Now that you’ve got a firm understanding of the value of a welcome email, let’s kick it up a notch by transforming it to a welcome email series. To do this effectively for maximum results, consider looking to the 1898 work of St. Elmo Louis’ venerable marketing framework, AIDA. If you’re unfamiliar with AIDA, it stands for:

• Attention: capture the attention of your audience by any reasonable means
• Interest: keep people compelled to pay attention by holding their interest in your product or service.
• Desire: incite desire to want your product or service.
• Action: get your audience to take action and buy.

Over the next 4 posts, we’re going to look at how to apply Louis’ framework to your welcome email series.

In step 1, you have to capture the attention of your new subscriber in their inbox. You’ve obviously caught their attention enough to get them to join your mailing list, but that’s on the web. What should you do in the inbox to recapture that attention? More important, what can you do in the first email that will pay the attention you’ve earned forward to subsequent emails? Set the groundwork for a successful subscriber!

First and foremost, create a consistent appearance. If someone came to WhatCounts.com to sign up for our newsletter, the first email should be from WhatCounts.com. If someone came to a personal landing page on WhatCounts.com from CEO Allen Nance, then the first welcome message should come from Allen Nance, WhatCounts.com, so that the experience is consistent.

Make sure the subject line is clear and obvious. The first welcome email isn’t the time to be overly clever. Something as simple and as blatant as “YOU JUST SUBSCRIBED TO THE WHATCOUNTS GAMECHANGER. READ THIS NEXT.” can be powerful and effective. These days, more obvious subject lines are working better and better because people have shorter attention spans.

Lay out expectations for the welcome series and for the regular newsletter. This is the time to reiterate when you’re going to send, what you’re going to send, and what value you plan to provide. For example, you might specify that the next few welcome emails will be every day or every 3 days or every week – whatever the interval that you’re going to send, set that expectation.

Create immediate value to make the first email attention-getting. What immediate tip or content can you provide from the first message that will convince people to stay subscribed?

Use these tips to start off a great welcome series with an attention-getting email. Tomorrow, we’ll look at part 2, interest.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Quick, what’s the most valuable email for sales contact building that you’re ignoring today, and that you intentionally ignore?

It’s this:

Why is the out of office email so valuable? For this simple reason alone: it tells you exactly who else in that company might be worth approaching who has a similar functional role. If you’re a sales professional, it handily identifies for you who the next person to contact is:

There’s a catch, however: in order to make use of this trick, you need to actually collect and read the out of office replies you get. If you’re using an address on your newsletters like “DONOTREPLY@WHATCOUNTS.COM”, you’re missing out on the opportunity to explore and learn more about your customers.

Let’s also be clear about this: we’re not talking about blindly mass-adding people to your mailing list. What I’m suggesting here is that if you’re a sales professional working to reach out on an individual basis to prospective customers, this gives you additional insight in that process. If the Director of Something is out of the office but tells you who their assistant is, it’s not permission to just spam the assistant. It is a way to reach out and ask the assistant for when the Director can be successfully contacted and do some exploratory questioning about how sales at that company or with that person works.

Tune in and listen to what your customers are giving you!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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As you’ve well read many times on the WhatCounts blog, finding and growing email ROI is core to what we do. Part of the ROI equation that we don’t talk about much is the investment side. For total marketing ROI, reducing your overall marketing expenses can help improve your ROI, and email is one of the most cost effective vehicles for doing that.

Let’s look at an example from the tradeshow world. At any major tradeshow, having a booth is a significant investment, in some cases tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a chance to meet face to face with a few prospective customers. At a marketing conference early this year, I walked around the show floor and did my best “jelly bean jar” guess of how many business cards were dropped in sponsor’s booths on the expo floor. At this show, there were approximately 5,000 people, and sponsors paid around $10,000 for a 10×10 spot on the floor. Each booth had anywhere from 25-50 business cards in their bowl for a free giveaway of whatever the latest Apple device was on a daily basis.

If you do the math, that’s 75-150 leads generated from a 3 day show for $10,000. The cost per lead is therefore between $66 and $133 per lead.

What if there were a way to reduce that expense? Here’s one simple way: when you’re looking at your tradeshow budget, ask the sponsoring organizations what a media buy sponsorship would cost. This is a sponsorship in which you gain access and the right to email the list of registrants for the show, in addition to or in place of a physical show presence. Many show organizers, interested in reaping as much revenue as possible for their shows, are eager to be flexible with sponsorship options and if they don’t offer a media buy already, will usually find a way to work one out.

What if that same show above offered an email send on behalf of a sponsor to attendees? The cost is usually equal to or less than the cost of a booth. If you assume a 10% conversion rate for a good offer (which is quite reasonable and realistic) for the same $10,000, then that same audience would yield 500 leads at a cost per lead of $20. If you had a goal of 150 leads, you could either invest the same amount of money to get a lower cost per lead, or reduce your spent money to hit your lead target number.

Think of all of the different media you work in and do an assessment of your cost per valuable action (lead, sale, donation, etc.). You’ll find plenty of opportunities to use email marketing as a way to either spend less or get greater results, allowing you to grow your marketing ROI through greater efficiency.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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