Ok, you’ve got your avatar, you know exactly who she is. You’ve written some amazing content and started to drive traffic. Then you agonized over an opt-in, finally picked one and finished it. And surprise – your readers loved it! They signed up for your email list, and now each week you think of something to say and send them a weekly newsletter.
Now what?
The first step you need to take is to create a welcome campaign tailored to your opt in aka lead magnet. This will let you do two things: tailor the first few emails your new subscribers receive to their unique situation, and relieve you of the pressure of being on your ‘A’ game for new readers every time you write your weekly newsletter.
Creating a Follow Up Campaign for your Lead Magnet
Pull out your lead magnet, the opt-in you’ve made available to encourage readers to subscribe to your email list. Get your head back into who you wrote it to.
Yes, you have a specific avatar. What were you thinking about when you created this resource for her? What is going on in her life? What kind of week is she having?
Brainstorm some notes, and then find time to sit down and write 3-6 emails for a new subscriber to get specifically right after they receive that lead magnet. I recommend opening an empty document file and writing as you would to a friend, and getting all the text down. Write a subject and email body for each email, and get the main content down. Somewhere in the middle incorporate a welcome message and a little bit about yourself and the site – and tailor it to the topic you’re talking about. You might want to share a story about your life or a motivation you have for what you do the relates to the topic of the lead magnet.
Now come back to your file and consider the best spacing for your content. Decide how many days apart to space your emails. And depending on your content and how long your campaign is, it might be appropriate to include affiliate links or even links to one of your products if it is on-topic.
Your goal is to follow up the opt in offer with content that the new reader who was intrigued by the opt in will enjoy as well. You want to win her over, you want her to be a fan by the end of the email campaign. And you do this by being yourself, providing value, and talking to her.
Set up your emails as a Campaign, (some programs call it a Sequence), and set it up to deliver on the schedule you chose, when that particular lead magnet form is filled out. Make sure that you start by delivering the lead magnet, if you haven’t already done that as part of your confirmation or thank you email.
You can repeat this process for each of your opt in offers if you have more than one. And you may or may not want to call this series an email course or mini-course, that depends on your topic.
Incorporating Tags using Rules
Once you have your system set up to deliver the lead magnet and send the follow up campaign for it, you need to add tags so that you know which subscribers have received them.
Add these as tags in your system, using the name of your lead magnet and your campaign/sequence: ‘received_[lead_magnet]’ and ‘received_[campaign]’.
Now you will set up rules that will automatically apply these tags to new subscribers who use the opt in form.
Each rule has a trigger and an action. Create a new rule and for the trigger select subscribes to form’ or ‘filled out form’, and select the form of your opt in. Then for the action select ‘add a tag’ or ‘apply a tag’ and select your tag. Repeat and for the trigger select ‘subscribes to a sequence’ or ‘subscribes to a campaign’. (I’ve included the wording used by Drip and ConvertKit.)
Create a rule for the lead magnet and for the campaign.
Now you’ll be able to look at subscribers and know what they’ve received. As you add more topics and lead magnets, you’ll be able to identify which subscribers were interested in each topic.
That will be really helpful later, but what we want to do right now is exclude these new subscribers from your newsletter list until they have finished the follow up campaign from the lead magnet.
You can do this by adding another rule. Create a rule where the trigger is Completed a Campaign/Sequence and select the campaign for the lead magnet. Then for the action, select add a tag, and add the tag ‘weekly newsletter’.
Now you can send your weekly newsletter to all of your subscribers with that tag, and you know that new subscribers are receiving a campaign tailored to them before joining your main email list.
For more on this, read Why You Should Segment Your Avatar
Alicia Eichmann