Once you compiled your opt-in list, it is important to send your leads targeted, relevant, and timely emails.
The Education Email
The early emails should be mainly focused on adding value and educating your leads, and as time goes on and you build a relationship with them, then your emails can become more promotional. By providing them with valuable information related to your business’s area of expertise, you build a sense of authority around your brand that shows potential customers you know a lot about something that they already expressed an interest in.
The Problem Email
The second email in the series should still be focused on providing valuable information, but this time your goal should be to educate leads on why the problem they came to you about in the first place is worth solving. This second email demonstrates to your leads why their problem is important and helps create a sense of urgency that compels them to seek out a solution.
The Solution Email
Now that you’ve convinced your leads that their problem is important and worth solving, it’s time to convince them that your product or service is the answer. Although still educational, this email helps convince your leads that they need a professional service like yours and gets them thinking about who the right provider might be.
The Case Study Email
Now that you’ve convinced leads that their problem is important and that they need to find a proper solution, it’s time to prove that you are the right provider for them. This email, combined with the sense of expertise you have built around your business by continually sending educational content, should give your leads confidence your business is the right choice and compel them to respond to your quote and purchase your services.
If at this stage in the series you haven’t convinced your leads to purchase, then your chances of converting them are looking a little slim. So, you may want to consider offering some sort of discount or special offer to these customers. Although this may reduce your margins a little bit, this is the last email in the series and likely your final chance to convert them into a customer, so it’s probably better to get them at a slightly discounted rate then to not get them at all.
Remembering these psychological triggers should also help you with your email campaigns:
Pain / Pleasure Principle
In marketing, we understand that all human behavior, at its root, is driven by the need to avoid pain and the desire to gain pleasure. Therefore, in order to influence someone’s decision, you need to get very clear on who your audience is. You must know who they are and what they want. In your marketing message, your goal is to teach your leads how to move as close as possible to what they want before you ask for their money. The closer you get them to where they want to ultimately be, the more likely they are to buy from you in order to go the final few steps needed to arrive at their desired end result.
Novelty
We as human beings love novelty. Neurologically, it has been demonstrated that exposure to something new and unfamiliar increases the release of dopamine in the brain. Novelty makes our brains feel like there is a possibility for reward waiting for us just around the corner. That potential for pleasure motivates us to seek it out. If you want your prospects to buy your products, create new ones, or just make a few tweaks, update the old ones, and rebrand them. You also could combine this with the scarcity trigger to release a certain product once every few months, so that every time it is released it creates a perception of novelty.
Inspire Curiosity
George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, discovered that when there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know, we will take action to fill that gap. It is referred to as the Information Gap Theory. Think of it like an itch that needs to be scratched. Our curiosity not only inspires action; it increases activity in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure as well. Triggering curiosity will ensure that your prospects open your emails, promote your content, and buy your products in order to fill the gap between the teaser you leave them with and the answer that lies beyond it.
