Our Guest:
Jason Martin has been running email marketing automation and funnels at Leadpages for the past few years. He has experience tracking leads from the opt-in to moving them through the buyer’s journey.
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to implement a marketing automation practice that converts
- How to create different marketing automation email sequences for different kinds of subscribers
- The number one tactic that effectively moves people through your funnel
Tim: Previously on the all new ConversionCast.
Jason: You’re not going to want to every single subscriber the same way. Like you said one person can be a CMO and one person could be a solopreneur. So at this point once they become a lead in our system, we kind of start all this different logic that really looks to see if we have any existing information on them and then we can start kind of pushing them in different directions.
Tim: This is the conversion journey in 13 parts as told by the Leadpages team. In this all new series, you’ll hear what we do each day at Leadpages to find, convert, and keep our customers. I’m Tim Paige and this is the all new ConversionCast.
So we’ve spent the first two episodes of the all new ConversionCast focusing on creating some effective pieces of content that you can use to promote. And that really speaks to in this modern era of marketing. It’s not enough to just say go to my website or go buy my thing or whatever. We need to have engaging individualized content. In this episode, I’ve brought Jason Martin on to talk about what to do once you have that content and somebody opts in, what happens next? Because this is an area of confusion for a lot of people. I think a lot of people think we’ve got them on the list and we’re done and that’s it. But a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes once somebody joins your list and that’s kind of what I want to talk about today.
So before we get into the specifics of that, Jason can you just maybe talk about what your role is here at Leadpages? What you spend your days doing?
Jason: Sure totally. So for the last couple years, I’ve been at Leadpages and the whole time I’ve really focused on email marketing automation and our funnels. That’s basically tracking our leads from the moment they kind of come to our web properties and opt in to something and basically moving them through them through that whole buyer’s journey.
Tim: I love it. And you’ve seen a lot of changes and you’ve seen the evolution of the way that we’ve done things because I think we’ve always been pretty smart about our email marketing and our automation but it’s just evolving and it’s getting smarter and smarter and smarter and you’ve been a huge part of that. so that’s why I’m excited to have you talking about this. so I think the first kind of the first thing to start with is somebody comes to our website and in the next couple episodes we’ll be talking about how to get somebody to come to your website or how we get people to come to our website rather. But somebody comes to our website, they come to a blog post they pull up a lead box. They enter their information and they click the opt in button. They click the call to action. What happens next?
Jason: Yeah, totally so when someone opts in we’re going to fulfil whatever that asset is that we promised them so whether that’s a landing page template, whether that’s a marketing course, we’re kind of then send that email back to them that provides them that asset and then we kind of take it from there. So that’s where all the fun stuff happens behind the scenes now that we have them in our system.
Tim: So what is that fun stuff? We send them the asset and I think that’s the pretty common steps but we’re still focused on behavioral marketing. It’s one of the biggest things that has allowed us to achieve the success that we have especially because our audience is so broad. It’s not enough to say we promote our stuff to marketers because it could be a solopreneur who had this idea for a widget and now they want to figure out how to find customers or it could be a CMO at a fortune 500 company trying to figure out how to optimize things better and you’re not going to talk to those two people the same way. So can you kind of walk us through a little bit of the magic that happens that allows us to decide what’s the next step for that person?
Jason: You’re definitely right like you’re not going to want to talk to every single subscriber the same way. Like you said one person could be a CMO and one person could be a solopreneur. So at this point once they’ve become a lead in our system then we kind of start all this different logic that really looks to see if we have any existing information on them and then we can start to kind of pushing them in different directions. Let’s say they are not a customer, we can then move them kind of to the next phase which basically we’ll send another email after a delay that we can ask them a list of profiling question, right? So we can kind of get an idea of their business, the size of their list that kind of stuff so we can kind of reach for more information at that next step.
Tim: And it’s that done with an email that they’re asked specifically that information?
Jason: Yeah totally. So after the delay we’ll send another email that basically has these trigger lengths when we’re using drip. So that’s a profiling question in that email and based on their response we can start pushing them down our funnel in different directions.
[0:05:09]
Tim: And so they give you that information and how do you discern what information leads them where? I mean if somebody was to say I don’t know they’ve got a list of whatever 10,000 people. How do we use that information to say well here’s what we do next?
Jason: I think that’s a lot of internal kind of strategic decisions that companies can make whether if the sales team has a certain criteria that they’re looking for in a potential customer. I think that’s all kind of articulated from the different departments and then that way we can kind of identify which subscribers the best for which track.
Tim: Awesome. Now before we go any further, I have to mention that all throughout this episode and in the all new season of ConversionCast. You’re hearing what we do at Leadpages to automatically grow our email list and boost our sales every single day. Well in my next webinar I’ll show you exactly how to do this for your business. In this free training I’ll give you a live step by step walkthrough of the top 3 tactics we use at Leadpages to automatically grow our own list week after week. This is going to be everything you need to know to implement this in your business so make sure you check it out. To reserve your spot on the webinar text LEADPAGESLIVE to 33444. That’s all one word LEADPAGESLIVE to 334444 or head to Leadpageswebinar.com
All right, let’s get back to it. Okay got you. So we’ve gotten them– They’ve gone to a blog post or a piece of centerpiece content or a video or whatever it was. They’ve opted in. we delivered the asset to them. Initially we send them kind of a welcome email letting them know what to expect but then after a delay they get an email where they can kind of self-select, right? So are they? What stage of the game are they at? What happens from there?
Jason: Yeah that’s right. so after that point, they’re going to be involved in lots of just different non-customer type emails so if we’re running promotions, if we’re sending a really cool piece of content to everybody in a noncustomer list things like that. They’re going to be involved with those type of emails and the cool thing then in those emails at the bottom we’ll have a CTA that kind of pushes people to a webinar. And so that’s kind of like the next step where we can kind of help push them to the next phase of the funnel after they’ve maybe seen some cool assets, they’re in different buyer’s phases. If we can get them to a webinar then it kind of opens up that next step for us.
Tim: You know I think we weren’t going to talk about this but as were kind of diving through this, I do think it would be interesting because I know that not everybody who listens to the all-new ConversionCast is running webinars. I think that’s probably a mistake for a lot of folks. Webinars are probably not for everybody but for nearly everybody I think it makes sense. But this is really a key part of how we end up converting those leads to customers. Of course we have promotions. Of course we have videos. We have organic signups. We have partners promoting us and that kind of thing. But webinars have been for a very long time a big revenue driver and a driver of new business for us. So this has been one of the areas I think and you can correct me if I’m wrong. But this has been one of the areas where we’ve spend a lot of time and energy getting our automation processes really dialed in around the webinar. Is that right?
Jason: 100% right on that.
Tim: So what are some of the things that you and the team have done around webinars to make sure that people are getting marketed to the right way?
Jason: If we can get people to opt in for a webinar given that that’s one of our biggest sales approaches and I’m talking to the man himself who converts on these webinars and so what you’ve done over 250 now at least, right?
Tim: 750 in the last 3 years.
Jason: Oh my gosh. Okay. So a couple multiples of that. So you’ve seen it in the trenches and you definitely know that that’s our biggest opportunity to connect with customers that kind of that one to many scale. So we’ve really dialed that in like you were saying. We have a pre webinar sequence and a post webinar sequence. And I think the post webinar sequence in this conversation is really fun because not everybody can actually attend the webinar. So we like to break it down in a few different buckets.
Tim: And so people that obviously we’re trying to get them on the webinar. That’s everybody’s goal and I think we’re still dialing it that in as best we can. But once they’re on the webinar– Once the webinar happens, there are different ways that we have to communicate and I think that’s what’s you’re getting to is if somebody doesn’t attend the webinar we have to market to them a certain way. If somebody attends the webinar but doesn’t way we market to them a certain way. If they attend the webinar for a short period of time but don’t make it to the pitch, they get marketed to a different way. So can you just maybe talk about even just one of those facets? Let’s say somebody registers for a webinar and they don’t attend, what happens then?
[0:10:11]
Jason: So if they register and don’t attend, that puts them in an interesting bucket for us. It shows that they’re interested. At the end of the day though, they haven’t seen the content and they haven’t seen a pitch and so really that gives us kind of an opportunity in the post follow up to kind of bundle it or kind of tighten it up I should say in those last few emails to really tell them what they missed, introduce kind of like some of the content and then also introduce the offer as well that you talked about on the webinar. So we want to give those people an opportunity to still get in on this exclusive time based promotion. So we really want to articulate what that offer is and then give them a few emails with reminders to kind of drive home that scarcity when it ends within that 7 day time period.
Tim: So the folks who don’t attend the webinar they’re not pushed to watch a replay. They are instead educated through email and then we try to get them to buy.
Jason: Yeah, that’s right.
Tim: Got you. And then for the folks that do attend but don’t buy because I think it’s pretty clear what happens to folks that do buy. We’ll talk on a future episode more about what happens with folks who become customers. But the folks that attend the webinar they got the information. Maybe they made it to the pitch and they didn’t buy what do we do with them?
Jason: They made it to the pitch and don’t buy, that’s another bucket that we can have that basically helps us kind of see or understand where they’re at already and then we can hit them kind of with maybe another hard sales pitch. Maybe they’re just indecisive about something. Maybe we can kind do some comparative type copy to help get them through that decision process.
Tim: Got you. They’re pretty educated. They got a strong sense of who we are. A strong sense of the problem that we solve. And at that point they haven’t decided so we’re trying to push them off the fence. We’re trying to show them, look here are your other options. Clearly we’re the best. And from there if they haven’t made a decision then we move them into our regular non-customer marketing, right?
Jason: Yup. And then that will kind of start something up that we call the kaizen sequence which maybe we’ll save that for another episode.
Tim: Just give the overview. What the idea of the kaizen?
Jason: Sure. So that’s kind of a slow nurture for us where we really still, it’s still a sales pitch but we’re really talking about the product itself. A lot of the benefits that we give to the users and we kind of hit a lot of the different angles. So whether that’s really product focused or list building focus whatever that maybe but they all end with a call to action to still purchase.
Tim: And how long is the kaizen?
Jason: I think right now we have it about 10 emails.
Tim: Got you.
Jason: We’ve had it a lot longer in the past but we’ve kind of shortened it up and we’re always experimenting.
Tim: This is such a great insight or view of a company that with over 40,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I think this is a really critical topic for a lot of folks so thank you so much for coming out and just giving us this view of what you’re doing. So thanks a lot.
Jason: Yeah definitely. Thanks for having me, Tim.
Tim: Next time on the all new ConversionCast.
Speaker. Ideally we’re putting together the best quality content that we can with all this research. So the one side of the research is like is anyone searching for his? But the other side is giving you the information you need to make something that’s really informative.
