One of the most important distinctions in e-mail marketing is the difference that should be established between broadcast e-mail campaigns and auto-responder series. The foundations of a good strategy towards e-mail marketing should possibly start with this distinction. In this article we will discuss what the difference between the two is.
Auto-Responder Series
If broadcast campaigns aim to awake your list of e-mails, auto-responder e-mailing aims to convert the lead into a customer and a customer into a multi-buyer. Overall this is the strategic goal of any business – and even though people have discredited e-mail as a useful e-mail marketing tool, you should never do so.
Auto-responder e-mails are design to build trust in your brand, to engage and convert. They are the bread and butter of any sales process. Without a proper auto-responder sequence your e-mail marketing efforts will not achieve their full potential.
During an auto-responder series one is basically trying to build a relationship with our potential client driving him or her through what could be described as the buyer’s journey. Buyer’s want to get help for some form of pain that they have, they seek some sort of solution in a particular product – and its up to you to provide them with that solution.
Buyer’s also want you to show them that you are really good at what you are doing, they want to engage with you and your content and through it recognise you as an authority in your field.
They want to bond with your brand, and feel comfortable with you – somehow having a sense that they know you and you are there to help.
They want to have proof that your service or product has given results to other people and that it may do the same to the potential client. And they also want to read reviews and other people recognising the results that can be achieved through your product or service.
Finally, they want to be called to buy and make a purchase.
An auto-responder series should answer all these questions in the buyer’s journey. More elaborate versions would also include upsell campaigns and re-engagement campaigns within the umbrella of auto-responder series.
We will discuss these different approaches at a later stage.
Broadcast Campaigns
All e-mail marketing should have a regular schedule of broadcast campaigns. These are all those campaigns that aim to alert and segment your public. In other words, they form the structure of a solid revival of your e-mail list.
Either through SEO, social media or paid search you keep collecting leads for your business. These leads should be engaged with auto-responder e-mails but you also need to nurture all those that are involved with you and your brand on a regular basis. Enter broadcast campaigns.
Broadcast campaigns are all those that are sent to all your leads and they basically aim to alert your potential client to a new product, service, news or piece of content that you have. You should never just send content or news about your business without some commercial goal in mind – if you are doing so this is a mistake.
Broadcast campaigns aim, therefore, to segment your e-mail list and to let your list know what goes on in your business at the same time. They can inform and sell or they can only sell. What should never happen is that they inform and provide content with no goal in mind – this happens a lot, believe me!
Ideally you should have at least 12 broadcast campaign prepared throughout the year. Every month you should re-engaged your audience with some piece of new information, a new lead magnet, a new product, a discount or promotion.
This will allow you to acquire potential new clients and re-engage all those that for some reason are quite and are not currently engaging with you and your brand.
