List Sign Up Automation
purpose
As you are aware by now, a website has many strategic purposes and one of the most important is to generate more leads passively. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create a “List” sign up whereby someone signs up / subscribes to receive email content from you in the form of a “newsletter” or general email that contains free advice, information, behind the scenes or similar content.
Here are the two core reasons why having a list sign up is important:
Help Convert Leads to Paying Customers – sign-up lists are a great way to acquire leads that will hopefully end up being paying customers. Lead nurturing is an important part of converting people who have seen your website and shown an interest in staying in touch but are not quite ready to purchase. By introducting email marketing (sending emails to your list) with motivational and supportive content, it shows you care about helping them solve their problem even if they don’t buy a thing from you. Building a relationship with your customers is essential for customer loyalty and to ensure they stick by your brand regardless of who else comes onto the market. This passive nurturing can lead to lifelong customers if executed correctly.
Drives More Traffic to Your Site – by sending email content to your “list” you can promote program launches, new blogs and other targeted content with links that point back to your website. Giving your website a boost in traffic means a lot for online presence nowadays and the higher you rank, the more influential your site becomes to others. The more you are able to rank on google the more likely you are to feature when someone searches for a service you provide. This is very important when it comes to acquiring leads outside of social media.
Email Marketing Guide
OBJECTIVE
As mentioned in the above video the objective of creating a sign up list is to build an email community.
It is another form of marketing outside of social media and is in some ways superior as there is no relying on chance that someone will see your content amongst the thousands of pepole they follow.
If someone has signed up to your list, it is because they want to hear from you and when they see your email in their inbox they will more than likely open it.
When someone subscribes to your list it is the perfect opportunity for you to immediately showcase your offerings and promote ways that you can help that lead as soon as possible. Why? Because they are actively seeking help and are most likely to take action then and there. This is the ideal time to share the free/low end of your sales funnel because this will be relevant to anyone and depending on what CTAs they opt-in for they will now be starting the sales journey with you.
If you make that lead wait to receive from you then chances are they will go off in search of an alernate source of help to immediately solve their problem.
Down the track in your actual email communications you can provide more information about higher offers or personalised CTAs but the aim here is just to provide that initial entry point to subscribe to your email list so that you can share information and sources of help with them in a passive way.
Process
The general process of a list sign up automation includes 2 steps:
- Lead Form
- Welcome/Thank you email
In a later chapter we will focus on creating segmented lists, CTA lead forms and automation in relation to marketing. However, for the purposes of this lesson we are focusing only on a “list” sign up and then the initial email they receive.
LEAD FORM
A basic list sign-up form can include as many or as little questions as you want to include. The aim of asking questions is to help you get data from your leads so that you can learn more about them which will help you to generate content that is relevant to them.
Keep in mind though that there needs to be a pay off in terms of what the lead is getting out of providing personal information to you. For this reason, generic list sign up forms tend to be minimal with their full name and email.
CTA lead forms that are providing specific free tools or resources can ask more questions in exchange (like age, gender, location, interests e.t.c.), because the person will see the exchange valuable and will answer them if they want what you are offering.
WELCOME / THANK YOU EMAIL
Once the lead submits the form, there is an automatic trigger that sends them an email. There are a few purposes for this email:
- Thank them for joining your list.
- Explain what they can expect from you and why it is worthwhile they open them (i.e. a monthly email containing x,y,z).
- Point them to some resources or programs that will be beneficial to them and why they should access them.