How to Use ConvertKit to Convert More Leads: Evolving beyond MailChimp & once-a-month newsletters
Create email funnels that actually convert
The once-a-month/week/day newsletter format is tried and true. It has been proven as an effective and efficient marketing channel over and over and over again. There is a plethora of information out there to guide you through that process. This post will not cover any of that.
This post is about taking your email marketing to the next level. Since everybody has caught on to just how powerful email is, there is more noise in this channel than ever before. It is so easy to simply end up in the junk folder. That means you need to crank it up to 11 and ConvertKit makes it easy to do that. ConvertKit is a tool that allows you to manage your email list much more effectively and create automated funnels and triggers to give your leads the content they need most.
Strategy: Design multiple paths that your customers can take, based on their interactions with your content, that walks them through your sales funnel when your leads actually want it. With this strategy, you are able to give more relevant info to your leads exactly when they need it the most. You aren’t constrained to send one big email blast on a certain date of the month with the same content for everybody.
Oversimplified Steps:
- Create an insightful piece of content that people actually want.
- Capture their email in exchange for the content
- Send an automated email asking them what their biggest interest is and give three options
- Based on what they click, automatically send them down the appropriate funnel.
To give you an example, I have built out what a sample campaign might look like for a destination hotel. Let’s assume this hotel is in a beautiful tropical paradise with many things to do, see and eat. The hotel has created a thoughtful guide to the can’t-miss attractions in their area that guests can download onto their phone in exchange for signing up to their mailing list.
A day after the guest has received their guide, an automated email goes out to him or her to ask whether they are most interested in the ‘food’, ‘adventure’ or ‘relaxing’. If the guest selects ‘food’, over the next two weeks, they will receive an automated email every other day introducing them to a different restaurant in the area. If the guest chooses ‘adventure’, they will receive details about the different activities. If they choose ‘relax’, you might send them a coupon for a massage, details about meditation and highlight secluded beaches.
Whichever route they choose, there is a very high likelihood that you are going to up-sell many of these guests on extra packages that would have taken far more work for them to discover normally. You will also drastically increase guest loyalty and you can even siphon off guests from competitors over the long run.
Create more value than you take
It really isn’t that complicated but it takes a lot of planning and you absolutely must spend the time to create content that is actually valuable to your customers. This is where most businesses fall short. If you don’t create more value than you are capturing, nobody will engage with your campaigns. You can’t just send a few coupons for people to use. You need to create content that is deeply engaging and meaningful to that customer and any discounts are just a cherry on top.
The whole idea is to have such valuable information that customers WANT to keep engaging with your brand so you stay top of mind and build trust. If you can integrate video content throughout the campaign, you will amplify the amount of trust and brand equity that you build by a huge factor, but don’t let that be a barrier to getting started with this strategy. Even with just text and photos, you can develop deep relationships with a large number of people. And the most beautiful part is that, once you put in the effort to set it up right, you can just sit back and let it automatically build all of these loyal customers.