Even in a world of texting, DMs, and live chat, email is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers, build awareness, nurture leads, and make sales.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through the key elements you need to build a successful email marketing campaign using the secret sauce FOMO. But before we get to that, let’s go over what we’re going to cover.
What we’ll cover
- Understand user behavior
- Analyze who you’re writing for
- Identify the value you can provide your audience
- Structure your email sequence
- Create personal FOMO deadlines
1. Set A Goal With User Behavior In Mind
When you start planning your email marketing, the first thing you need to do is set a goal.
And you might have several goals, such as:
- Product awareness
- Education
- Purchasing
- Using your product
- Referral
In order to achieve any goal you set, you need your subscribers to take action on the offers you make. Understanding how user behavior works will help you better plan out and position your offers.
One of the most popular frameworks for understanding user behavior is the Fogg Behavior Model:
Behavior can be broken down into three parts: motivation, ability, and triggers.
Motivation
Motivation represents people interested in taking action on one of your goals.
As an example, let’s imagine you’re selling an online course about “How to Learn Piano in 30 Days.”
If your subscribers are not interested in learning piano, then they won’t be motivated to open your emails, purchase your course, or share it with their friends.
Ability
Ability looks for “people who can take this action.” If the course costs $99 and your subscribers don’t have $99, then they don’t have the ability to purchase the course.
Since your course is about playing the piano if they don’t have access to a piano… then there’s no ability to move forward with that behavior.
Triggers
Triggers are the last layer, and a trigger is what takes a group of people who are motivated and able to do something, and it encourages them to do it now.
2. Know Your Audience
Now that we’ve figured out what causes people to take action, we need to look at who these people are!
In your email marketing, you’ll have a few different groups of people (at least!) that you’re writing emails for.
Here are a few examples:
- New subscribers
- First-time buyers
- Repeat customers
- Non-buyers
- “Dead” email subscribers
Drip – a popular email marketing platform – provides a great list of example workflows you can use for different segments of your audience:
And the easiest place to start is with new subscribers…
3. Provide Value To Bew Subscribers
The emails that you send to new subscribers in the first week after they opt-in are going to frame the rest of their experience with you, your products, and future marketing.
Focus on improving your email marketing for new subscribers, and you’re setting the stage for success everywhere else!
When I first subscribed to the Beardbrand email list, they sent me an email a day for the first week after I subscribed:
It’s basically a free one-week mini-course on all things beards!
Here’s a sample from the first email:
Beardbrand is over-delivering on content… beyond what I had expected when I gave them my email address.
And now that they sent me through this welcome sequence, I trust them a lot more because of the investment they made to EDUCATE and build trust before trying to sell me anything.
Remember how motivation was the first part of the behavior model?
Over-delivering through education and entertainment is one of the best ways to motivate your audience to purchase from you in the future.
Keep in mind… you don’t always need to create new content for these emails. Many times you can start by repurposing existing content – blog posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, courses.
4. Strategically Structure Your Email Sequence
This is a template that our team uses as a starting point for new subscriber sequences that we build:
| Day 1 | Welcome |
| Day 2 | Killing the “sacred cow” |
| Day 3 | Problem, agitation, solution |
| Day 4 | Story, introduce the offer |
| Day 5 | Story, more details |
| Day 6 | Expires tonight |
| Day 6 | Reminder |
| Day 6 | Last call |
| Day 7 | Feedback |
The first three and a half days are focused on content and education. It’s only about halfway through this email sequence that we introduce a special offer.
On days 5 and 6, this is where you focus on presenting the details of the offer, answering common objections, and closing the sale.
Notice how on day 6 we’re sending out three different emails. This is really important! Don’t be shy about sending multiple email reminders about your offer on the last day.
Adding multiple emails on the last day of your offer can dramatically increase your email conversion rates. Most of the time your subscribers just need to be reminded a few times about what you’re offering and when it’s going to expire!
And finally, on day 7 you can send out an email either congratulating them on their purchase (with info on the next steps), or if they don’t buy you can send them a quick survey asking for their feedback.
5. Create Personalized FOMO Deadlines
So let’s talk about creating personal deadlines for your subscribers that create a sense of FOMO.
The term “FOMO” means, “the fear of missing out.” It’s a psychological bias humans have that creates anxiety about missing an opportunity.
Having an authentic deadline built into your offer is one of the most effective ways to increase conversions because it creates a sense of FOMO.
So how do you set up a deadline that’s unique to each person that opts in?
We’ve built Deadline Funnel exactly for this reason – to help you add real authentic urgency to marketing. It integrates with almost every landing page builder and email platform and is being used by thousands of marketers to increase conversions.
If you don’t want to use a platform like Deadline Funnel to automatically manage your evergreen campaigns, here are some other ideas for adding deadlines to your email marketing:
- For new subscribers, offer a special bonus if they purchase your product within a week of signing up for your email list. Then ask them to forward their receipt to you showing when it was purchased.
- Create a product launch campaign – manually send out the email sales sequence and take your special offer page down at the end of the promotion.
- Once you run your first product launch, set up a monthly process to send it out at the beginning of each month for anyone on your list who hasn’t purchased it previously.
When you bring each of the foundational elements together – user behavior, understanding who you’re writing for, delivering value, creating a structured offer sequence – and layer a personal deadline on top of that – you’ve created your first evergreen marketing campaign!
And from there, you can focus on increasing traffic and optimizing your campaign for even more conversions.
Editor’s Note: The article is part of the blog series Grow Your Business brought to you by the marketing team at UniTel Voice, the virtual phone system priced and designed for startups and small business owners.
