What’s email logic and why do you need it? In this episode, Tami and Joe discuss everything you need to know about creating the right email automations. They talk about what kinds of emails you should have, what kinds of waiting conventions you should install, how to end your automations, and how to strategize multiple automations to nurture your leads at each step of the funnel.
Episode 17 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us, the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics, and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast where I asked Joe questions about different topics and trends and marketing based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book at ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
Today is the 17th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing and we’re going to discuss email automations. But first, a little housekeeping. Rate us on Apple podcasts, that purple icon. Give us a five-star rating, leave a review, and let us know if you’re enjoying listening to this podcast series. Before we jump into our topic of the day.
Joe, do you have a quick inspiration minute?
Joe: Yes, I do have an amazing inspiration minute. I want everyone to know today that success is personal. So stop comparing. When you stay focused on your actions instead of your results.
You also stop comparing yourself to everybody else. Because when we think about our goals and success, we often compare our own success to the success of other people. But that’s a recipe for disaster. Because your purpose, your personal purpose, is very different from anybody else’s personal purpose.
If you define your external purpose based on somebody else’s purpose, like your role, then you’re gonna be lost. Because you’re going down the wrong path. Don’t wish that things were different. Instead, transform into the person who knows, who sees, and who is present.
Being present is the greatest gift you can give yourself and your ego wants you to chase after other people’s dreams and desires.
These are not your dreams. These are not your hopes. You think they might be because it gives you a sense of importance in other people’s eyes. But you being rich, you being famous, is probably not going to help you feel fulfilled, and feel at peace. And it’s probably not your purpose. Success is personal.
So, stop comparing yourself to everybody else. And if you do that, you’re going to have more mojovation.
Tami: Thank you, Joe. Okay, let’s jump into our topic of the day, creating the right email automations. So first, let’s set some groundwork here. What is email automation? What is email logic?
Joe: Email automation is when you have a sequence of emails that go out on a defined basis. Email logic is the tree that you create that if somebody clicks you do this, if they open it, you do that. If they don’t click and they don’t open, and X amount of days passed, you do something else.
So what you want to do when it comes to creating email automations, you need to consider the path that you want to take people on. That’s what email logic is creating a flow of what emails the person will get, and how long they need to wait between each email.
It’s a very basic way of creating simple email automation. For example, you went to my landing page and signed up for my 20-minute presentation about how to create a marketing funnel. And by the way, you can do this at www.ajaxunion.com. And I was hoping that you would set up a strategy call with me, but you watch the video till the end, and you didn’t set up a strategy call with me. What should I do now? Should I complain? Or should I allow the machine to automatically remind you?
That’s what email automation is about. It helps me be able to be consistent.
Tami: That’s amazing! So, you gave an example of an email automation, is there another more common example of when someone might need an email automation?
Joe: Whenever somebody takes an action on your website, you want to thank them for taking an action. Somebody signs up for your newsletter, thank them for signing up for your newsletter. Somebody watches a webinar or a show. Thank them for watching the webinar or show. And all that can be automatic.
Three days later, you might want to set up a follow-up email, especially if they didn’t click on the link to download that you sent them. If they didn’t respond a few days later, you might have followed up with a case study or some insights. If they don’t respond to that,
Later you might just ask them, “Hey, are you even getting these emails? Click here if you’re actually wanting to get them.” Eventually, I usually stop automations and put them into another automation, especially if they’re not engaging with anything because, at that point, I might want to just remove you from the list because it does cost money for every contact I’m sending emails to.
So, there are lots of different email automation. You really want to first think about why you want to create an automation to begin with. What’s your intention? What would you like to create here for the user?
Once you understand the intention, you can be more intentional about creating email automations that help you get to your goal in your business.
Tami: And creating your intention will help you understand what you should include in your email automation, whether it’s a call to action to book a call with you, or to sign up for something, or to purchase something, or to read a blog, etc, etc.
So let’s say you have a series of five emails you want to send to someone after they download one of your lead magnets.
How long should you wait between each one of those emails? One hour, one minute, two hours, one day, two days, five days, two weeks, you know, how do you decide the wait time between the emails,
Joe: What I like to do is, I like to think about your target market, and what their expectations are. So for example, if you’re creating an email automation for a course, let’s say you join our LinkedIn Accelerator course, it’s part of our sister company Evyrgreen, and you’re learning about LinkedIn, you may want to get an email every day during the six-week program that we have.
So, we’ll create a 42-day email automation series, and every single day you get an email if you’re coming to a webinar, you want to get a series of emails. You’ll get one the day before, the morning of, three hours before, and maybe 15 minutes before the webinar, or maybe 15 minutes after the webinar, or maybe the day after the webinar.
And that’s how you’re going to think about your email automation based on the context of what you’re doing. But for the most part, if you’re following up from a sales perspective with somebody, or you want to get somebody to sign up for something, you probably want to do it every five days or so, you know, every three to five days, because you want to make sure that you’re not doing it multiple times per week and annoying the crap out of the person.
Some people do daily email automation, but that can sometimes be a little too much. If you’re doing it every five days, there are experts that agree that five days is a good number to wait between just standard follow-up sales automations.
Tami: Why is it important that someone finished the automation before taking action and scheduling a call? Or is it even important?
Joe: I like to take people through a journey. I like people to read a certain amount of emails and watch a certain amount of videos before they actually get on a call with me. Because otherwise, they don’t really know you that well.
A lot of the time people get on sales calls with me after going through my email automation and they’re like “Joe, I know your background. I know your story. I know you were you been. Let’s get down to business.”
Let’s get down to business. Yes, that’s what I want to do. I want people to get down to business with me. And because I use technology, I’m able to do this. Now, this is different than an email newsletter. An email newsletter is like a monthly newsletter that you send to a list. This is more of like a transactional email that I want people to do something,
I’m taking them through a journey, email automations serve a specific function based on the action the user took, or the action that did not take. And at Ajax Union, we recommend sending out newsletters on a regular basis to stay top of mind.
But email automations are very, very important. If you want to be able to create a business change if you want to be able to grow your business, or you want to be able for people to do specific actions, email automations can be really helpful.
Tami: So should you have more than one email automation running in your business? And if so why? And if not, why not?
Joe: For every function that happens in your business, every communication function, you want to consider how email automation will support that function.
The key is not to micromanage people, but to micromanage the process. So if you have good systems and processes, automations are like systems and processes. The more automations you have, the more likely you have you are to be able to succeed with what you’re doing.
Imagine I have five automations and someone downloads a lead magnet, and then they register for a webinar, and now they’re in two automations and they’re getting two emails at the same time.
That’s where email logic comes in. Email logic comes in to tell you that if one person enters one automation, they should be removed from another automation.
Tami: So then you have to prioritize one automation over another.
Joe: Correct, you want to make sure people don’t get 1,000 emails at once.
Tami: Yeah, I can say personally, this is a lot of what I do at Evyrgreen, not a lot, but it’s a lot. I have a Ph.D. in math so my brain is set up for logic. I write algorithms and all that, that’s what math coding is. But I often wonder as I’m setting up the logic for all the email automations that we have running in our email service provider, how do other people do this that aren’t trained, as I am, in algorithms?
Joe: That’s why they need to hire an agency to help them because this is a very, very complicated thing.
Most people cannot predict the future. And part of this is predicting your user behavior. And because you are taught critical thinking, and you’re taught mathematics, you know how to do this, and our staff knows how to do this, but most people don’t know how to create email logic. And so relying on experts is really important if you’re a marketing director.
If you’re a CEO, if you’re a CMO, if you’re a marketing leader, you want to have a conversation with a competent team that will help you be more proactive and create opportunities to generate revenue, increase customer satisfaction, improve cash flow, and ultimately, to make your business more robust.
Tami: Thank you so much, Joe. That was amazing information. I hope everyone listening got as much out of it as we did.
In next week’s episode, we will be talking about the purpose of marketing analytics, analyzing your data. So, make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode. You can follow us on Instagram @ajaxunion.
Follow Joe on all social media platforms @JoeApfelbaum, and follow him on LinkedIn at Joelinkedin.com. If you didn’t catch that, check our description for all of our social media links. And you can also learn more about the podcast listen to more episodes at ajaxunion.com/podcast.
If you have any questions, shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. Our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.
