#26: Nurturing leads on Autopilot: The Power of Welcome Email Automation
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Welcome Funnels to Build Customer Relationships… And Your Online Service Business
In this episode of the "Brilliant Business Beautiful Life" podcast, we're unfolding the magic behind welcome funnels and the power of an email list — your own secret garden where your business blossoms. We'll dive into how these tools not only capture but also nurture the attention of your audience, transforming them into a community of customers who share in the excitement of your offerings. I'll share insights that will shift your perspective, making email lists and welcome funnels a priority in your strategy.
I've seen firsthand how vital an email list is to sustainable business growth. It's a tool that, when used correctly, can free you from the unpredictability of social media algorithms. I understand the hesitancy that comes with the idea of funnels — it can feel impersonal, cold even. But think of it as an introduction, the beginning of a relationship where you guide new friends through the story of your brand, leading them gently towards choosing to work with you.
I want to change the narrative around email lists and welcome funnels. They're not just tasks at the bottom of your to-do list; they're opportunities to connect, to grow, and to create a space where you have complete control over the dialogue with your audience. It's about turning that first handshake into a loyal partnership. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear understanding of how to craft a freebie that resonates, and how to build an email journey that aligns with your business's heartbeat.
We're going to get technical, but don't worry — I'll walk you through every step, making it simple and actionable. Whether you're just starting out or you've been in the game for years, there's something here for you. So, let's begin this journey together, and take a step towards creating not just a thriving business but a beautiful life.
(full transcription below)
Main Points
00:00: Unlocking Customer Engagement with Welcome Funnels - Brilliant Business Insights
01:21: Email Lists: Your Secret Weapon for Online Service Business Growth
03:07: Why Your Email List is More Valuable Than Social Media for Customer Relationships
04:11: Building a VIP Community: The Power of Targeted Email Marketing
05:23: Protecting Your Business from Social Media's Unpredictable Nature with Email Lists
07:16: Crafting Irresistible Lead Magnets: Strategies to Grow Your Email List
09:01: Maximizing Lead Quality: How to Attract Engaged Subscribers
11:01: Leveraging Canva Pro to Create Compelling Lead Magnets with Ease
12:14: The Anatomy of a High-Converting Landing Page for Email Marketing
13:16: Strategic Freebies: Aligning Your Lead Magnets with Business Goals
15:33: From Lead Magnet to Loyal Customer: The Art of the Welcome Email Sequence
17:34: Crafting the Perfect Welcome Email to Delight New Subscribers
19:17: Nurturing Leads on Autopilot: Setting Up Your Welcome Email Funnel
21:22: Tagging and Segmenting: Personalizing the Subscriber Experience
23:26: Beyond the Welcome Email: How to Continuously Engage Your List
25:38: Actionable Tips to Enhance Your Email Marketing Strategy Today
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Hi, I’m Samantha Bell
I’m all about helping you build the business – and life – you’ve always wanted.
Listen in for the simple, actionable strategies, mindset shifts, and practices you need to make your business thrive. Plus, a healthy dose of self-care, health, and wellness so you can live the life you absolutely adore while building your beautiful business.
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Transcription
00:00 Unlocking Customer Engagement with Welcome Funnels - Brilliant Business Insights
Welcome to another episode of the Brilliant Business, Beautiful Life podcast. Today, we're going to chat all about the concept of welcome funnels and email lists, which are your secret garden for growing a business that blooms with engaged customers who are as excited about your offerings as you are about providing them. You're already familiar with the power of digital marketing, but have you ever wondered how successful businesses seem to effortlessly nurture leads and turn them into loyal customers? Well, the answer lies in a well-crafted welcome funnel. I'm sure you've also heard the term. The money is in your list. Certainly, if you've listened to the wonderful Amy Porterfield, you would have heard her say those exact words. You know how much she talks about the power of an email list to grow your business, and it's coming on very good authority from someone who has done it multiple thousands of times. But even after knowing all of this so many business owners and entrepreneurs they still put building an email list and creating a welcome funnel at the very bottom of their to-do list. And today we're going to switch your thinking and put them both very firmly at the top.
01:21 Email Lists: Your Secret Weapon for Online Service Business Growth
If you're new here, I'm Samantha Bell and I'm the founder and creative director of 16th Ave Creative Studio, a one-stop-shop solution for women to start and grow their businesses through Swear Space, website design services, copywriting, brand design and email marketing. I'm also the host of the Brilliant Business, beautiful Life podcast and course creator of Startup Success. I talk about all things entrepreneurship, building an online service business and creating a life that you adore. If you're new here, hello and welcome. I'm so glad you're here Now. You get a good mix of information here, so, whether you're at the very beginning of your journey or many years in, there is something for everyone. So don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode, and it also helps us to be able to keep creating great content and reach more people. So let's get into it. Why is building your email list so important and what exactly is a welcome funnel? Whether you've started your list or not, after today's episode, you're going to have a much deeper understanding of why you need an email list, how to start it, how to create a freebie that's going to draw people in who are interested in what you've got to offer, so that you can be set up for success and make money in your business. And we also talk about the anatomy of a welcome funnel. Lots of people don't like the word funnel. They feel it's very cold and I tend to agree. I'm just using it for the purposes of this episode, because people know what I'm talking about.
03:07 Why Your Email List is More Valuable Than Social Media for Customer Relationships
But first things first, I want to get something out of the way, and it is social media. Social media is like the bustling streets of a big city it's very lively, but the connections you make on social media can be fleeting. You can have thousands of followers on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, but ask this question how many of them are truly tuned in to your message? How many people would notice if you switched from posting about artisan coffee to luxury car rentals? Would everyone notice? That's why an email list is like an intimate coffee shop where every patron there is there. Because of the unique blend that you serve. They notice everything.
04:11 Building a VIP Community: The Power of Targeted Email Marketing
Your email list is literally filled with people who want what you've got. It is the most targeted, specific audience. You have one that's already interested in what you offer and working with you. The email list is a curated community of individuals who put up their hands. They've stepped forward and they said, yep, I'm here for what you've got to share. They are literally your front row audience, your VIPs, and, unlike social media. They're yours, no matter how the digital world changes. Not only that, your email list gives you really important data about how your potential clients interact with your business, how many times they've clicked on something, what they haven't clicked on, and you can use this to really learn what they're interested in and who in your audience is the most engaged and disengaged. And all of this information can help you further target your marketing and reach out to those who aren't engaging with new information, with things that might appeal to them. It's really powerful.
05:23 Protecting Your Business from Social Media's Unpredictable Nature with Email Lists
You own your email list, but your social media following you don't own it. It can be disabled, it can disappear or be affected by algorithms without you having any control over your own account. You don't own your social media following and you most definitely do not have the deep data and connection advantages that you do inside your email list. So, as I often say, building your business on social media is building on rented land that the landlord can kick you out of in a blink. It's not a good idea. Just imagine if your social media accounts were shut down tomorrow. Oh my God, the horror. You would have lost all your potential clients in seconds, and without potential clients, you have no one to sell to. You've got no one to do business with, and this is why building your email list is so important. Now, definitely, social media is important. It's a fabulous platform to help grow your business, but what you want to do is get people off your social media and onto your email list ASAP, because it's a platform you own, you control it and you can build really meaningful relationships, provide amazing information and guide people on a thoughtful journey with you that leads to them buying your services and growing your business. Every person on your email list is someone who's reaching out for handshake. They want to know more about you and they are potentially going to become a very loyal customer. So that's very powerful.
07:16 Crafting Irresistible Lead Magnets: Strategies to Grow Your Email List
The next obvious question would be how do you get people onto your email list in the first place? Well, to entice all these wonderful people that are out there on social media or wherever you're interacting, how to get them onto your email list? You need to give them something. Give them something that they want, something that's valuable, something that is free, but not just any freebie. I'm talking about a very tantalising taste of your expertise. It could be anything like a checklist, a mini guide, an audio snippet, a workshop, a PDF, anything that provides them with immediate value, answer some questions, give them a quick win and leaves them wanting more.
08:09
Here's the secret to a great lead magnet. It should solve a specific problem or address a burning need that your audience has. It's not about the quantity. It's not about how big the freebie is. It's about the quality of what you put inside it. When your lead magnet delivers very real value, you will attract subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, rather than people who just download every single freebie they can get their hands on. Because there are people like that who just download everything, never look at anything and don't ever take action, and you won't get those people. If your freebie is very specific and gives genuine value, you're going to attract high quality leads into your email list.
09:01 Maximizing Lead Quality: How to Attract Engaged Subscribers
It's very important to have a good strategy around your freebie. Your freebie should also be part of your strategic sales system. It needs to naturally align with the next step of services or products in your ecosystem. The purpose is to capture the right people's attention, get them curious about you while giving them a really simple, quick win that they're chasing. Then, through your emails, what you're going to do is build a journey You're going to take them through a journey of getting to know you, getting to like you and getting to trust you, and then giving them the opportunity to lead to the next step of doing page work with you. Your freebie needs to give them quick wins, tell people about you and provide a way to connect with you through a discovery call or whatever.
09:56
The next appropriate step in their journey with you is the best and easiest way to create a freebie or a lead magnet is using Canva. Oh, my goodness, I love Canva. I use it so much in my own business and in my clients' businesses and it's just an amazing, amazing tool which continues to just get even more amazing. It's mind blowing what you can do inside Canva. They've even got AI inside of Canva. Now for writing, for creating images, for everything you can imagine. There's the free version and then there's the Canva Pro, and if you're really serious about building your business, I recommend getting on to Canva Pro. I'm on Canva Pro myself and it is amazing. There's also loads of free templates inside Canva that you can customize for your business and you can create something for your business maybe in as little as an hour if you're very focused and know what you're creating.
11:01 Leveraging Canva Pro to Create Compelling Lead Magnets with Ease
But after you've created your amazing lead magnet, what do you do next? What's the purpose of an amazing lead magnet If no one knows where to find it? And this is where you need to get technical. You need to get a robust email marketing platform where you can craft, nurture and grow your email list. Think of it like the soil and sunlight that'll help your list thrive. And for your freebie to bloom, to blossom, you need a landing page where people can come to claim your offer to get the free thing. The first step is to connect up your freebie to your email marketing system. And if you want to learn more about email marketing platforms that I recommend and that I use and recommend my clients use, have a listen to episode 23, which is called Tech Simplified what you Need when Starting your Online Service Business. It will give you some great options, plus all of the links you need to access them. So this episode 23,. I'll pop the link in the show notes below.
12:14 The Anatomy of a High-Converting Landing Page for Email Marketing
So once you've created your irresistible lead magnet, you need an equally compelling landing page, like I've just mentioned. Now. Your landing page should be concise. It needs to be gorgeous, it needs to be super laser, focused on explaining the benefits of your lead magnet, and don't forget to have a clear, enticing CTA call to action that encourages your visitors to subscribe, to click now to get the download, to get the free thing, and get on your mailing list. Then, once you've created your landing page, it's a fabulous idea to add a sign up form onto your website. You really need to have it on your home page, on your contact page and anywhere else it's relevant. If your lead magnet is specific to a particular one of your services that you offer, make sure it's on that particular services page on your website as well.
13:16 Strategic Freebies: Aligning Your Lead Magnets with Business Goals
Most businesses have multiple freebies and they're all relating specifically to different things. So have the most popular freebie on your home page and your contact page and then these specific ones, have them on the specific service pages so that they make sense. Pop that on your website. Put the link to your landing page also onto your social media profiles, included in your email signature and absolutely everywhere you hang out, everywhere you're online, so that it's easily accessible and you want to share details about your freebie. You want to talk about it on your social media. Talk about it on your podcast, in your blog articles. Get the word out there and constantly direct people to sign up to get your freebie. It's also very powerful to share it inside Facebook groups, networking groups, in any community that you're a part of. You really want to participate in conversations inside these groups, be very present, provide lots of value and then, when it's relevant and when the groups allow, you can post the link to your freebie, because every time you share it, every time you mention it, you are planting a seed in someone's mind about doing business with you Very important. Another great way of getting people onto your mailing list is to host webinars, to host three day challenges, and promote the webinars and the challenges again on your socials in these groups and get people to sign up to join the event. So you're not technically giving them the PDF freebie, you're giving them a free event and this is going to help infuse your list with more fresh new people who are really engaged with you and your offerings. There truly are so many ways that you can grow your email list in a natural, helpful, non-sleazy way that is going to benefit your new potential clients and, in effect, eventually increase your sales.
15:33 From Lead Magnet to Loyal Customer: The Art of the Welcome Email Sequence
When people sign up for your freebie and join your list, it doesn't stop there. That's not all you need to do. You need to then cultivate that new relationship and welcome these people into your world, and you do this with a welcome email sequence. This is the funnel. So picture this instead of getting stressed or confused about what this is and over-complicating it, simply think of it as a series of friendly chats. You're just getting to know each other, you're sharing some stories, you're sharing some information, you're building trust. It's not a sales pitch. It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and how it works is someone signs up for your freebie and they automatically receive an email that welcomes them into your community and, at the same time, it delivers the lead magnet or whatever freebie it is that they've requested, and it enters them into your welcome email funnel.
16:38
Now, a typical welcome funnel consists of four things your lead magnet, which is your irresistible offer that entices visitors to share their email addresses with you. The welcome email, which is the first email in your sequence where you greet your new subscriber and deliver the lead magnet. And then you're nurturing emails, which is a series of emails designed to educate, engage and eventually convert these leads into customers. And also, importantly, there needs to be a call to action, a CTA, an invitation for your subscribers to take specific actions, like making a purchase, following you on social media, just some way of further interacting with you. So how do you craft the perfect welcome email?
17:34 Crafting the Perfect Welcome Email to Delight New Subscribers
The welcome email is your first opportunity to make a really memorable impression. It should be warm and friendly and you should show your new subscriber that you're genuinely excited to welcome them into your community. And you can do this quite easily by using personalization like their name, talking about whatever the thing is that they've just downloaded or signed up for, being grateful, telling them how grateful you are that they've just joined you. And it's also a really great practice in the initial welcome email to set out some clear expectations so they know what to expect from you and your emails. Are you going to send them a weekly newsletter? Are you going to send them promotions? Are you going to send them tips or quotes, or what is it that you're going to be sending them and how regularly are they going to receive communication from you? And this transparency will build a lovely level of trust with your new subscribers, because people like to know what to expect.
18:43
But the key is when you tell them what to expect, you need to deliver on that promise because you've just made them a promise of how you're going to interact with them. So make sure you keep that promise. If you say you're going to email them weekly, email them weekly. If you say you're going to provide them with a quote this week and a podcast, the following and do that in rotation. Do that. Don't let them down, because they will unsubscribe, because you will have crushed their trust in you.
19:17 Nurturing Leads on Autopilot: Setting Up Your Welcome Email Funnel
Now, after that first email, there should be around four to five short, relevant emails that are set up in the funnel to automatically send to the new subscribers at set intervals, like every two or three days after they've signed up, and you set this up once inside of your email marketing program and then it delivers these emails in sequence at the right timings on autopilot every single time you get a new subscriber, just like magic. And the purpose of these emails is to make people feel noticed, to make them feel special, to introduce your business and how you can help them. Plus, it gets them to know like and trust you. And then, when you're ready, to start selling to them, because you need to eventually move from nurturing to selling, emails is one of the best places to sell because you're talking to a warm audience, not cold audience, who don't even know why they're around you. These people have chosen to be with you. Remember that. So you need to move eventually from nurturing to selling. When you are ready to sell to them, they already know you, they know what to expect from you and they're more likely to take the steps that you want them to take and eventually do some paid work with you. And always, in every single email whether it's a nurture email or whether it's a sales email always make it easy for them to contact you. Include links to your website, to your socials, to your booking, link to your blog, your podcast, your YouTube channel, your services page, anywhere, that they can easily continue their journey of getting to know you and your business. And then one day, when they're ready for your services, you will be the natural person they go to for help in solving their problems.
21:22 Tagging and Segmenting: Personalizing the Subscriber Experience
A powerful tool in most email marketing platforms is tagging and segmenting. Going back to the coffee shop analogy, it's a little bit like knowing which of your customers in the coffee shop prefers lattes or espressos. You can really tailor your conversations with your email subscribers to their taste, and personalization is really the key to giving them a heartwarming experience that keeps them coming back and eagerly reading every email that you send out. And this is a simple way to easily and instantly identify which people on your list are interested in specific things, and it enables you to further target your marketing. For example, if you are a health coach and you offer nutrition coaching, personal training, and you've branched out and added in how to choose clothes that best fit your body shape, you've likely got three different audiences that have signed up for one of your specific lead magnets. Remember I mentioned you're most likely going to have multiple lead magnets, so these people have signed up for most likely one of those. So if you start talking about a lead magnet that they don't know anything about, just say they signed up for your five steps to eating that will energize your life and reduce your waste loan but you start emailing them about how to choose clothes. If you've got a pear-shaped body, they're going to wonder if they're in the right place and will most likely unsubscribe because you're sending them information that they're just not interested in or they didn't sign up for and they'll be wondering hmm, this isn't for me. So using tags and segmenting and managing your list means that you can create amazing content that's specific to what people are interested in, and then you can develop a much deeper relationship with them.
23:26 Beyond the Welcome Email: How to Continuously Engage Your List
Lastly, let's talk about nurturing your list as a whole. This is not about bombarding them with emails. No one likes to just be constantly, constantly, constantly getting an overabundance of emails. It's about sending them thoughtful notes, little updates, helpful tips that they'll treasure, things that are going to help make their journey with you better, solve problems, and you need to make every message feel like a personal letter to a friend. And, importantly, don't ghost your list.
24:04
It is one of the most common and biggest mistakes I see amongst entrepreneurs. They don't think past the welcome series. So once the subscriber has got their lead magnet, their first welcome email, and then they've finished that four to five following on emails, they don't get anything else. There's nothing. There's white noise, silence. You've left your subscribers hanging. Then what I see is a lot of entrepreneurs become surprised or disappointed or don't know what they're doing wrong when they get a lot of unsubscribes the next time they promote their services or talk about something new in their business. So it's really important not to go silent after those first five emails. You want to keep up the relationship you want to keep your precious subscribers because they are precious Keep them engaged, give them stories, information, give them value that's relevant to your service offerings and the freebie that they've downloaded. So this is where, again, those tags and segmenting comes in really handy, because you'll know who to send what to. So there you have it your email list is literally a garden that's waiting to be tended. It is a space where real connections grow and flourish, away from the noisy streets of social media that you don't own.
25:38 Actionable Tips to Enhance Your Email Marketing Strategy Today
Now go, get started. Do not put it off for a second longer and, if you've already got an email list, have a look at your freebie. Have a read through of your welcome sequence and how you communicate with your list past that. Look for opportunities to make your emails more personal.
25:57
Do you need to update your freebie? Do you need to update the landing page or how you're marketing it? Is there a way you can make everything a little more personal, a little more magical or a little more valuable? And if there is, do it because it's really important and your business will only get better and grow because of it. So, regardless of where you are in your business journey, your email list will serve your business well, and it is an asset you cannot afford not to devote time and attention to. So those seeds with love and intention. Now don't forget to let me know which tip you liked the most in today's episode, and be sure to check out episode 23 to get all the lowdown on the tech you need in your business. And, as always, keep shining, keep sharing and let's make business beautiful. Until next time, remember I'm here cheering you on every step of the way.
