Even though it's over 50 years (!) since the first email was sent, it's still one of the most effective tools you have for generating sales and building a good relationship with your customers. A good email strategy together with Performance Marketing often delivers better results than they can on their own. In this article, we'll show you how you can combine different types of emails in automated sequences to create new customers and keep existing ones engaged.
Three different types of email
When building a good automation strategy, it's a good idea to distinguish between emails that ask for something and those that don't ask for anything. We recommend these:
1. Transactional email
Emails that are sent when a transaction has been completed and contain information about what has been ordered. This type of email does not require consent to send and is not intended to promote your business.
2. Information e-mail
These emails don't ask for anything, but provide information that is relevant to the customer. This can be anything from information about the company/store to recent sign-ups to more specific information for a selected group.
3. Handling e-mails
This type of email encourages some kind of action, most often sales, and is the one that businesses use the most. This type of email accounts for most, if not all, email marketing revenue.
Seven essential sequences in an automated email strategy
Email automation is all about how to combine informational emails and action emails to transform users from being a subscriber to your newsletter to becoming a returning customer. When we set up one or more emails that go out with a unique purpose, we call this a sequence.
The purpose of setting up emails in this way is to create value for the customer. We want to be seen as someone who adds value to our customers and only sells once in a while. We can achieve this by using informational emails to begin with, paving the way for a sale or action.
Step 1. Introduction
Introductions fall under informational emails and are sent to new subscribers. We recommend one to two emails to introduce your company and what makes you unique. At the same time, if it's natural, you can close with an action email and a great offer.
Step 2. Segmentation.
The purpose of this part of the sequence is to identify the interests of your customers. A good tip is to send information about specific problems that your products solve, such as "Best type of wool for allergy sufferers". We recommend sending these out once a week or less often. Segmentation goes out to the entire list each time and acts as an entry point to the rest of the sequences.
This step only contains informational emails. If someone opens the email or clicks on a link, you know they are interested. You can then add them to an engagement sequence and send information about the products they have shown interest in.
Step 3. Engagement.
This step is dedicated to following up on those who have shown interest in a topic and selling to them. Here you can go into more detail and present relevant products and services.
Engagement sequences usually start with an informational email. Finish with one or two emails that push a little more to sell the product or service.
Tip! Use feedback from previous customers in sales emails.
NOTE! When someone in this sequence becomes a buyer, it is important that they are removed from the sequence to avoid appearing fussy.
Step 4. Winback
Unfortunately, the email is not always opened by the customer. A winback sequence aims to get a response from those who go a certain period of time without interacting (typically three to six months). This can be done by providing a summary of what has been sent recently. If desired, it can be followed up with a good offer.
ATTENTION! Winback is not a sequence that is suitable for all companies. If it's done wrong and you come across as pushy and fussy it can be damaging, so use it in moderation.
Step 5. Deletion
Sending emails to a large unresponsive list can have a negative impact on your spam score. In the worst case, it can lead to your emails being stopped by spam filters and limited by your platform. That's why it's important to review your email list regularly and delete inactive users.
Step 6: Follow-up after sale
If you're only going to create one sequence, let it be this one!
The most important thing you can do for your customer is to make them feel cared for, without being too pushy. We recommend the following approach:
- After ordering: Send tips and tricks for use, preferably one or two selected customer reviews. If it's a physical product, it's a good idea to include an estimated delivery time. This is not a transactional email. Send these separately, preferably a few minutes apart.
- 2-3 days after average delivery time: Send an email asking if they have received the product and encouraging the customer to get in touch if there are any problems.
- 21 days after ordering: Ask for a review. Feel free to make suggestions for what they can write in the review (e.g. "What are you most satisfied with", "How do you experience our customer service" and the like) and ask them to share their experience with the product.
- At re-order: Send an email reminding the customer that they can order a new product approximately 7-14 days before you expect the product to be used up.
- 30-90 days after ordering: Upsell! Suggest products and services related to the customer's previous order.
- After repurchase: If you have a referral rewards or brand ambassador program, we recommend encouraging returning customers to look into it.
Step 7. Sales sequence
The sales sequence is the one most commonly used by businesses and is when you're trying to sell to your entire list, such as Black Friday, Summer Sales, Christmas Sales and the like. We recommend that these are not sent more often than approximately every other month outside the holidays. This may seem like a bit of a stretch, but in practice you can have up to several sales a month in the form of engagement sequences.
Bonus step! Full automation with a "super sequence"
Once you've created several segmentation sequences, it's a great advantage to be able to reuse them. Hopefully, you have a system for getting new contacts onto your email list. You can create a "super sequence" that contains all the segmentation sequences and set it up so that they go out periodically. This way, you can make sure that all new contacts receive this super sequence. If you start to run out of content ideas, you can add your entire email list to the super sequence. You're not the only one in people's inboxes and they're not going to remember what you've sent out in the past, so reusing old material isn't a problem.
If you do this right, you can end up having automated all your email sends for months, maybe even years. Then all you need to do is create sales sequences for a highly responsive and buyer-ready email list. This costs less energy and provides a steady income from email.
Final result
It's hard to strike gold every time, but if you focus on adding value rather than pushing new sales on the customer, you have a better chance.
The magic happens when you only send engagement sequences to interested customers. Anything they don't read isn't mentioned again and there's at least a week between emails. When there is something interesting, more is sent about this for a short period, and if they buy, they will receive very good follow-up.
If you follow these steps, you'll not only get higher open rates, more clicks and more revenue from your emails, but you'll also get fewer unsubscribes. Not least: With a good strategy for bringing in new emails, you can roll out segmentation sequences automatically and have a fully automated email strategy that lasts for months or years!