Embracing Evergreen Email Automation
You want to send emails out regularly to nurture your audience, but life gets in the way. If you don’t find a sustainable way to manage your email marketing, you risk losing potential revenue. Plus, you might find yourself stuck on the content hamster wheel, always scrambling to keep up. Evergreen email automation is your new best friend. Create an email automation to nurture your audience relationships so will be able to focus on other areas of your business. Here’s how to do it.
Weekly Emails Are Hard
The Power of Evergreen Content
Creating a Batch of Evergreen Content
Integrating Evergreen Content with Email Automation
Introducing the StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan
Benefits of Automating Evergreen Content
The Challenge With Weekly Emails
So many of us small business owners get excited to email our subscribers. We know that email is an important marketing channel. We know that it’s part of the ongoing stage of the marketing plan. We start dreaming about what we’re going to put in these weekly emails, how we’re going to build relationships with our audience, and what color the call to action buttons should be. We talk to someone on your team about spearheading this effort, and away we go!
Oh man! This is going to be fun!
Fast forward to six weeks later and you’ve not really gotten great results (or have you? You’re not sure how to tell). And your life has caught up to you. You and your team member are busy. Like, really busy, and there’s just no time.
2019. My daughter is in her Wednesday dance class while I’m writing email newsletters in Starbucks. Great plan. Until the recital comes and she’s off for the summer.
I was in the same boat. For about a year I would send out a weekly email. It was perfect, I thought. When my daughter was in dance class, I’d head over to the next door Starbucks and crank out an email then schedule it out.
But then there’d be a snow day and class would get cancelled. Or the end of the year came and she didn’t have classes throughout the summer.
There was a break in the rhythm. And my consistency suffered.
Life gets in the way of our best intentions.
Not only that, but every new subscriber doesn’t really have access to all of those past newsletters that you’ve sent out. (Yes, I know, there is an archive somewhere, but they probably aren’t seeking that out.) So every new subscriber starts from scratch with your emails. It’s up to you to give them a steady diet of it.
The Power of Evergreen Content
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content is simply content that doesn’t have an expiration date. If someone reads it two days from now or two months from now it will still be useful.
Evergreen content covers the tried and true concepts that you have told customers time and time again. The truths that you can rely on.
When it comes to email marketing, evergreen emails are perfect for incorporating into an automation. Someone signs up for your email list, and they consistently get a stream of messages that you wrote once and can automate forever. Since the emails are filled with tried and true advice, they are valuable to your subscriber.
Examples of evergreen content in email automations
You have probably been on the receiving end of evergreen email automations and may not have realized it. Think of when you first buy a product and then you get a few emails over the next couple of weeks. Those emails were written by someone somewhere and then put into a customer journey of some sort that is triggered when you make a purchase.
Another might be that you sign up for a challenge or a boot camp of some sort. Every day you get an email that leads you to your goal.
Why evergreen email automations work
It works for your audience because they consistently hear from you and benefit from your helpful emails regularly. Some people aren’t always ready to buy from you right away. They may be willing to pay attention before they are willing to pay you money. So, until they are ready, you want to remind them that you exist and you know your stuff. This is the idea behind nurturing emails. And it’s one of the points we talk about in our marketing plans.
The difference with automating your nurturing emails, is that you only have to set them up once and they are continuously sending.
I’ve seen this happen where subscribers will purchase affiliate products, set up appointments, and become clients based on emails that were written years ago.
It’s like being an actor and filming a commercial, and then getting residuals on it for years to come.
In the meantime, when your audience is ready to buy, guess who’s going to be at the top of their list?
Creating a Batch of Evergreen Content
Brainstorm topic ideas
Okay, so you want to write an evergreen email automation series to nurture your audience. The first thing you’ll want to do is come up with a list of topics to write about.
Here are some category ideas:
problem / solution emails (if you have this specific problem, here’s a fix for it)
best practices (how the get the most out of the product or service we offer)
case studies (examples of your product or service working)
myths / truths (what do lots of people get wrong about what you offer?)
beliefs (what are things that your audience and you believe)
You want to come up with 5 different topics for each of the categories.
The idea is to give one simple nugget that they can read while they’re waiting in line at the grocery store. Something entertaining, educational, inspirational, or helpful. These aren’t long - only 200 words or less. But we’ll get to more best practices in a minute.
Batch Production
Once you know what you want to write about it’s time to get going!
In the summer of 2020 I wrote one email every weekday morning during the month of August. By the end of the month I had 25 short emails written. I put them in a Mailchimp automation and by September I had six months worth of evergreen content regularly going out to my audience.
Note: I did this in the hour every morning that my 7 and 10 year old kids were watching TV. I knew I wasn’t going to be interrupted. You can find a time that works for you.
Short sprints like this seem more doable if you have a beginning and an end in mind. Do you want to wake up early to write every day? Maybe not. But could you do it for a month so you know that you’ll have six months worth of emails written? Sure.
Email Writing Tips
You can read the in-depth blog post I wrote about email best practices or the email about great writing. But here are a few quick hits to get you started. As a Mailchimp Partner, these are always on the tip of my tongue:
Keep your emails 200 words or less
Make the reader the hero. Quick way to do this? Switch all of your first person pronouns to second person. So instead of saying “I, we, me and us, mine and ours" you can go to ”you and yours”
Example: Instead of “I will teach you” think “you will learn”
Always throw in a call to action of some sort. Even if it’s just, “reply and let me know what you think” this helps to build the relationship and also gives a touchpoint that you can track
Use the jab, jab, jab, right hook idea from Gary Vaynerchuk. Give helpful information in three emails. Then the fourth email can be more salesly.
Plain formatting is fine.
Done is better than perfect.
Integrating Evergreen Content with Email Automation
Nurturing Email Series
Most email platforms have some sort of automation capability. Take the emails that you have written and create a series of weekly emails that will automatically send. Mailchimp is the preferred email platform at Downstage Media, but you do you!
Here’s another trick: although you can have the emails go out every week based on when someone first subscribes, try this instead: Always have the emails go out on a specific day of the week. This way, if you have other email campaigns going out, you know that you’re not going to inadvertently send out more than one a day.
Also, when the person goes through all of the emails you can have them cycle through it again. Will they remember an email that they received six months ago? Probably not. And if they do, that’s not a bad thing. Good marketing is an exercise in memorization.
Personality and Personalization
These emails can be where a brand finds its voice. By writing one email every day for a month you develop a style and a brand voice. This can be so helpful for future copy that you have to write (and especially if you want AI to write some of it for you).
But mostly, it’s helpful for you to know what your style is.
Because personality shines through in writing and it will help your audience know your brand better.
On the flip side, when possible, try to throw in some personalization. Use your subscribers’ first names when possible. You really want to make each reader feel like you are talking to them and only them.
Monitoring and Adjusting
Over time your point of view, niche, and offerings may change. Every six months, go in and take a look at a batch of your email and make sure they are still relevant.
Annie Schiffmann is a Mailchimp Partner and a StoryBrand Certified Guide.
Double check that the links are still working.
Also, look at the analytics to see which emails are getting opened and which aren’t. This will help you understand which subject lines and preview text are stronger.
Take a look at where people are clicking in order to find out what they’re interested in.
Then, a year later - maybe next August - you do the sprint again. Write another 25 emails. And guess what? You’ll have an entire year covered.
Introducing the StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan
The Solution to Getting Your Email Automation Written
You may not have time to build an evergreen email marketing automation. But you like the concept of it. You get it, you just can’t do it right now, or in August, or ever.
The StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan helps you be proactive and in control of your marketing. Downstage Media will help you create a 12-month evergreen email marketing automation for your business.
What’s in the StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan
Although in this blog post we’ve talked about having around twenty-five emails, you can get started a little simpler with a year’s worth.
The StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan includes:
3-hour virtual session to create your evergreen email marketing automation
a plan for 12 nurturing, evergreen emails
30-minute six-month check-in with the customer
OPTIONAL: Set up in Mailchimp if they are a Mailchimp user
Pricing
Your investment for the StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan is $3997. To find out exactly what that all entails, and if this option makes sense for your brand, just schedule a call with me. We’ll figure out if it’s a good fit.
Benefits of Automating Evergreen Content
Time savings
It can’t be stated enough how much time you will save by creating in batches and automating it out. When you sit down and write every day, you get faster at writing. If you sit down to write once a week (maybe) you have to ramp up a little bit more. So the task of actually writing itself goes faster.
Also, yes, not having to create content constantly frees up a great deal of time in the week to week.
Consistent Engagement
Regular emails keep your brand top of inbox - and therefore top of mind.
Plus, it is so fun to get email replies from people in your audience. They are interested in what you’re sending them and they are interacting with it. It’s great! It’s just what you want!
Not only that, but when your audience engages with your emails in some way, your campaigns are less likely to wind up in Spam, Junk, or Promotions folder. That’s why I’m all about the CTA!
Focus on Growth
When you have a nurturing email series running in the background, that frees you up to work on other areas of your business growth. The person in charge of your email marketing can work on more time-sensitive campaigns. And you can work on doubling your revenue in the next year.
Embrace the Evergreen
Most business leaders don't spend enough time crafting an email marketing strategy that nurtures their audience. Instead, they end up reacting to whatever's happening with messy, last-minute email blasts. It’s a chaotic, short-sighted approach, and it's costing them big time.
An evergreen email marketing sequence puts you in the driver's seat of your marketing. It’ll help you automate weeks of content in advance so you stay ahead of your tasks.
Embrace this evergreen strategy and start creating your own evergreen content and setting up your email automation. The StoryBrand Sales + Marketing Email Plan is a starting point if you want a StoryBrand Certified Guide to take care of it for you. Or refer to this post to give you the steps you need to do it on your own!
