6 Steps to Building an Effective Email Autoresponder Sequence

— March 1, 2017

An email autoresponder sequence or series helps you automate your email marketing campaign while at the same time, nurturing your leads and making more conversions. Building an effective email autoresponder sequence is a powerful tactic that makes our lives as marketers much, much easier.


Setting up the first sequence might mean making a few mistakes, but that’s totally OK! Creating these sequences gets easier as you become more familiar with your software.


Whether you’re a beginner or advanced marketer, use these six steps to guide you in creating your own powerful autoresponder sequence:


1. Choosing an End Goal


effective email autoresponder


What is the end goal of your email autoresponders? Making that decision is the first step. Do you want to sell a physical product? Maybe you’re launching a new service or looking to strengthen your relationship with subscribers as they move further through your sales funnel?


Either way, before you begin building your autoresponder series you must first define the end goal.


There’s a few different goals a marketer could have when using an email autoresponder sequence in their email marketing strategy. If you start with one of these below goals, you’ll be on the right track to building an effective autoresponder sequence:



  • Welcome sequence for new subscribers
  • Free mini courses and lead magnets
  • Put your sales funnel on autopilot
  • Promote up-sells and add-ons

2. Segment Your Email Lists


email autoresponder sequences


Demographics, buyer personas, sales funnel stage, or interests are just a few common ways to break down your list into small, specific groups. This is also known as segmenting your email list. We should know by now that segmenting your email gets you higher open rates (14%), lower unsubscriber rates (8.54%), as well as a better overall ROI on your email marketing campaigns.


Segmenting your email lists is a great way to make sure you only provide content to those who want it. If you skip this step, you can expect to see a huge spike in unsubscribes.


3. Choose Your Software


To schedule and send out your email autoresponders, you’ll need an email marketing program that will fit your business’s needs. If you already have a email marketing software, good news, you can skip to Step 4!


At Performance Marketer, we use InfusionSoft CRM because of all the advanced features for lead scoring, automation, and most importantly, segmenting our email lists. There are plenty of other options out there for you though! MailChimp and AWeber are quite user-friendly, perfect for beginners or small businesses.


email chimp autoresponder


On the other hand, HubSpot’s software goes beyond just email marketing to meet all the marketing needs of medium and large companies. HubSpot certainly has a shorter learning curve than InfusionSoft, but their monthly price is hard to stomach for many.


4. Map Out Your Autoresponder Sequence


Setting up the sequence of your email autoresponders is dependent on your goals and business. Someone selling an information product won’t have the same sequence as someone offering a physical product. Decide how many ‘content’ emails you are going to send before you send an ‘promotion’ (sales) email.


email autoresponder series


Across the board, autoresponder sequences do typically look like this:


Welcome email Content Content Content Promotion Content Content Content Promotion


If your business is more content-based, this sequence might be better suited to your marketing efforts:


Welcome email Content Content Content Content Content Content Promotion


On the other hand, if you’re purely an eCommerce business are building an autoresponder sequence for your ‘super users’ you could be a more aggressive with a sequence like this:


Welcome email Content Promotion Promotion Promotion


5. Create an Effective Autoresponder


Now this is an important step of setting up effective email autoresponder sequences, and it can be one of the most tricky. In fact, you may want to outsource this task to a copywriter! If you’re feeling confident, then the below list will set-up the foundations for sending out effective email autoresponses:



  • Focus on the reader
  • Consider who is sending the message
  • Make it personal
  • Highlight value
  • Craft an incredible subject line
  • Proofread, proofread, proofread!
  • Easy-to-read
  • Always add a CTA

6. Monitor, Test, and Optimize


Autoresponders are mostly ‘set and forget’ but like all things in our world of marketing, we must constantly monitor, test, and optimize. These are just a few of the questions to ask yourself after you’ve set up your email autoresponder series:


Is this autoresponder still relevant to your list? Could it be segmented further?


Are your subject lines being A/B tested?


Are the goals of your subscribers changing and evolving? How can you solve their current issues?


Finally, Open rates, click through rates, and unsubscribes are the metrics that should be measured against the effectiveness of an autoresponder series.


Conclusion


We send a lot of emails here at Performance Marketer. So it’s incredibly important that our autoresponder sequences are closely monitored. This is how we ensure we’re not sending people five or seven emails a day! Remember that instead, the aim of your email autoresponder sequences are to ensure you’re not sending too many emails. All that while you’re targeting the appropriate segments with the messages they way.


What kind of email autoresponder sequences do you think would be effective for your subscribers? Maybe you’re already using autoresponder sequences? Let us know in the comments!


Also, feel free to share this post on social media so others can learn the power of having a high-effective autoresponder in their email marketing campaign.

Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community

(100)