What Email Automation Can Do For You
As a network marketer, your success depends on two important factors: your ability to make connections and your ability to identify new networking opportunities.
Everything – from sales conversions to recruits and even direct sales – depends on how many people you can reach, how well you reach them, and whether or not you succeed in reaching them in the right way.
Here’s the good news: changes in technology (especially around communication) are providing us with newer and better ways to communicate than ever before. Gone are the days of the lowly door-to-door vacuum salesman; today, you can reach, recruit, and market to millions of people all at the same time via online platforms.
In a world soaked with smartphones, tablets, computers, websites, and other electronic devices, one of the network marketer’s very best friends still comes out on top: e-mail. Working your list via an email program makes it fast and easy to gather information, stay in contact with your people, or even leverage your list to drive more sales.
But it’s not all exciting (unfortunately).
The truth is that email marketing can be time-consuming and, in some cases, extremely tedious. Setting up mail merge lists, rolling out newsletters, creating this month’s sales flyer, drilling down through your lists to spot sales demographics – done manually, all of these actions require way too much time.
We’re here to tell you why email automation can change the tide for you, giving you more time to focus on business development and the human aspect of every interaction. Once you discover what we have to say, we think you’ll understand exactly why email automation is a must for any network marketer.
Let’s jump in!
More Sales; More Conversions
VentureBeat’s 2016 email marketing guide reveals something many network marketers take for granted: utilizing email in your marketing efforts can result in an ROI explosion. The secret found within the guide is a remarkable $38 in ROI for every $1 invested when email marketing is used. Although the data within the guide was mostly targeted to mid-size businesses, network marketers benefit from increased ROI in much the same way.
So what’s the catch?
Much like anything else that seems a bit too good to be true, there is indeed a catch – using or sending out manual email alone isn’t enough. Instead, the study identified that increased ROI seems to be uniquely tied to email automation. Even then, marketers had to find the right email automation program with the right features for their needs to gain the most benefits.
When businesses and marketers did successfully find the right email automation platforms, email marketing outperformed nearly every other marketing channel in terms of ROI. This includes television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, affiliate marketing, and even this year’s most coveted trend, video content.
Simply put, if you aren’t utilizing email automation, you’re cutting yourself off from a significant source of return unnecessarily. No matter where you are right now – just starting out or exploding into the stratosphere – you can and will still benefit.
Targeted Email Workflows
As a network marketer, your email protocols should always be staged in five individual stages: attracting, connecting, converting, closing, and recruiting. Whether list members are brand-new or they’ve been selling under you for years, you should be able to quickly identify exactly where they are in that process and what approach will encourage them to enter the next stage.
That’s where automation comes in.
Automated email workflows can handle much of this work for you, filtering through your email lists and their contacts to identify and/or tag each contact. In seconds, you can “clean” your data and see important statistics that help you form new workflows that better target each customer from wherever they are right now.
Taking this a step further is the fact that email automation can often automate other email processes. “Set it and forget it” approaches let you specify exactly how you want to reach out to a lead depending on how they’re engaging with you right now.
If someone writes in about a specific keyword (e.g., “how to order a product), you can tell the system to automatically email them the information they need. Instead of waiting for you to be available, they feel catered to and supported – and more likely to “buy in” to your opportunity, product, or experience.
This is just one example – automation workflows may include anything from page views to shopping cart abandonment or even influencer value in your network. With the right customization options, you can target email workflows for almost any scenario.
Improved Results and Data Visualization
How many people bought into your last campaign? Do you know how many of your leads are male versus how many are female? Which of your last six campaigns had the highest click-thru or conversion rate – and what was it about that campaign that was especially persuasive?
Questions like these are all a part of a network marketer’s toolkit in identifying and nurturing leads. They also just happen to be tasks you can automate through email automation, rather than filtering through your data manually to identify results for each campaign, product, or opportunity.
Instead of nitpicking, you can simply log in and click a few buttons to generate a visualization or report that identifies exactly where you’re succeeding and what needs work. You benefit because you see critical statistics before, during, and after each network marketing or lifecycle stage. That makes it easier to react, predict, and target your efforts to receive the most ROI.
More Focus on Lifestyle; Less Time Wasted
Network marketing is about lifestyle. That’s why most network marketing experts refer to it as a lifestyle business rather than a corporation. Most of us don’t have any interest in starting a company or chasing multinational growth (it’s way too complicated); we want to make income for ourselves with less effort so we can enjoy more freedom.
It’s the flexibility and freedom that comes with working for yourself from anywhere that attracts most network marketers to the business in the first place. And who can blame them? There’s just nothing better than having the freedom to decide how, when, where, and why you work – not to mention the freedom to increase your income based on effort.
Email automation furthers your flexibility and freedom goals by removing all the painful tedium from your email marketing attempts. Through the creation of custom workflows, you can automate new campaign creation, HTML email templates, promotion creation and disbursement, or even personalization (e.g., greeting leads by name) with only a few short clicks. Many advanced automation platforms also offer full automation of data sorting, filtering, and opportunity identification (new potential recruits) based on keywords.
That leaves you, the network marketer, with far more freedom and flexibility to focus on more human aspects – like nurturing leads, cultivating new referrals, and approaching the leads that show the best chance of converting when they’re ready to convert.
(Or taking a vacation; that’s just as valid. No judgements here!)
Network marketing is all about making your business work for you, no matter what that looks like within your lifestyle. Email automation just happens to be one of the best tools available to help you achieve your goals.
