Drip email campaigns are an invitation enticement to a discussion about a solution, not a sales pitch for your product or service. 

If you believe this, then your email campaigns begin to look different.

More to the point, your email campaign design process starts to look a little different.

You don’t sit in front of you keyboard and start pounding out emails, begging for business. Creating long diatribes or over-designed, substanceless emails. 

Instead, you begin by researching and dissecting your customer’s buying habits and processes. This is the process that I want to show you.

I’ll be hosting a webinar on this topic, this Friday.

Join me by registering here.

What do your customers want to know?

Let’s start with a little research. 

What do your customers want/need to know about your product before they buy it?

I turn to Ubersuggest to answer this question.

In this example, I’ll use auto insurance as my example product.

Begin researching your core product keyword.

This search will tell you the most common searches around this keyword. It will also give you insight into the type of language that your customer uses in looking for that product. 

A few things immediately pop out to me. 

• “Car” sometimes replaces “auto,” but not as much as I expected,
• “Cheap” is definitely a common theme or modifier when people are searching for auto insurance, and 
• People often search for a specific insurance provider.

My next step is to use this same search and analyze the questions that people use to search for auto insurance.

A quick glance at these queries shows a few important questions that your customers want to understand before buying.

• What is the “best” auto insurance
• How much insurance do I need
• And, then of course, once again – how to get it cheap

Finally, I want to look at popular comparison searches that customers do. This gives me insight into some of the shopping behaviors.

In looking at this list of popular searches I notice a few additional themes I might use in talking and educating my email list.

• The relationship between credit scores and auto insurance
• The relationship between auto and homeowners insurance
• The difference between comprehensive versus collision coverage
• The difference between commercial and personal auto insurance

These comparison searches are ripe for content and sparking a deeper conversation with prospective customers on my email list.

Create workflows that connect to the buying process

My next step is to take these key searches, questions, and comparison themes and weave them into a drip email sequence – a buying journey.

In this quick analysis, I’ve picked out six themes that I want to turn into content-driven, value-first, educational emails.

1. How to get cheap auto insurance?
2. How to get the best auto insurance?
3. How much auto insurance do I need?
4. How does my credit score affect my auto insurance rate?
5. How can I save by bundling my auto and homeowners insurance?
6. Do I need comprehensive or collision coverage, and what is the difference?

I won’t go into actually writing these emails in this article, but the very next step is to start working on my subject lines and headlines. 

You can learn my email writing process by checking out my How I Write Emails that Convert article and on-demand webinar.

Creating content for email marketing

One of the common mistakes at this point in the process is that people try to cram everything the customer needs to know into the email.

Remember, your emails are just conversation starters.

Think about it this way. When you see something interesting on the web and want to send it to someone, you don’t copy the whole article and paste it into an email to your friend or colleague. No, you right an interesting subject line, say something simple like, “check this out,” and paste in the link. Then hit send.

That’s the approach we want to emulate.

Of course, you can’t paste that link into your email until you create an interesting piece of content.

There are a few routes you can go here.

1. Curate content from great websites and use those resources in your emails
2. Write great content, publish it on your website, and send it out via email
3. Create informative videos (on YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin) and include them in emails and website content 

The first approach is the easiest, but the least ideal in generating leads. Using other people’s content is better than nothing. However, sending them away could distract them and confuse them.

My preferred approach is to start building my own content library on my website or blog. This has several advantages, including: 

• Doubling as sales collateral
• Can eventually bring me new SEO traffic
• Clearly positions me as an expert in answering all of your insurance questions
• Might introduce them to other products and services I offer
• Allows me to encourage them to contact me with any additional questions

In addition to the more traditional written (blog) content, I really encourage you to consider flipping on that webcam and doing video. This is like getting to sit face-to-face, across the kitchen table, and pitch hundreds (maybe thousands) of customers in one sitting. 

What’s more that video will keep pitching for weeks, months, and years and influencing new customers to reach out to you in the future.

Using content and email marketing to generate leads

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably becoming pretty evident about how this system works. Instead of writing emails that beg for an appointment or shout at customers about how smart or consultative you are, you simply show them.

Just as a quick recap…

1. Find out the questions they’re asking
2. Create an email sequence points to the answers to each of those questions
3. Create content that goes deep into answering each of those questions
4. Ask them, in your emails and content to reach back to you with any remaining questions

This simple system will create a lead generation (and referral) engine that will consistently fuel and grow your business.

Do you have any questions for me? Email me at bill.rice@kaleidico.com.Do you want help implementing any of these strategies? Schedule a discovery session with my agency and team at Kaleidico.