Email marketing remains a powerful, effective, and low-cost way to reach your audience, communicate your message, and encourage conversions.
Email allows for direct and personalized communication, which translates into stronger relationships with your subscribers, and greater potential for loyal customers.
If you’re new to this topic, there are some key email marketing essentials and best practices that you’ll want to review before getting started.
Once you’re well-versed in these email basics, (for example, you’ve determined your email goals and strategy, set-up your chosen email software, started building your list with engaged subscribers, and have a good understanding of the subject lines, email campaigns, and visuals that are aligned with your company and audience), then it’s time to explore email sequencing.
In this blog we’ll explore the importance of email sequences and why you should use them, types of email sequences and their use cases, and how to create an effective email sequence for your business.
Let’s get started.
What is Email Sequencing?
Email sequencing refers to a series of automated emails that are sent out in a specific order to guide a prospect or customer through a predetermined journey.
These emails are typically triggered by a specific action such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
For example,
- A welcome sequence containing 2-6 emails introducing new subscribers to your brand, products, and services.
- An abandoned cart sequence consisting of a couple reminder emails, sent when a customer leaves an item in their cart without completing the purchase, and potentially containing a discount code or limited time offer as added incentive.
- A lead nurturing or sales sequence containing a series of emails aimed at converting leads into customers by sharing educational or promotional content.
- A re-engagement sequence focused on getting inactive subscribers to open your emails once again.
Each of these email sequences provides an opportunity to connect with your audience and subscribers on an ongoing basis, providing valuable information, helpful resources, and/or timely reminders about your brand or offer.
The goal? To guide subscribers towards a specific action or outcome, whether that’s making a purchase or simply deepening their connection and understanding of your brand.
Why is Email Sequencing Important?
Email sequencing provides numerous benefits for small business owners. With limited time and resources, it’s important to be strategic about the marketing efforts you’re employing.
While they take time upfront to curate and schedule, automating email sequences allows you to regularly connect with and nurture your subscribers without daily effort.
Below you’ll find an overview of some of the other benefits.
- Builds Relationships Over Time
Instead of sending one-off promotional emails, sequences allow you to engage with your audience gradually over time, providing value and building trust.
By spreading out communication, you avoid overwhelming your subscribers (and yourself!).
Since you’re drafting each email in the sequence at once, you can craft them so they flow together cohesively. This allows you to methodically and intentionally lay out an entire journey for your subscriber, with a common goal in mind.
- Keeps Your Brand Top of Mind
Email sequences help keep your business in front of customers on a regular basis, without coming across as too pushy.
Consumers often need multiple interactions with your brand before they are ready and willing to make a purchase (research shows this number to be around eight touchpoints, though it depends on the quality of the interaction!).
A well-timed email at the right stage of their customer journey can nudge your subscriber toward making a purchase or booking a consultation.
- Saves Time Through Automation
Email sequences are automated, meaning you can set them up once and then let them run in the background of your business.
This allows you to save time and focus on other areas of your business while still nurturing leads and driving sales behind-the-scenes.
- Delivers Personalized Content at the Right Time
By segmenting your audience and triggering specific sequences based on their behaviour (for example, connecting with them after they download an eBook or leave an item in their cart), you can send personalized emails that feel relevant and timely, increasing chances of engagement and conversions.
Here’s a closer look at some of the types of email sequences you can implement within your business to drive sales and deepen relationships with your audience.
Types of Email Sequences and Their Use Cases
Welcome Sequence
Intention: to introduce your brand to new subscribers.
If you followed the steps in my email marketing essentials blog, you know the importance of building your list with quality leads.
But once someone joins your email list (likely through a lead magnet), it’s important to keep them engaged beyond your initial freebie delivery.
An intentionally crafted welcome sequence can help set the tone for a positive long-term relationship between your brand, and your new subscriber.
This series of emails gives you a chance to share more about your company, values, and offers, to guide your subscribers from getting to know you, to starting to trust you, to eventually (hopefully) buying from you.
For example:
- Email 1: Thank the subscriber for signing up and deliver the lead magnet (free resource) they were promised, if applicable. Allow subscribers to get to know you better by offering an introduction to your business or mission.
- Email 2: Share a valuable blog post, podcast episode, social media post, or additional resource to further develop trust and showcase your expertise. This can also serve as a way to move this subscriber from your email list to additional platforms you’re hoping to grow.
- Email 3: Let subscribers know that you understand them and their pain points. Encourage them to begin to daydream about a life without those issues, introducing your offer or product as the solution they’ve been looking for.
- Email 4: Offer an exclusive discount or incentive to encourage a first purchase.
- Email 5: Share what subscribers can expect from you moving forward. How often will you send emails? What can subscribers look forward to?
- Email 6: Ask subscribers for feedback. What are they looking for? Encourage subscribers to respond to your email so you can start communicating directly with them. Note: this may depend on the size of your email list!
You can (and should) modify this series of emails depending on your business and subscribers. You know your audience best!
How are people finding out about your email list? What are they looking for when they sign up? What stage of the customer journey do your new subscribers tend to be at (how familiar are they with you and your brand)?
The answers to these questions will help you determine the most appropriate content and information to include in your welcome emails, as well as the tone to deliver them in. Be authentic!
Keep this welcome sequence 3-6 emails, spread out over a few weeks to avoid overwhelm and information overload.
Abandoned Cart Sequence
Intention: to recover lost sales.
Studies show that 75% of lost e-commerce sales are linked to cart abandonment. That’s a lot of lost potential revenue!
The goal of this sequence is to increase sales by encouraging shoppers to complete their transaction. It should be triggered when someone has items in their online cart but leaves your website before completing the check-out process.
For example:
- Email 1: A friendly reminder that the customer left items in their cart, with a clear link back to complete their purchase. This email should be sent shortly after the cart is abandoned, and assume that the visitor simply got distracted when browsing.
- Email 2: If no action is taken, send a second email about 24 hours later offering a discount or incentive to finalize the purchase. Many carts are abandoned due to high shipping fees, so if you’re able to offer free shipping, this is a great opportunity to do so.
- Email 3: This final reminder should emphasize urgency by indicating a limited availability of the items, or an expiry for the discount code you offered prior. This is your last chance to grab your customer’s attention!
Keep this sequence short, sweet, and timely. Any more than 3 emails in this sequence will likely end up annoying your potential customers, more than it will support your business.
Sales Sequence
Intention: to increase sales of a particular product or offer.
Particularly useful when launching something new, an intentional sales email sequence can drive action through urgency and by speaking directly to your ideal client or customer.
For example:
- Email 1: Introduce your new offer and its benefits. What makes it valuable? Why did you create it?
- Email 2: Address common objections with FAQs.
- Email 3: Share testimonials from previous buyers who experienced the promised transformation, to showcase social proof and develop trust.
- Email 4-6 (depending on product/ offer and launch timeline): Create urgency with regular reminders about the limited time offer or limited availability of the product or service. Subject lines like “24 hours left!,” or “Cart is closing!,” can help further drive sales.
Include clear CTAs with the next step (for example the direct purchase link or a link to book a consultation call) in each email to optimize conversions.
Use this email sequence sparingly (for example 1-3 times a year maximum)! You don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers.
If your email software allows, it can also be helpful to give users the ability to opt out of this particular set of emails, if they know immediately that this specific offer isn’t for them but may still be interested in your other content or products.
Re-Engagement Sequence
Intention: to win back inactive subscribers.
Regardless of how incredible the content in your email campaigns is, unsubscribers and inactive subscribers (people who have stopped engaging with your content but remain subscribed) are inevitable.
Re-engagement sequences are created with the intention of reminding inactive subscribers about your company, in ways that encourage them to start interacting with your emails again.
For example:
- Email 1: Check-in with your inactive subscribers, offering something valuable. For example, deliver them a special guide or exclusive limited time offer they haven’t seen elsewhere. Within the copy, share that you haven’t seen them in a while, and remind them why they signed up to your list to begin with.
- Email 2: Ask these subscribers if they’re still interested in hearing from you, while offering a reason to stay on the list. For example, giving them a sneak peek of something exciting you’re working on or VIP access to an offer.
- Email 3: If there’s still no engagement, remind them they’ll be unsubscribed if they don’t interact, and give them one last chance to re-engage.
While unsubscribes aren’t ideal (of course, our goal is overall list growth), inactive subscribers will end up hurting your marketing statistics more. Open and click rates will decrease, and deliverability may be impacted.
Outlook, Gmail, and other email service providers monitor subscriber engagement and if their users are ignoring your emails, your reputation and credibility are likely to be negatively impacted.
These providers might end up flagging you as spam, or sending your emails directly to their user junk or promotional folders.
Having some email unsubscribers is completely natural.
Maybe,
- They’ve already purchased from you and feel they don’t have anything else to gain from your content.
- Consider: Are you able to provide an additional next step by creating a new offer or way to work with you that would be of value to these particular subscribers? Can you ask for a testimonial to showcase their transformation to other potential customers?
- They simply get too many emails a day and don’t have the time or energy to interact with all of them.
- Consider: How can you make your emails stand out?
- Their interests have changed.
- Consider: Are you growing with them? What else do you have to offer? If you’re simply no longer aligned, that’s okay too! You want your audience to be filled with people who connect and resonate with what you’re sharing.
- Your emails are landing in their spam folder.
- Consider: Are you complying with the rules and strategies of the Canadian anti-spam legislation? Do you have an unsubscribe link in your emails? Are your emails personalized? Are you using excessive spam triggering keywords within your email copy? Do you need to clean-up some of your inactive subscribers with a re-engagement sequence, as described above?
Regularly reviewing your email data can help you to spot inconsistencies and troubleshoot solutions for inactive subscribers, low open rates, or high instances of unsubscribes.
How to Create an Effective Email Sequence
While the email sequences outlined above are some of the most common (and are email sequences you should definitely implement in your email marketing strategy), you can have fun with the other ways you utilize email automation within your business.
Regardless of the purpose of your email sequence, here’s an overview of how to plan out your content so it drives results.
- Start with a Goal.
Define what you want to achieve with your email sequence. Whether it’s onboarding new customers, nurturing leads, recovering abandoned carts, or re-engaging inactive subscribers, there needs to be intention and purpose behind your sequence so that you know how to gauge the impact of your campaign and can make modifications based on the results.
- Map Out the Sequence.
This includes the number of emails you plan to send out, and the timing of each. How many emails are needed to achieve your goal without overwhelming your subscriber? How can you appropriately space these out? For example, while 24 hours apart is appropriate for cart reminders, a week apart would be more effective for lead nurturing or educational content.
Too many emails in a short span can overwhelm subscribers, but too few might cause them to lose interest or forget who you are.
- Craft Relevant Content.
Each email within the sequence should reflect your brand through its design, tone, and content. They should be easy to read, mobile friendly, and have compelling subject lines to encourage higher open rates (these are all key practices outlined in my blog post on email marketing essentials).
Personalize your emails based on the subscriber’s behaviour, or their stage in the customer journey. Ensure that each email adds value and leads naturally to the next step!
- Include a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA).
Make it easy for recipients to take action. Whether it’s completing a purchase or reading a blog post, ensure your CTA is clear and compelling.
- Schedule Your Emails.
Use your chosen email marketing software to design and schedule your email sequence. This allows you to focus on other areas of your business while your automations run in the background.
Make sure to check-in on these every so often to ensure they reflect your brand, current offerings, and business goals!
- Track Performance.
Measure open rates, click-through rates, and conversions for each email in the sequence. Use this data to refine future sequences. A/B testing can be a great way to optimize your strategy.
Feeling inspired?
I’d love to know what one thing you’re going to commit to in the next week to improve your email marketing strategy!
Need help linking your ideas to a concrete strategy you can use to achieve your business and marketing goals? Let’s connect.
