Imagine walking into a large crowd and asking complete strangers to marry you?
Rejection after rejection, you just keep asking the next person to spend the rest of their life with you.
It doesn’t really make sense, right? They don’t know you well enough to commit at that level. So, rather than giving you an opportunity to stay in touch with them, they flat out say Bye Felicia.
Or imagine you meet someone amazing and have an incredible connection and then you don’t follow up with them. For months. Then out of the blue, you send them an email saying “hi, remember me?”.
I’ll save you the trouble..they won’t remember you and will wonder how you even got their email address.
This is the kind of “Relationship” Marketing most of us do. We don’t mean to, but it’s what happens by default because we don’t actually know how to turn strangers into people we stay in touch with to grow our businesses. At the core of everything we do in home staging is a relationship–with our clients and with our client’s clients and it starts with our marketing.
More specifically, it starts with your email list and your Welcome Sequence
By the way, I promise, email is not dead. If it were, I would totally tell you! And if you had lettuce between your teeth, I’d tell you that too. That’s the kind of friend I am.
Anyway! Your prospective client’s inbox is where you can build a relationship that takes them from being someone new (aka cold prospect) to you and turn them into someone likely to buy from you (aka warm prospect). Email is the exact way I have built my business and I want you to have this amazing tool inside of your business. So let’s start with some basics…
Email List Basics
Email List: When I say “email list”, I’m not talking about your yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail. I’m talking about using something called a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) app like Aweber, MailChimp or Flowdesk.
Subscriber: A “subscriber” is just someone who has been added to your email list usually by giving you their email address in order for you to send them a lead magnet. I wrote all about lead magnets in this blog post.
A subscriber can be added automagically–like when they fill out a form online to get your free lead magnet.
Or a subscriber can be added manually–like when you give a presentation in person and offer to send your free lead magnet.
Automation: One of the dreamiest aspects of using a CRM is that you can have emails sent automagically to your subscribers to deliver their free lead magnet and begin to warm them up in a “Welcome Sequence”.
Welcome Sequence: This is a series of 3-7 emails that you create to deliver your free lead magnet, introduce your clients to you, and engage them by providing helpful information about your process and company. These emails are typically sent a day or two apart through the magic of automation.
The Welcome Sequence is really important so let’s dive into this a little deeper…
The Email Welcome Sequence
What is a Welcome Sequence?
Your Welcome Sequence is like greeting someone when they are a guest at your door for a super fun party. You want the feeling of your welcome sequence to be festive and celebratory! They have joined your community and you are so excited to have them!
In that spirit, you also want to help them feel just as excited and super comfortable at your fabulous party. So here is what you will want to include as a part of the 3-7 emails you send.
6 Simple Steps to the Perfect Email Welcome Sequence
I like to start by thinking about how I want to say hello, what information I’d like to learn about my subscriber and what I’d like them to know about me, my company and my services.
I also want to think about where else we can engage besides their inbox and invite them to come hang out with me there. You want to be as present as you can on a regular basis in the places where they hang out and this is a great opportunity to do that.
And then I open a google doc or a word document and I just start writing. But before you go and do that, here are 6 more best practices to create your first Welcome Sequence.
#1 Engage right away
You want to make sure that your first email goes out right away when someone signs up for your lead magnet. Nothing worse than sitting at the door ringing the bell, hearing the laughter and no one comes to let you in. Schedule that first email to go out in the first few minutes after someone becomes a subscriber.
#2 Have a clear subject line
Now is not the time to have a clever, cryptic subject line. Typically, “Welcome to XXX” is a good start or “Here’s the XXX you requested!”
#3 Include the lead magnet in that first email
Don’t leave your subscriber wondering if you got their message. They really, really want that lead magnet so give it to them in the first email.
#4 Tell them what to do next
Maybe you want them to click a button to let you know if they are a seller, Realtor, investor or builder so you know more about them. Maybe you want them to follow you on social media. Maybe you want them to reply to your email or watch a video. Give them something to do. It will be the start of them taking action to move the relationship forward.
#5 Give an extra gift in one of the emails
I love doing this! I like to send another unexpected piece of value-added content. I mean who doesn’t love a little surprise gifty every once in a while?! I like to make this bonus something I know will align with a question they have or a key piece of information that I can make even easier by giving it to them.
#6 you must actually create these emails and put them into your CRM
Ok, a little tough love…this blog post will be of no use to you unless you put it into action. These emails don’t have to be perfect, they just need to be done. You can tweak and refine over time but you’ve just got to start.
The cool thing is, once you create one Welcome Sequence, you will begin to see other places you can use a similar process–we use a Welcome Sequence to onboard all of our new clients and it has been a game changer in how comfortable and prepared our sellers feel before we even step foot in the door. Now go have fun!!
If you struggle with this kind of thing, I give you my EXACT Email Welcome Sequence inside of my RethinkYou Mentorship Program. Get yourself on the waitlist for when we open in 2022!
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