Seven Step Process to Email Marketing Success

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Last week, I participated in a panel discussion for Designhill.

My fellow panelists were Michael Brenner, Pam Moore, and John Jantsch so you know it was a good one!

At one point, we were talking about content and the notion that email is dead. We all laughed at that comment. Of course email isn’t dead.

The gross way of pushing your products and services via email is dead, but email marketing most certainly is not.

If done well, email marketing is the best way to communicate with your clients and prospects.

A great email marketing campaign not only levels the playing field for all of your subscribers but compels them to action.

And that is what we want. We want to compel our subscribers to action.

Let me tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, Danny Iny called and said he was going to be in Chicago and invited me to have lunch with his mastermind group, who was meeting in person.

I will be honest: I didn’t want to go.

It was on a Saturday afternoon and I had just spent all week at Social Media Marketing World.

So the idea that I was going to spend another afternoon away from home wasn’t super exciting to me.

It’s always those types of trips or meetings that bring about big change. I didn’t want to go, but the three hours I spent with that group of people changed the way we’ll do business…forever.

I was supposed to be there to talk about PR and how these business owners could use it to build their brands.

Instead, it turned into me being on the hot seat for three hours, as they went around the room and asked me questions about why we didn’t compel our subscribers to action.

It was not fun. It was really uncomfortable. One person even got out of her chair and started banging her head on the wall. I felt like crying.

But they were right: we’d never motivated anyone to do anything, except read, comment, and share.

(Which is awesome, BTW, but those things don’t make payroll or pay the mortgage.)

You should see my notes from that meeting. I refer back to them often. And, it was in that meeting, that I decided we were going to do more than just email blog posts to subscribers.

While we’ve been doing true email drip campaigns for a few short years, we have had significant success.

Spin Sucks, today, is our major revenue source—and we expect it to grow significantly in the next five years…and all of that success has come from our email marketing.

Of course, all of the work we did in the 10 years before it has helped immensely—and so does the community (all of you)—but you don’t have to follow this exact path for email mareketing to be successful.

In fact, you don’t even need a blog (and, if I were starting today, I’m not sure blogging is the path I would take).

There are 15 types of email drip campaigns. They include:

Once you’ve decided upon which type of campaign you want to do from the list above, we have a simple seven-step process for setting up your email drip campaign.

At a high level, the process is:

Even with the short process above, it can be totally overwhelming—especially if you think, “OMG. I have to do 15 different campaigns?”

But to help the paralyzing fear you may now be feeling, we have created email marketing templates to help.

You can download them by clicking here.

If you have any questions or need any help, leave a comment, find us on the social networks, or join the super fun Spin Sucks Community.

Now get to work!