Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
Welcome welcome welcome!
This Playbook is all about the Welcome Sequence.
This is one of the most powerful assets you can have for your business and it’s key for turning audience members into customers.
This week we’ll cover:
Let’s get started:
Why you need a Welcome Sequence
I’ve talked a lot about how important it is to get an audience member’s email and not rely purely on social media.
Getting an email ensures that we can continue to communicate with them and move them to becoming a customer. There are a number of ways to get the email - lead forms, lead magnets, newsletter sign up, free giveaway etc.
I’ve discussed those in other Playbooks so won’t cover it all again. What we’re interested in is what happens the moment you get that email.
Do you just wait until you have something to sell them and blast them an email? No!
In fact we want to hold back the selling as much as possible. If someone has just trusted you by giving them your email and you immediately hammer them with your offers you won’t make the sale. In fact you’ll end up in the spam folder, you silly goose.
Instead we ease people in with a welcome sequence.
A well constructed email sequences becomes an incredibly powerful sales tool to drive revenue on autopilot. That’s what we are building this week.
A welcome sequence is a series of emails that is sent to all new people on your email list. Regardless of when they sign up they get sent the emails in sequence.
So if Joe signs up on Monday he’ll get email 1 on Monday, email 2 on Tuesday and so on.
If Joyce signs up Wednesday she gets email 1 on Wednesday, email 2 on Thursday and so on.
Everyone is on their own timer.
Practicality wise I recommend using beehiiv (referral link with discount) for all your email newsletter and marketing needs. But there are many other tools that can delver email campaigns like welcome sequences.
What do we say in these emails? How many emails do we send? When do we send them? What’s too many emails?
We’ll answer all of this across the week.
Here’s an outline though:
Is this the only way to structure a welcome sequence?
Absolutely not. There are many ways.
But it’s a solid starting point for a business that does not yet have a welcome sequence in place. And from there you can tweak and optimise as required.
One caveat here - if your first sale is low cost (<$50) you can likely shorten the sequence. If it’s higher (>$500) ticket you’ll want to extend the sequence. I’ll discuss this as we talk about the sales emails in Parts 4 and 5.
After your welcome sequence you can also segue into your main marketing campaign emails. We just use the welcome sequence up front to ease people in, build goodwill and move them them to a first purchase.
Think of your first and sixth emails a tentpoles.
Email 1 is the first value email. Followed by 4 more emails to lock the value in .
Email 6 is the first sales email. Followed by 4 more to outline benefits, deal with objections and close the sale.
If these emails don’t hold up then all the subsequent ones don’t matter. For this reason take extra time drafting these tentpoles emails. We’ll give them special attention in this Playbook by giving them a whole Part focusing just on them.
Here’s a super powerful exercise.
Think of the last purchase you made online. Not from Amazon but from an individual creator or maybe a piece of software.
Go back to your emails and look for the first emails they sent you.
For example I just purchased Justin Moore’s new book on pre-release.
I can trace back in my email inbox and find the first emails he sent me:
These become valuable for me to review. Because I know they worked - because I made a purchase. Therefore there’s something valuable to be gleaned from looking back at Justin’s first emails to me.
On quick inspection I love that his first email is “what do you need from me?”. He literally asks what he can do to help.
Going back through welcome emails from creators you respect is a great way to start gleaning insights into what they are doing to get you to (one day) purchase.
Now that you know what a welcome sequence is this becomes an extremely powerful exercise - go inbox diving for treasure!
Then starting next we’ll kick off with Part 2 : The important Email 1