Let’s talk about some real bare-bones basic email marketing automation sequences & campaigns that you can set up once and have working for you in the long run. You’ll get people engaging with your brand, coming back to your website, making more purchases, and kind of being a part of their life so to speak.
How I’ll format this post is first I’ll explain what each sequence is and then tie it back to one of my websites: a job board. It has both B2B & B2C applications so regardless of what side of the fence you’re on, you should get some value out of this.
The Welcome Email
So the first email the welcome email. It’s pretty basic. It could be just one email or it can be a series of emails depending on what kind of product you’re selling. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s just a way of letting the new sign-up or customer know what you have going on.
- What we got going on
- Here’s what you can expect from us moving forward
- Here’s about the frequency of emails we’re going to be sending
You’re just welcoming them saying “hey, thank you for entrusting us with your inbox and we’re not going to inundate you with junk.” We’re going to try to provide some actual value here in the next few weeks.
Welcome email example
What I’m doing for the job board is exactly what it sounds like. It’s
- Thanks for using our service (B2B & B2C)
- Here’s what we offer (B2B & B2C)
- Here’s the amount of traffic we’re getting a month (B2B)
- Here’s how many companies are using our job board a month (B2B & B2C)
- The number of candidates you should expect to see (B2B)
All things that introduce somebody that is posting a job or looking for a job would want to know.
Pro-tip: It can almost be like a rewrite of your about page.
The Abandoned Cart Email
Number two is the abandoned card email again. Super simple. Super easy and any major ecommerce platform should be able to handle this whether you’re using Shopify or Woocommerce or Bigcommerce. The abandoned cart sequence is usually about two, maybe three emails, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Someone is about to post a job. They add it to their cart. They have everything filled out but they don’t actually finish the order. Either
- They don’t post it
- They don’t want to post it
- They got called into something
- They simply forgot after getting sidetracked
So depending on what works for your business, the trigger for being added to this campaign is 2 to 4 hours after a potential customer adds the product to their cart. There will be a filter to not send the email if they make a purchase, but everyone who adds a product to their cart gets put in this sequence.
For that first email, all you’re saying is something like
“Hey, did you forget about this?”
Just that real quick hitter and then 24 hours later you’ll want to send a second email. The same verbiage, and if you want, you can include a coupon code in there to incentivize that purchase.
They added that product to their cart for a reason and for whatever reason they didn’t complete the purchase. The price may have been a factor so a five or ten percent discount coupon might what it takes to get them to complete the purchase.
Know that the minor hit to revenue now will pay dividends in the future if you know the lifetime value of your customers.
The Feedback Email
Okay, asking for feedback. This is another one of those self-explanatory emails, all you need to do is get your message and timing right for this one. Like most things in marketing, the timing portion really depends on your product and industry.
Is it a consumable product? You could ask for feedback much sooner than if it’s something like hardware where the customer may not have a real review or testimonial to give until after a few weeks of use.
There are a few ways you can ask for feedback.
- How’s it tasting?
- Is it working for you?
- Are you happy with your purchase?
- Anything we can do to improve your experience
Not only are you interacting one-on-one with a customer, but they’ll give you real, valuable customer feedback about your product or service. They’re either going to respond with “yes, I’ll leave a 5-star review with the quickness” or tell you why they wouldn’t.
- It tastes chalky
- I thought it would be bigger
- It works, but not as well as I thought it would
- The instruction manual was hard to read at some points, but the product works
Then you can go back to the drawing board to try to make improvements based on the feedback.
If they do respond and say everything works great, ask for that review! This is definitely not going to be an automated process, but worth the time it takes to respond. Have them leave a review or testimonial on your website or a third party authority or marketplace website (Amazon, anyone?). That’s a lot of social proof that can do nothing but help your business.
Or you can set up a survey to ask for feedback. That way you can keep all the responses in one repository instead of hundreds of response emails.
Feedback email example
In my case, for the job board, I have job listings that last 90 days. 75 days after a job is posted, I send an email automatically that asks the business if they found who they’re looking for. Do they need to list it for another 90 days? Are they happy with their candidates so far? Then I take their feedback and do what is requested.
I’ve found that after that was implemented, there were more repeat customers, even if they weren’t 100% satisfied with their experience. That amount of give-a-shit makes people come back because they’re not just another number in my CRM. I’m not just going to take their money and run, but ensure their experience is the best I can provide.
The Re-engagement Email
If you have customers that haven’t bought from you in a given time frame, you can try to win them back with a re-engagement email. The re-engagement email is especially important for consumable goods.
Say you’re selling protein powder. You know it typically lasts for 30 days from the date of delivery.
First, you set up an email that is sent to everyone who
- bought protein powder 27 days ago
- hasn’t placed a new order for protein powder
with verbiage similar to “don’t miss a day without your protein powder, order now to get it before you run out.”
What you can also set up is anyone that
- bought protein powder 45 days ago
- hasn’t placed a new order for protein powder
gets sent an email pitching them on the protein powder they should have run out of by then.
In both cases, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible to reorder their powder of choice. That could be sending them straight to the product page or their checkout page with that product already in their shopping cart. Make it as easy as possible for them.
Re-engagement email example
In the case of my job board, the standard is a 90-day job posting. If they haven’t posted a new job in 180 days from their first posting, I’ll send out a message asking if they are looking for new candidates. Every time they post a new job, the timer is reset to 0. This message also goes out 270 days out and lastly 365 days out.
I’ll have someone in my ecosystem a whole year out from the last time they posted! The easiest part of this is the message doesn’t need to change at all because it’s 3 months between those re-engagement emails.
On my B2C side, I don’t have any re-engagement emails because I’m not selling a consumable product, but the next section’s emails come in mighty handy for my B2C customers.
The Upsell and Cross-sell Emails
An upsell is any product that is the next step up in terms of quality, quantity, value-add, etc. A cross-sell is any product that compliments the product a customer has already bought.
Upsell email examples
With the job board, on the B2B side, there is a free job posting offered. Pretty standard, you may get buried in the volume of postings. The upsell email, which goes out 15 days after the free job is posted, offers the “featured” listing which is paid and “glues” their job to the top of the listing.
On the B2C side, I’m offering a free resume/portfolio template download. Part of the welcome email sequence when someone downloads those templates is a series of informational emails with tips on how they can improve their resume/portfolio. If they haven’t bought a full version during that sequence, they’ll get an email pitching them the full version.
From free to paid.
Cross-sell email examples
For my B2C customers, most of them buy portfolio templates. Around 2 weeks after they purchase and download the portfolio template, I’ll send them a cross-sell email pitching them the portfolio template’s resume template counterpart. Basically a resume that’s stylized the same as the portfolio template. It makes their candidate package a whole lot more congruent when everything looks the same.
The Information Email
The last and probably the most important of the emails you want to be sending out and the most frequent is a strictly information only email. Totally a value adds. If you’re doing any amount of content marketing you should have information about whatever you’re selling.
You’re not trying to sell anything.
Those emails are just to give people more information about your product. Get them back on your website. From there you should already have call-to-actions in your articles.
As far as the frequency of these emails determine whether it’s once a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, whenever. I wouldn’t go once a month. That’s really infrequently.
Information email examples
On the B2B side, I’ll have an email go out a week after posting their position linking them to articles to improve their job description’s formatting. They’re already posting, here’s more information that can only help your firm out.
On the B2C side, if the customer bought a portfolio template, they get emails related to improving the portfolio. Use these fonts, have this many pages, include these items to get hired.
These are my six email marketing automation every ecommerce store can use to increase brand awareness and customers. Depending on what CRM or email marketing tool you use, they may have a lot of these already set up. All you need to do is customize them.
Once they’re set up, they just go to work day in and day out.