#012 - Create Your Email Process Before Picking Your Email Platform - BS'ing with Brandi

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my goal is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about why you need to work out a detailed process and workflow before you start paying for the business tools that are going to execute or automate that process. I’m going to use email marketing as an example and walk you through what would happen if I suddenly had to choose a new email marketing platform.

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Our topic today came from a couple of recent experiences with email - the first was a client who needed to set up a lead magnet funnel that turned into the most painful email experience of my life, and the second was the 3-part series we just did inside our membership group School for Heartful Entrepreneurs where we covered, in quite a lot of detail, a comparison of the features across about 9 different platforms. 

What I’m going to cover is:

• What can go wrong when you pick your platform first

• How frequently jumping around to different services is wasting your time and potentially harming your business

• The process & workflow I’d document if I had to choose a new email marketing platform

Before you make a switch to any email platform, consider how much time it takes you to import and tag all of your subscribers, to recreate your welcome emails and automations. On top of that, think about all of the other tools you use that are connected to your email service - don’t forget to switch them too otherwise things are going to get missed. And finally, there is always a risk that constantly switching platforms will damage your deliverability - a new service may have different settings and suddenly your emails are going to spam, and it’s difficult to recover from that.

The simple breakdown of my email process for a lead funnel with the following functionality:  target my ideal audience with a free opt-in, offer them a small paid product, and then nurture them toward a larger paid offer. 

• I want to collect name and email

  • Do I care if it’s first name only or full name? I’d like to personalize emails so first name is mandatory, I can live without the last name if I have to.

  • Obviously I need a form so I need to decide if I will use the form inside the email platform; if I already have contact forms on my website and would prefer to use them, I need to be able to connect them to the email platform (so I’d be looking for a direct integration or something like Zapier).

• I want to be able to share my sign up link easily on social media

  • This means that I need something that has its own unique link - so do I want a form that I can embed on a page I make in my existing website? Or do I need my email software to have landing pages?

  • I want to be able to customize it to look like my brand, so either the built-in landing pages have to be extremely customizable, or I just need to embed the form on my website where I can design my own page.

  • Also, if I’m considering boosting these social media posts or creating ads with them, it would be better if the landing page want a link on my domain, and not a random link from my email service - so best to have it on my website.

• Because I have other funnels, I need to make sure that I can uniquely identify the people that sign up for this specific opt-in

  • This is so I can automate the future nurture sequences - either I need to be able to give them a tag when they fill out the form, or the platform needs to segment “under the hood” with options like “send this email to people who subscribed to form XYZ”; I would prefer tagging because it makes it easier to see what your subscribers are interested in at a glance

• I want people to get their freebie right away without having to confirm their subscription

  • Just to clear things up, double opt-in is NOT a requirement of GDPR or CASL or any anti-spam law; it’s a good idea if you get a ton of spam signups, but as I don’t, I don’t need it - I need a platform that allows me to set whether I want single or double opt-in.

  • I need to be able to send an automatic email containing the freebie as soon as they subscribe.

  • It would be nice if the platform could store documents directly, but if I have to link to it in Google Drive or Dropbox I can live with it.

• On the signup thank you page they are presented with a small offer and if they purchase it, I need that to be uniquely identified in my email platform

  • Again, I would prefer this to create a tag - I need to make sure that the sales software I am using can be connected to the email platform - direct or a Zap.

• For people who got the opt-in but didn’t purchase the small offer, they are put into a value-based nurture sequence to warm them up to my main offer

  • I need a multi-email sequence

  • I need a multi-step automation - ideally this nurture sequence would be part of the same automation as the freebie email (this makes it easier to manage going forward) so there needs to be conditions - for example if subscriber doesn’t have tag “smalloffer” then send email sequence A

• For people who did purchase the small offer, they are already warmed up - they still get a value-based nurture sequence but it’s much more direct and quickly leading them to my main offer

  • Now I want another multi-email sequence and condition: if subscriber does have tag “smalloffer” then send email sequence B.

  • As for being part of the same automation, again it would be ideal, but if I had to make these separate automations (so the automated freebie email is one welcome sequence, and each nurture sequence is separate) then I need to be able to tell the platform to automatically move people to the next relevant sequence. For example, when a subscriber is at the end of the welcome sequence and has tag “smalloffer” add them to sequence B.

• At any point in either nurture sequence if they book a call with me or purchase my service they are taken out of the nurture sequence

  • Another integration or Aap needed here to be able to connect booking and/or payment software to email software

• For those that go all the way to the end of the sequence without purchasing I want to continue to provide value since they are not ready to buy

  • At the end, I don’t want people to just sit there and never hear from me again, so I want them to be automatically moved to my “regular weekly list” where I give out value and occasionally promote new things

So there is a LOT more we could get into, like email design, but you can see how we’ve gotten specific enough that when I go to evaluate email platforms I know that I am looking for specific things.

For example: for a platform that advertises email automation, I’m not going to immediately sign up because does “automation” mean a single automated welcome email? Does that mean a multi-step, multi-email automated sequence? Does that mean I can automatically add people to sequences based on tags or sign up forms?

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with the aforementioned show notes and links to any resources mentioned. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!

Resources Mentioned

•  3-part email marketing platform comparison: part 1, part 2, part 3 (you have to be a member of School for Heartful Entrepreneurs to access)

• To become a member of School for Heartful Entrepreneurs sign up here

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