What should you do with new subscribers? Master Follow-up vs Long Term Nurture
What do you do with a subscriber once you’ve got them to opt-in to your list?
In most cases, you’re probably delivering some sort of a lead magnet right?
But what happens next?
Where do those leads go?
What do you say to them?
I’m continuing to find that this is the number one question online entrepreneurs are asking, and most of it stems from the fact that people are using lead magnets incorrectly in the first place.
While it’s super important that you have a strategy for dealing with new leads coming in through lead magnets, at the end of the day, there are new people on your list.
You’ve probably sent them an email or two to deliver the lead magnet but then the communication stops…
Or, you just add them to your master broadcast list and they start getting a wide variety of communications from you, which is most likely hurting your conversion.
I wanted to present two campaigns you could and should be leveraging in your business that are meant to engage and convert your new subscribers after they’ve opted in.
- The Master Follow-up Campaign
- The Long Term Nurture Campaign
Using these two campaigns will help you finally answer the question, “What should I be doing with new subscribers once they are on my list?”.
First, Make Your Lead Magnets Work For You
Before we dive in it’s best if we get on the same page when it comes to how to create and deal with multiple lead magnets.
After working with some of the top entrepreneurs we’ve noticed a trend for the lead magnets that work. Here is a simple formula.
P – (P x .90) = LM
This basically means, take your product, extract a small portion (let’s say 10%) and that is either your EXACT lead magnet or very close to what your lead magnet could/should be.
The purpose of your lead magnet is not only to get their email address but, to be truly effective, it MUST capture a sliver of the same intent that will be needed to buy your product.
[Tweet “Your lead magnet should capture a sliver of the same intent needed for making a purchase.”]Ok, now that we have that all dialed in, served up and ready to roll, let’s look at each of the two campaigns you should use after you get a new subscriber.
The Master Follow-Up Campaign
Ok, so someone just downloaded your awesome lead magnet.
First, here’s what not to do:
That would be doing nothing, yet, I see this all the time.
So many people want to capture leads that they create lead magnet after lead magnet (also called a content upgrade from within a blog post) and then they just don’t do anything…
Enter the Master Follow-Up Campaign
After someone downloads your lead magnet they should go into a campaign that is a specific follow-up aimed at converting them into a product/service that you sell.
If you followed the formula above for creating a lead magnet then what they just downloaded will be very aligned with the offer you’re making within the master follow-up campaign.
My friend, Chris L Davis, The Head of Automation for LeadPages breaks it down like this.
[Tweet “The Master Follow-up Campaign is for a short term goal. The Quick sale!”]It’s recommended that the master followup sequence is between two and five emails.
So, now when someone opts-in to your Lead Magnet, it looks something like this…
One tip: Before creating multiple lead magnets, make sure your Master Follow-up Campaign is converting well.
At that time, you can start adding lead magnets to this system which, is my favorite part about Master Follow-Up
Remember, If you reverse engineered your lead magnet from your product, and your Master Followup is converting well, it’s time to reverse engine a second lead magnet that can plug into the same Master Follow-up, which is already converting well (since you spent the time to make that ONE campaign work before building others).
This saves you time and should help increase conversions vs. creating a whole bunch of new campaigns for every lead magnet.
So, maybe your first lead magnet was a Free Checklist.
Your second might be a Video Series that leads right into the same master followup. So now it looks like this:
You can technically keep replicating this for multiple lead magnets.
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Greg, what If I have multiple products?”
No problem, that’s when you create a new Master Follow-up Campaign and start this whole process over.
Simply, you’d have one Master Follow-up per product/service you’re trying to sell and there could be multiple lead magnets connecting to the appropriate Master Follow-up campaign.
An Alternative Option – The Indoctrination Campaign
This concept was made popular by Digital Marketer in their concept of The Machine.
There are varying ways to execute an Indoctrination campaign but the purpose of the Indoctrination campaign is to engage brand new leads into your system.
This means that only new leads go through this campaign.
If they opt-in for something else down the road, they do not get the Indoctrination campaign again.
The thinking with this campaign is that if you’re using a lead magnet, that is promoting one very specific topic of your business offering, you don’t want to introduce them to only that one topic since you have more to offer.
That’s where an Indoctrination campaign can help.
Your indoctrination campaign will expose new subscribers to your business and the best you have to offer.
It’s important to note, that if your lead magnet is something like a video series, for example, your indoctrination campaign will be sending simultaneous emails often leading to multiple emails on the same day. More on that a bit later.
Digital Marketer calls the emails that follow up after a lead magnet the “Engagement” campaign.
For Example. On Day 1, they will receive your lead magnet PLUS the welcome email in your Indoctrination series.
It would look something like this:
Most people leverage the Indoctrination Campaign to:
- Welcome new subscribers and let them know what to expect over the next few days
- Let them know what you stand for and against
- Incorporate your story and how it’s relevant to what you’ll be sharing with them moving forward
- Highlight a few pieces of your most popular content
- In some cases, mention how you can help them (aka mention your products/services)
This campaign is meant to be two to five emails as well and delivered while the engagement emails from the lead magnet are being delivered.
I personally don’t like the idea of sending multiple emails each day for the first few days of the relationship. But that’s me.
I believe if you write the copy correctly in your Master Follow-up campaign correctly, you can weave in your story and set the tone for what subscribers can expect and go without a separate Indoctrination campaign but it doesn’t always work perfectly so that’s why I present it as an option.
The Long Term Nurture Campaign
So you might be thinking, “Well what happens after they get through my Master Follow-Up campaign”?
Without getting too advanced (remember always start simple), after they buy or not, you’d be moving subscribers into the Long Term Nurture Campaign (LTN) in an effort to make a future sale.
Now, for many people, this will just be a broadcast list but I challenge you to create a longer term campaign that continues to nurture your leads in a way that can drive them to a sale. Potentially into another Master Follow-Up campaign for other products and services that you offer.
I know over at LeadPages their LTN campaign lasts almost a whole year.
We have clients that have over 52 weeks worth of content to remain engaged.
The best part about this is if done strategically it’s probably more likely to convert than just sending broadcasts on random new posts.
[Tweet “The Long Term Nurture Campaign is all about making a future sale.”]One of the key factors of your LTN campaign is to be able to “pause” that campaign if a subscriber enters into another Master Follow-up campaign (or a campaign that is focused on short-term conversions, like a webinar).
I actually shared one of our favorite tricks for accomplishing this called The Do Not Disturb Formula on the blog.
From a 10,000 view, this is how your Long Term Nurture Campaign might look:
A critical benefit of your Long Term Nurture campaign is staying in touch with subscribers and in front of them so they can see you care.
[Tweet “Don’t be “out of sight, out of mind”! Use Long Term Nurture to stay top of mind and show subscribers you care!”]Knowing Who’s Who
When setting up all of these campaigns it’s important to make sure you’re segmenting your contacts so you know who’s who. This can be as simple as creating groups called “new leads” “customers” and “long term nurture”.
So, now it’s your turn.
Do you have leads going stale because they’ve opted into a lead magnet and fell by the wayside?
What are you doing to convert new leads quickly and stay top of mind for future sales?
