How to Define Your Sales Process To Create A Great Auto-Responder Series
Developing a cooperative method between your sales and marketing team can increase your revenue by up to 20%, whereas those without proper alignment can see a decrease of up to 4%.
Consumers frequently buy products and services from an email campaign and an auto-responder series is a good method of making sure that you are sending the messages to your mailing list.
However, an auto-responder series which is too pushy is likely to deter customers from making a purchase and lead to an increase in spam reports, unsubscribers and a poorer brand image.
Therefore aligning your autoresponder series with that of your sales process is essential if you wish to maximise your revenue from the campaign.
Step One – Define the Stages in the Sales Process
The first step is to make a list of all the stages you have in your sales process, right from when you meet the potential client to when you close the sale and even after sales treatment.
You should identify exactly what is said at each stage in order to complete the sale of your product or service. The hope being that you can then mirror this in the auto-responder series.
Step Two – Create a brief outline of what actions the lead needs to take in order to move onto the next stage of the sales process
In the real world, you should know the signs of when a consumer is ready to talk to you more about the next stage in the sales process. If you do it too early or too late, you could lose the customer and they could either not buy the product or go to a competitor.
The behaviours you are looking for are those who are clicking through to see more content, completing a form or another action.
Step Three – Link the actions in step two with the content you create
Consumers like to read content they find valuable and informative. The content you provide also needs to be relevant to the action you wish them to complete.
Stories are pretty effective when it comes to email marketing. Think of interesting customer stories where your product or service has supported their life or given them joy.
Another idea is to give advice on a related matter. For instance, if you are a decorator – you could create content that would describe the best colour schemes for certain rooms, as long as the content has value and interest to the reader and directs them to a relevant action that will set in motion the next stage.
An additional consideration is to make sure that the content is ‘evergreen’ – in other words, despite the day, month or year it is sent – it will be relevant and accurate. This means you are not constantly changing the message just because circumstances are slightly different.
Once you have done this – create the content.
Step Four – Consider the frequency
Email marketing and real life sales are different when it comes down to the time frame you have. Email marketing can take weeks or months to be successful – whereas often in the physical world, you have a single shot.
Having your emails sent out too frequently will lessen the willingness of the customers to stay subscribed to your service and eventually buy a product from you. A good idea would be once every two weeks – you certainly don’t want to send out a message more than once a week.
Step Five – Determine who to send your emails too
You need to make sure that you are regularly maintaining your mailing list – to ensure that you are sending out the emails to the right people.
An email to the wrong person not only lessens your statistics in terms of open rate, click throughs and conversions – but it could increase your unsubscriber rate and spam reports.
Therefore, ensure that the action the lead has taken on your website is sufficient for them to be placed on your auto-responder series.
Step Six – Implement auto-responder series
Once you have made all your decisions – start implementing the process. Place your content in branded email format and start the series with those who you think are ready to read the material. Ensuring that the people who are ready for the message are the only ones that will receive it will improve your open rate and conversions.
Take Action:
Use the above six step solution to define your sales process and create an auto-responder series that will sell your products / services.
Conclusion
Aligning your sales process and email marketing is a good, clean method of increasing revenue.
An auto-responder series can save you time in creating material and manually sending the information. Yet marketers should be keen to keep the series related to their sales process and the content relevant and valuable to their audience for the foreseeable future.
Do you use an auto-responder series in your business?
Let us know how it performs in the comments below!
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