How do you deliver your lead magnets? Do you have a lead magnet email sequence? If you want to know how to create a follow-up campaign that will increase your deliverability and get your subscribers to absolutely love you, you want to take notes about this.  

So stop what you're doing and read or listen! It'll change the way you look at your lead magnet funnel forever. 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:16) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 
(3:29) What is lead magnet follow-up sequence?
(7:23) Why you want a lead magnet email sequence?
(10:53) A fantastic example of a lead magnet email sequence.
(12:12) Why so many emails?
(14:14) Increase the perceived value of your lead magnet.
(17:39) Lead magnet email sequence - how it works. 
(21:07) Should you have a Welcome sequence too?
(26:24) Why you want a separate Welcome sequence.
(30:58) Subject line of the week.

What is a lead magnet follow-up sequence? 

So you have a lead magnet funnel where people opt-in to receive your lead magnet. All great here. But how do you use a follow-up email sequence to make sure people download your lead magnet? And how do you put people into a sales sequence after that? What about a Welcome sequence? How does it all fit together? 

Here's our first tip. (And it's an important one). Unless your lead magnet is a sales video, don't give people your lead magnet on the Thank You page. Just don't do that. 

You see, despite what we've been told, a lead magnet isn't really free. It's still a purchase. And the currency people use to buy is their email address. In his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, Robert Cialdini talks about the concept of reciprocity. It's the idea that if you give someone something for free, they'll want to give you something back (i.e. buy from you). But lead magnets aren't entirely free. Because people ‘buy them' with their email addresses.

So never give people their lead magnet instantly. Because if you do, you lose an opportunity to get them to take the next step in your lead magnet funnel – whatever that step is. 

Why you want a lead magnet email sequence

The other reason for sending lead magnets to someone’s inbox (and not on the Thank You page) is that you want to give people a reason to engage with you via email. You want them to read your emails! And sometimes people don't open your emails because they've signed up for a lead magnet, but they forgot all about it. They might remember the thing they wanted but not your name, for example. 

So you want to use your emails to bridge the gap between your lead magnet and anything you'll send after that. The lead magnet is the thing they're familiar with, but they don't know what comes next. This is where you build your relationship with your subscribers. Because remember – all they signed up for was a lead magnet. They didn't want to get into a relationship with you, so tell them what to expect.

Your lead magnet email sequence is also the place to address objections and remind people that what you do is valuable. And yes, you can mention what you sell too – no one stops you from doing that! We certainly do and get sales from that on a weekly basis.

A fantastic example of an automated email marketing sequence for your lead magnet

So we established you want to send your lead magnet via email. But how long should your email marketing campaign be?

Well, it shouldn't be one email. Because that's not enough. People are busy and might miss your email. So you need to send more than one email to make sure they see it and open it. But also, as we said, because you want to nurture that long-term relationship with your subscribers.

Why so many emails? 

We have 9 (yes, 9) emails in our Curious Cat campaign, which is our lead magnet delivery sequence. We send these many because a lot of people may download our lead magnet when they're in the middle of scrolling their Facebook. They might see an ad about our lead magnet, remember that actually it taps into a problem they want to fix, and they opt in for it. (That's called interruption marketing, by the way). 

And it works. But then people might not go into their inbox straight away. And when they do, they probably have other higher-priority emails that get their attention first. And your email gets buried under all the others. If that's all you send, they might never see it! So you want to send more emails to have more opportunities (over a number of days) to remind them to go grab your lead magnet.

Increase the perceived value of your lead magnet 

The other reason why you want to send more than just one email is that you want to increase the perceived value of your lead magnet. Through the emails we send, we also take the opportunity to show people how good our lead magnet is and how others are getting results. Even if people never download it, we give them value in the emails.

But we also increase the perceived value by keeping all our lead magnets inside our members' area, where people have access to our membership and courses. We send people their login details via email to give them access to a safe, secure, and private space.

Once they're in the members' area, people can then see all the other products we have for sale. They are greyed out with a little padlock on them and a mini description below, which is purposely written to tease people about the outcome – to make them excited. If people click on the product, it takes them to the sales page where they can go and buy it. And week in and week out, we make sales that way for products that we haven’t even promoted to the person yet! We didn’t even try and sell!

This works because you’re presenting related products that solve a similar problem to what brought people to you in the first place. And now the perception they have of you is that you’re not salesy at all, because you haven’t even tried to sell them anything! They’re the ones who have made the decision to solve that problem for themselves.

Lead magnet email sequence – how it works

9 emails for a lead magnet sequence may seem like a lot, but if someone's not clicked on a link to access the lead magnet, there's a high chance it's because they haven't seen the email. And it's not too many emails if they haven't even seen them! If they never see them (i.e. they never engage), we take them off our email list as part of our list hygiene activities.

When they open any of the emails, we consider them engaged and interested. And at that point, they'll probably only see 2 or 3 emails from us before they go and access their lead magnet. And when they do, we stop the sequence. 

If you want to see what this looks like, click on this link where you can choose which lead magnet to download, and see our email sequence and lead magnet delivery at play. 

Should you have a Welcome sequence too?

So far we've talked about our lead magnet delivery sequence (the Curious Cat campaign). A lot of marketers deliver a lead magnet and then go straight into a Welcome sequence. So how do these work? Should you have one or the other or should they run in parallel? How do they fit in with your lead magnet delivery?

Here's how we do it. When someone opts in for a lead magnet, we kick off our 9-email lead magnet campaign, where the emails run over a period of 5 days. But at the same time, we also kick off our Welcome sequence, which we call The Getting To Know You sequence, which is 4 emails over 4 days. 

Does this mean people get more than one email a day from us? Yes, they do. And that could feel overwhelming, but it's only for 4 days while the two campaigns run in parallel. The Curious Cat emails are staggered and spaced out based on the time someone opts in for the lead magnet while The Getting To Know You emails come out at the same time every day and are clearly labelled as 1 of 4, 2 of 4, etc. So people understand there's a clear end to this campaign. 

How the two campaigns run in parallel

And what happens if someone opts in for more than one lead magnet? In that case, they'll get the first email of the Curious Cat campaign for each lead magnet they opted in for. But emails 2 to 9 of our follow-up lead magnet campaign are the same for all lead magnets. So if someone opts in for two lead magnets, for example, they won't get double emails from our Curious Cat campaign. 

Also, as we said, when someone downloads their lead magnet, we take them out of the Curious Cat and put them into a sales campaign as part of our SCORE email engine, where we invite them to buy something. We only see the Curious Cat as a way to continuously nudge someone to go and download the lead magnet they asked for in the first place!  

Why you want a separate Welcome sequence

So why have two campaigns – the lead magnet sequence and the Welcome sequence? Because they do two separate things. The lead magnet campaign ensures people download the lead magnet while the Welcome sequence helps you set up the relationship with your subscribers and let them know what's going to happen going forward. 

For example, in our Getting To Know You sequence, we tell people we’ll show up in their inbox every day with a tip or a short story, some help, inspiration, and advice about email marketing. We also let them know about our free Facebook community, and tell them that if they want to jump straight in, we also have a membership called The League, where we help people get results with their email marketing. Another thing we do is to ask people to engage by asking them to answer a quick question or vote on something within the email. 

So before we put them into a sales campaign, we have 4 days of pure showing up, giving value, and engaging people. If we started selling straight away, that might come across as too aggressive for some people. But instead, we spend 5 days encouraging them to download the lead magnet, and 4 of those days getting to know them and telling them about us.

This helps people understand we’re really good at what we do and lets them know they can trust us because what we do is unique, special, and interesting. And it’s important enough for people to put it on top of their priority list.

Want some help writing your campaigns? 

So if you haven’t written them yet, go and write both your Welcome sequence and your lead magnet delivery sequence! You’ll see higher engagement from all your emails, and you’ll get to set up the relationship with your subscribers so they see value in what you send.

If you’re already a member of The League, go and check out the templates for the campaigns and set them up. You can just grab them, put them in your voice, and drop them into your automation, so every new subscriber is set up with that perfect relationship with you every single time. And if you’re not a member yet, check out all the details and go and get stuck into these resources.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “The Mc ‘Missing Out’ burger” This is one of the few subject lines we’ve done that use a catchphrase. Normally, our subject lines are very plain (but effective). They’re normally things that don’t sound marketing related, whereas this one does. It’s just more interesting than writing something like “Where’s my burger?” And obviously, coming from us (i.e. people who teach email marketing and have nothing to do with burgers) is even more interesting because it’s unexpected and different. 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Template For Email Marketing Campaigns.

7 Essential Email Campaigns Examples For Your Business.

9 Psychological Things That We Use In All Of Our Campaigns.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

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