Episode 228 - My Exact Welcome Sequence Strategy

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A Welcome Sequence Strategy That Will Build Relationships

If setting up your welcome sequence has been hanging over your todo list, you’re in luck because today I’m sharing my EXACT welcome sequence strategy with you – exactly how many emails I send, what they each cover, and how it works together with your opt-in sequences.

You’re listening to episode 228 of the Chasing Simple Podcast, and I’m your host – Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by Gaffin Creative – the best podcast production team out there!

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives!
Gaffin Creative: https://gaffincreative.com/podcast-production-management/
This week’s action step: Outline Your Welcome Sequence, or Snag Mine in My Shop
This week’s book recommendation: Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!

Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

If setting up your welcome sequence has been hanging over your to do list, you’re in luck because today I’m sharing my exact welcome sequence strategy with you. Exactly how many emails I send, what they each cover and how it works together with your opt in sequences. You’re listening to episode 228 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.

This episode was brought to you by Gaffin Creative, the best podcast production team out there.

How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?

Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing, welcome friend, this is chasing simple or practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content, marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.

I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.

When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.

If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do. Which is why I’m here, to help make marketing more simple and less time consuming, so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love.

Each week I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business.

Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Hey, sweet friend. It seems like I attract a lot of introverts with my marketing. And if that’s you, and you have been throwing around the idea of adding long form content to your marketing plan, you might have been thinking about a podcast. Podcasts are great for introverts.

And just for those of us who want the easiest possible route for creating long form content, because you can do it, In your pajamas, you can do it no matter what you look like. And all you need is, honestly, you don’t even really need a microphone. I suggest you get one, but you just need something you can record on.

And if you’re going to go that route, you need a great Editor. Now, whether you are thinking of starting a podcast or you’ve already started a podcast and you know how overwhelming the production side of having a podcast is, I want to introduce you to Gaffin Creative. Gaffin Creative is a podcast production company dedicated to empowering creatives like you and like me to use your voice and grow your brand.

They’re not just another production company, though. They’re your partners in creativity, community, and success. I have been working with Haley Gaffin and her team for, gosh, years now, and it is the best thing I spend money on in my business every single month. I love that I can hand off what I’ve recorded, and I know it’s in good hands.

I know that I can fully trust them With all of the audio aspects, they are so aware of how to improve your audio, but then they also do things like, Hey, if you make this tweak while you’re recording, it’ll sound even better. And they’re just, they’re really dedicated to quality. And I knew that, but I really discovered it when I had them edit the audio book for my book, Chasing Simple Marketing.

They were just so dedicated to the quality, and they were so committed to that project. Honestly, more than I was. And it was just such a reminder of how amazing they are to work with. I know that when I hand over my content each month, that it’s going to be wonderful, and that you, as a listener, are going to get a great experience because of them.

So, whether you’re launching your first episode, or you need some ongoing support, they are on a mission to turn dreamers into doers. The founder of Gaffin Creative, Haley, actually, she joined us on episode 93, where we talk about cheering other women on in life and business and episode 202 to discuss visibility and podcast guesting.

So if you want to learn more about Haley, those are two great episodes to go check out. And if you’re ready to take your podcast to the next level, visit gaffincreative. com and discover how they can help you bring your podcast to life. The way that I teach and that I use a welcome sequence is that there are two parts to every welcome sequence.

First, you’ve got your opt in sequence, and then you’ve got what we traditionally call the welcome sequence. With the opt in sequence, this is where new leads join your list. So whether it’s from freebies, lead magnets, opt ins, whatever you want to call it, or it’s from products they’ve purchased, however it is that they’ve joined your list, giveaways, this is where you want to add them to your opt in sequence.

So they join your list in some way, shape, or form, then they should get added to your opt in sequence. Now for this, I usually, and there are some different strategies depending on exactly how they opted in, but I usually do a three part optin sequence for a lead magnet or freebie. I send a delivery email just confirming like, Hey, you’ve signed up.

Here it is. I do a bonus tip email with a reminder to actually use the freebie, and then I do a final quick sales email. So very short and sweet, not something that’s super heavy, but just a, Hey, you got this freebie, you might also really like this other thing I have, and here are the benefits and all of those fun things.

Then, once someone has gone through your opt in sequence, you want to have your system, whatever it is, run a check to see if they’ve been through your welcome sequence before. And then if they haven’t, have it add them to it. This has been what I have found to be the easiest way to make sure people get welcomed, but they only get welcomed once, even if they buy multiple things or opt in to multiple freebies.

Just because, let’s face it, people will likely if they’d liked one opt in. Or you like the looks of one opt in, they may go through and opt in to a ton of your stuff. And what you don’t want is every single time someone opts in, you don’t want them to end up being welcomed again. And so what I like to do is my opt in sequences are each separate, and then I’ve got one welcome sequence.

And so when someone opts in, they go through the welcome sequence, my system, I use Cartra, My system then checks to see if they have the tag I’ve created for either completion of the welcome sequence or currently active in the welcome sequence. And if they have either of those, it removes them from the opt-in sequence, and that’s it.

However, if it doesn’t have either one of those, it then adds a tag to kickstart the welcome sequence, and then they join the next part of the welcome sequence, which I’ll get to in just a second. So that way you can make sure everyone gets welcomed, but they don’t get welcomed too many times because that’s not something we want.

Even if we want them welcomed and we want them to know who we are, we don’t want them to get welcomed over and over again. So they get added to the welcome sequence. Now, what I’m going to tell you about is a five email welcome sequence. And this is a great goal to have, but you can start with just one and then add the others on later.

Okay. Because The goal of a welcome sequence is to introduce this person to who you are and what your brain is all about, and it’s a lot more beneficial for you to have just one email than none, because you keep putting it off. Throwing that out there before I dive in, but for a five email sequence for what you’re ideally going to do, start by introducing yourself.

Share who you are, what you do, and why, but similar to if you’ve ever heard a web designer or a website copywriter talk about the about page and say like it’s not about you, it’s about you, but it’s not about you, it’s about This is similar. So you want to introduce yourself, you want to share who you are and what you do and why, but you don’t want it to be all about you.

You want it to be through the lens of how your story and who you are can help them. So if you’re only starting with one email, this is the one to start with as well. And if you’re going to do the full five email welcome sequence, this is where you’d want to start. Start by introducing yourself through the lens of what that means for them.

Then in the second email, I like to share a little bit of an unpopular opinion. So for me, I talk about being a marketing strategist that Doesn’t worry about best practices. The goal here is to showcase what makes you and your brand different. And for me, that means I don’t care about best practices. I’m not creating content for best practices, even though most marketing strategies do.

And so right then and there, people will kind of self segment and they’ll either go. No, thanks. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand why as a marketing strategist you would not Follow best practices and then the ones who get it get it and they’re gonna stick around the third email is all about addressing a common pain point that your audience has.

So if it’s something that you personally experienced at one point, you can share your story. Or if you actually didn’t experience that for whatever reason, but you’ve noticed this common pain point through your audience and through your students and clients, you could share anonymously. Of course, you could more of a case study type email here where you talk about Um, and then the third email should highlight a client that experiences this and how you walk them through it.

Then the fourth email should highlight a common issue that you see with your clients or students. So this is different from the one before because this one typically is going to be a problem that they don’t realize that they’re having. Whereas the other one is one that your audience, your ideal audience, I guess I should say, they know.

They know that that is Something that is a common pain point versus fourth email should be this is a common issue But they probably don’t realize that they’re actually having it and then you can also talk about you know How you’re able to solve that for them. So for example pretty sure mine talks about Trying to create content weekly and then being stuck on the hamster wheel So a lot of times people come to me and they think that batching content means creating a week of contents You a week’s worth of content at one time, and this email kind of shows them like, no, that’s not That’s not actually helpful and by doing that you’re still stuck on the content creation hamster wheel and so I’m kind of Showing that to them gently and then finally the fifth email should provide more value I like to give three tips that lead into another freebie that I have but you could also do Tips that lead into your next offer that you’re getting ready to sell them Or you could send them to blog posts that you’ve got written or, you know, there’s, there’s all kinds of things, but you want to provide more value.

And then once they finish this, you’ll do a similar check of, okay. You finish this welcome sequence. Have you been through the sales sequence? And so similar to the other check, that’s what you’re going to want to do here. And if they haven’t been through the sales sequence of your main offer, you’re going to send them through that, but that is a topic for another episode.

So your action step for this week is to either outline your welcome sequence or head to amandawarfield. com slash shop, you can actually snag my welcome sequence template. I have The opt in sequence and the welcome sequence all in one and exact and a flowchart of exactly how those should work together Already written for you and all you have to do is fill in the blanks to get yours up and running So you can check that out in my shop.

This week’s book recommendation is Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter If you like fake dating tropes, you’ll love this one. It’s so cute and I believe it kicks off a whole series, which I haven’t yet gotten to dive into, but I’m excited to. I will say though, this is a young adult. So for those of you who aren’t fans of young adults, you may not love this one, but it was so stinking cute and I just, devoured it.

So highly recommend Better Than The Movies by Lynn Painter. And I will link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.

Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode’s show notes, as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.

Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.