should do is think about the types of emails you could send that a subscriber would want to respond to in one way or another.
Think about the emails you could send with the purpose of engaging subscribers & building a closer relationship with them.
As you think of an idea write it down!
If you are struggling with that here are some of the types of engagement emails that I have in my autoresponder series.
Welcome Email – The email that welcomes people to the email list, sets their expectations & engages them on social media.
How Can I Help – Emails that asks people how I can help & invites them to join the forum.
Content Ideas – Emails that asks the subscriber which tutorials they would like to see next.
Blog Improvement – Emails designed to collect feedback about the blog to improve it.
Testimonials – Emails that ask the user to submit a testimonial for the blog/tutorials.
Gratitude – Emails that say thank you to the subscriber for being part of the growth/community.
Social Followers – Emails that get the subscriber to follow you on a range of social networks.
You can see some actual examples of these emails in the first part of the series.
Everyones website/audience is different so really spend some time thinking about how to get your audience to respond.
If you run a site about cars for example – ask them what their favourite car is, how much they spend on petrol/insurance, what problems they have had buying/selling a car etc
Once you have a list of potential engagement focused emails you can send we then want to move onto creating a list of content focused emails.
You have a few options here, you can create unique content to send out to your subscribers or you can send emails to old posts/pages on your site.
With this blog I have chosen to send emails linking to my old content because the nature of blogs means your older content gets buried away even though it is still relevant.
It also means I can direct a constant stream of new traffic to them driving new comments, social signals, affiliate clicks & so forth.
So I went through every single post on this blog and made a note of-
This is what it looked like-
I ended up with a total of 50 posts in my list out of the 157 I have published in total.
With a list of possible engagement emails and my best blog posts I then started piecing together my email autoresponder sequence using a spreadsheet.
I wanted to get a good mix of blog posts with free products, blog posts with paid products and engagement type emails while maintaining my rules of engagement.
Doing everything in a spreadsheet makes it really easy to get a complete overview of the sequence and move things around.
The ‘premium’ column lets me know if the tutorial focuses on a paid solution or not and you will notice that for every few non-premium tutorials there is 1 premium tutorial that gets sent out.
The engagement emails are mixed between all of that to balance everything out nicely.
The last column is labelled ‘day sent’ which represents when each email gets sent. So the 1st email gets sent immediately, the 2nd gets sent 2 days after that, then each email after that gets sent 7 days after the previous.
Now we have a firm plan in hand we can move onto setting up the autoresponder itself.
I use Aweber for all of my email marketing and they make setting up an autoresponder easy! Read my full Aweber review to learn why.
Don’t worry if you haven’t done this before, the Aweber email autoresponder service is quick and easy to setup with a very intuitive interface.
The welcome email is the email that gets sent immediately to every single new subscriber. This should just be a friendly welcome that set’s expectations.
To set it up just login to your account and go to Messages > Follow Up Series–
Then click on the big green button that says Create A Follow Up.
This will present you with the message editor and you can write out the first email in your autoresponder sequence.
Looking at my spreadsheet the first email to write is the welcome email-
Once you have finished writing your welcome email then click on the big green Next button & then Save & Exit.
That’s all there is to it! When someone subscribes they will receive your welcome email immediately.
Now all you need to do is work through your spreadsheet and set up each of the other emails in your autoresponder sequence.
However this time we have a slightly different set of options to choose from.
Like last time click on the big green Create A Follow Up button and write out the email you want to send next-
When you have finished writing it click on the big green Next button but this time you will see this screen-
There are a few settings here that you need to select.
It really is up to you what you choose here and based on my spreadsheet plan the second email gets sent 2 days after the welcome email.
All of the emails after this get sent out 7 days after the previous email according to my plan.
Just work through your plan and setup each of your emails in the auto responder sequence one at a time!
Whilst you are setting up your email marketing automation & autoresponder sequence you might also want to add some kind of personalization to the subject line or email body.
Aweber provides a number of options to do this and it is really easy to setup! For example at the end of my email I always include this piece of text-
You have received this email because you subscribed to my blogs
newsletter at www.MatthewWoodward.co.ukYour subscription details are-
Email: {!email}
Subscribed on: {!signdate long}If you do not want to receive any more helpful tips, tutorials and
case studies then you can unsubscribe by clicking the link below.Thanks!!
Take note of the bolded sections {!email} and {!signdate long} – when an email goes out these get replaced with the subscribers email address and the date they subscribed.
This is what it looks like when a message from the email autoresponder gets sent out-
Aweber provides a range of personalization options for you to play with for example if you have collected the subscribers name when they optin you can personalize each email with their name using the {!firstname} tag.
However sometimes someone might have entered their name as matt but you want to capitalise it to display as Matt.
In this case you can use {!firstname_fix} which will automatically capitalise the first letter for you.
If you use the {!name} tag it will use the subscribers full name, again if the subscriber entered matthew woodward but you wanted it to display as Matthew Woodward you would change it to {!name_fix}.
There are personalization tags for a range of things like today’s date, the IP the subscriber signed up from, the country they signed up from (Aweber works this out automatically based on their IP) and so on!
Personalizing your emails is really easy to do just create/edit a follow up email and click on the blue personalize button.
You will see a range of options to choose from & insert into your email-
You can use them in both the subject line and the email body itself.
Here is an example of something you could do-
When that email gets sent out it will automatically replace the name in the subject line & the name/country in the email body.
This is what it would look like when it is sent out-
Pretty cool right?
You can get really creative with the various personalization options that Aweber offers.
When you are writing your email autoresponder sequence it is possible to place a global text snippet in every single email.
The global text snippet is a piece of text that gets inserted into all of the emails in your autoresponder that you can change easily without having to edit every single one individually.
If you run a brick and mortar business you might want to define your opening hours as a global text snippet, so if they ever change you only have to update them in one place.
For this blog I use the global text snippet to automatically insert a Ps line at the end of every email in the autoresponder.
Right now I’m using it to promote something that will become part of a future case study.
Sometimes I use it to help grow social followers, promote a specific post or get votes in a contest etc
If I ever want to change it I just need to change the text in one place and it automatically updates every single email in the autoresponder sequence for me!
Setting it up is really easy and only takes a couple of minutes!
Just go to List Options > List Settings > Personalize Your List then scroll down to the Global Text Snippets section.
You can see I have already set one up called calltoaction along with some text.
To create yours just give it a name in the name field, then enter the text you want to appear in the snippet text field & click on add.
Once you have done that go back to your email autoresponder sequence & edit the emails you have setup.
Click on the blue personalize button and scroll down to Your Snippets then select the global text snippet you created-
You can see I have added the {!global calltoaction} tag right underneath my name.
Now every time that email gets sent out that tag will get replaced with the text I have setup in List Options > List Settings > Personalize Your List > Global Text Snippets.
I have this tag added underneath my name in every single one of my autoresponder emails so I can easily update it across all of my emails in a couple of clicks.
If you want to update it just go back to the Global Text Snippets, mouse over your snippet, click on Edit and update the text to whatever you want!
When your setting up your email autoresponder sequence you can choose a specific ‘send window’ so your emails go out on a certain day/time frame.
There are some general rules of thumb for you to follow here to ensure as many people as possible open your emails and take action.
First of all most people work a 9am-5pm job 5 days per week Monday-Friday.
That means you should avoid sending email on a Saturday or Sunday. These days always have terrible response rates because people are out doing things/catching up with things.
Secondly you should also avoid sending them in the early evening. For example around 5pm-6pm most people are on their way home from work, at 6pm-7pm people are eating & at 7pm-8pm taking care of the kids.
You also want to avoid sending emails on a Monday because this is the ‘reset day’ in many peoples routines and is usually the busiest day of the week for them.
In general the best times to send your emails are mid week on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
You can then choose to target people before work around 7am-8am, mid morning around 10am-12noon or after 7:30-8:30 in the evening.
Now I know that all of the above makes a lot of assumptions and it is hard to generalise your entire list in this manner but use those rules of thumb as a start point.
Once you have enough data you can use Awebers Opens and Clicks Over Time report to get some actionable information on finding the best send window for your audience-
Use that report to your advantage and tweak your send window times accordingly.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your send windows!
At this point in the series you should now have your email list setup along with your completely personalized email marketing automation sequence!
Don’t worry if you only have a few emails in your email autoresponder at the moment – just keep adding more emails to it over time.
(click the image above to see my full sequence)
It might seem like a lot of work to setup but once it is done, it will keep people engaged with your website & keep them coming back for more every single week on complete auto pilot.
Your email autoresponder will do the heavy lifting for you every single day of the week for the rest of your life without fail whilst your doing something else.
Spend time planting those seeds and setting it up now!
To help avoid information overload I have broken my email marketing guide into a small series of posts.
In the next part of the email marketing automation series you will learn-
When you are ready, you can learn how to get more email subscribers.
46 Responses
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
Increase Your Search Traffic
In Just 28 Days…
Hi Matt,Awesome series, thank you!Couple of questions, do you add ALL your old blog posts to your autoresponder?Also, how do you send out new blog posts to your subscribers, do they get added to the autoresponder as you go along or do you send those out as separate ‘newsletter’ style campaigns?Cheers,Barry
I add the best ones only or the ones of the most importance.New posts go out as a broadcast to all subscribers
Hi Matt,Thanks for sharing great knowlege for free. You’ve done an amazing job.I have a question: I am not an English native person, which brings a lot of trouble in terms of creating content for my audience (like blog posts, emails..).Can you suggest some effective ways for non-native English people doing affiliate marketing like me? Thank you so much!
Well your English is very good! What about creating content in your native language?
Great! After reading your first part I forced myself to read second part and it was awesome to read this part too. As you told here many tips about email automation. I personally feel that if we send emails which contain one to one conversation like recipient’s name and country, that gets maximum CTR. So we should always try to put some personal touch.
Yes personalising helps a great deal if you have that data!
Nice Post Matt,love your content always very inspiring and informative.Thumbs up
No problem Laz thanks for reading 🙂
Matt. Where is part 3 of this series?
Ooops forgot to edit the link in the end, here it is https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/email/email-marketing-part-3/
Hi Matt!Some great posts. I am finally concentrating on growing my email lists and setting up an auto responder series, so it has been great to reread all of these.I get the impression that you only use one list? Is this true? Have you thought about segmenting the list to get the people more interested in SEO vs income reports vs whatever else and deliver a different series to them?
I haven’t done anything like that personally however it’s something I plan to do in the near future as I’ve changed the blogs strategy for 2015.
Epic tutorial Matt. Quick question though,did you have any problems setting up your Global Text Snippets. I can’t seem to fit all of my text into the “Snippet Text” field. Is there a text limit for that field? Thanks.
Yeah there is a limit, I just save it then edit it again to see if any has been cut off
Exactly just break it down like that, keep it simple 🙂 It’s always a good rule to follow thats saved my bacon a few times in life lol
Hey Matt, great post!I’ve hit an issue with the auto-responder set up. I didn’t have the responder set up for my first 2500 subscribers. So when I write a new post, do I send it out as a broadcast as well as add it to the end of the auto-responder sequence? Then the people in the auto-responder would receive the same email twice eventually. But if I don’t do a broadcast and just add the new content to the end of the auto-responder, then the 2500 subscribers not on the autoresponder list won’t receive the update. How do you go about sending out new content to the list and make sure that the people in the auto-responder sequence don’t receive it twice?Cheers!
Hi,No just create the autoresponder sequence and the entire list will start to get them if you are with aweber
Aaand this is how you remind me I’m a woman and I tend to complicate things. XD Didn’t thought about that. So instead of writing dozens of articles, just create 1 big case study post (I could divide a 4,000 into 2 posts, part 1 and part2 and create a sequence, that’ll also work when I send out emails to my list, right?). Plus an interview / week or an announcement with partner websites. I’m going to use that in a 3-months experiment, then we can celebrate with beer in November if it works. If it doesn’t, we’ll do Kamizake shots. Haha. ^^ Rox
Well why don’t you just start off nice and steady and do 1 per week you write, then 1 interview per week as well so you have a nice flow that doesn’t kill you on time.I wouldn’t bother publishing at the weekend personally, always get less traffic/bang for buck!If you do that traffic will grow in time for sure!
Hi. Thanks for the post. Do you use HTML or text emails?Cheers
I use text personally
Haha, Matt, no more alcohol for the time being. xD When I started the blog, I wanted to publish articles everyday and I created those featured images and categories for each day. But then I realized, I don’t have the time, physically speaking, to write articles of 2000-3000 words that don’t talk bullsh^t^, but actually bring some value. I could probably do 2-3 per week, and during weekends to publish interviews. I see interviews are a great way to generate traffic and support people in the same industry, if they’re done in a professional manner. ^^Traffic is the main focus right now. One thing I noticed is that in-depth articles work just as fine for users, as long as there’s a certain number of headings, even colour stroked h2 and h3, so the user can be selective in what type of info he/she wants to read. I’m on my way to the top, I promised myself that a while ago, it’ll happen sooner or later. Thanks again for the tips! ^_^
I heard you can contradict the tired look with the lots of alcohol look!Well having more content will help you for sure, the more content you have, the more you publish the quicker you will build traffic!So just set yourself some small goals, like 2 posts per week and make sure you have everything setup to get as much value from your traffic as possible and you’ll be there before you know it!
Oh yes, the sleeping patterns… I just got pulled in front of a mirror yesterday by a lady at a salon to explain to me how my face looks tired at 25. And I was like “pl-eeease, this is what I must pay for being an entrepreneur, my brain never sleeps” – tehehe. 😛 Yeah, it makes sense what you’re telling me about the content. I have a couple of case studies with more than 2000 – 3000 words. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to open up a campaign with an achievement? Like “first 25 posts on my blog” – then it’ll give me enough content to promote on the go. And a solid reason to work on finishing those free courses and case studies sooner, I’m still in turtle mode. >_< I'm taking notes on the email campaign, so I'll be stalking by again. 😀 And thaaaaank you so much for the empowerment, sort of need it. Rox
Haha that is the beauty of the dot com life style 😛 Plus nerdy types tend to have weird sleep patterns anyway ^^You have enough old content on your blog to make at least a 4-6 email sequence, then throw in an engagement email or two and your up to 2 months worth of emails already :)Just keep plugging away and you’ll get there =D
Just a quick thought about the Aweber Opens & Clicks Over Time data you showed. I assume it’s showing the time that the email was opened, so an email that was opened at 12 in the afternoon might not necessarily have been sent at that time. Would it not make sense to send emails in the morning so that they’ll definitely be in the inbox when your reader checks them. Also, do you take geography (time-zones) into account?
You can go on an email by email basis and Aweber will send out based on the subscribers time zone for you 🙂
“El Loco Matt”Jajaja
Interesting read, though why don’t you send affiliate offers to your list? Saying that the value of your list drops seems a weak reason to me. Not sending affiliate offers is like saying “I don’t want to make more money”. I would like to hear your more elaborate opinion about this 🙂
Well the general thing in this IM niche is to spam your lists with affiliate offers but I would rather focus on providing value/developing the relationship. I find email is a much better relationship tool than a sales tool.Plus by focusing on the relationship, you’ll make more money in the long run rather than trying to get your end away on the first date so to speak.
Don’t worry, Matt. I’m a free spirit and I’ve always been self employed, so I can sleep anytime I want. If I find something interesting, f**k sleep, you know! 😀 I wanted to start emailing people, but I don’t feel like I have much value for the moment. I’ve done serious brainstorming in the mirror with all my personalities, so this summer some changes will take place. After that, I’ll start sending newsletters and hopefully until then, I’ll have some more subscribers. Things are moving slowly, but in the right direction, I think. I’ve started building a name for myself again. ^^And thanks a lot for all the great content, it’s motivating me to keep going forward. Hugs, Rox
Thanks for post!
No worrys Kuba!
Great tips, Matt. You know, I always get your emails around midnight here. So if I have trouble sleeping, I just open one of them… And then have trouble sleeping some more ’cause my brain starts processing the information. >_<The thing with identifying what you dislike about a competitor's email marketing campaign, I can say it always worked. I use that as a reference when working with my clients. 😀 I usually design email campaigns in Klaviyo and then adjust them to the service I'm using (mail chimp, aweber etc). I haven't started sending email newsletters yet for my blog, I'm still miles away from the 100 subscribers milestone (25 until now). But once I do, I'm getting back to your email bible, haha. Cheers, Rox
Haha sorry Rox! Although I think you should set your engagement sequence up no matter how many subscribers you have – ideally from subscriber 0!
I always learn something new from your posts… Didn’t know about the Global Text Snippet before! Thanks Matt!Looking forward to the rest of the Tutorial!Cheers!
Thanks Munir!
haha you are crazy matt !!!!WHy you sharing so worth infomration for free !?
Yo soy loco!
One comment about the sending time – in my niche I actually noticed that people are much more engaged during the weekend. They have much more spare time to read to explore things.It could be that your sending times are okay for the IM niche but can be different for other niches.Also about answering questions and being in touch with your list – this could be doable if you have small to medium size list but not when you have 50,000 subscribers, you could spend days answering questions and engaging with people. This is time that you could have used for generating more helpful content or develop other things. Depending on your niche – you could spend a LOT of time just answering one question.
Hi Jack,Good advice and I have that exact problem with answering emails it takes me a few hours per day and is part of why I did this https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/tools/bbpress/
Great Part Matt, i just bookmarked this part and sure i’ll for the remaining parts. Thanks Matt 🙂
No worrys 🙂
Another one? Oh gosh, now I have to catch up to two blog posts.. slow it down Matt.. :pI find the most successful email sequences I have setup work by delivering high value content within the emails themselves. While it’s great to push people to your blog or somewhere else (that has the high value content).. and then from there push them to your offer, I find I convert much better by having the high value content within the emails itself and then pushing people to the sales page or offer from there.. if that makes sense. It’s less distractions. But I guess it depends on your goals however. With this blog, you want people to come back often to be exposed to all your affiliate links and product(s).. that works well too. Email marketing is fun. :)Cheers!
Haha sorry!Actually what I didn’t share was examples of the emails that push people into tutorials, they usually have some content within them and tease people in with ‘What You Will Learn’ bullet points
hhahahah rite!