How to Re-Engage the Email List You’ve Been Ignoring and Generate More Appointments

Whether your email list has 150 prospects on it or 15,000 prospects, chances are you are like many of the business owners I work with and have a segment of email addresses for people that are a good potential fit for your product or service…but you haven’t emailed them, texted them, called them, or seen them in a while.

A question I constantly hear with new customers of Connect 365 (our automated sales follow-up system) is: ‘What do I say to get more of my prospects into an appointment?’

So today I wanted to outline for you our (Re)Connection Sequence.

A simple, yet powerful multi-touchpoint email sequence that will reengage your prospects and warm them up to the point of a phone call.

Segmentation

I always want to start by thinking about…where did I last leave off with these prospects?

Have they been receiving emails from me pretty regularly in the past…but I just took a couple weeks off?

If that’s the case, they probably don’t fit directly in this process.

Has this list of prospect been curated from a number of traffic sources? I.e. People I met at a recent networking event, people that filled out the contact form on my site, referrals that never moved forward, etc.

If so, this is a great starting place.

Have I recently pitched each of these prospects over the phone?

In this case, you may want to approach it differently.

This process is ideal for prospects and leads you’ve gathered over the years, but haven’t had much correspondence with in the past few months.

It could be a list of prospects you’ve met at various events, LinkedIn contacts, webinar attendees from a workshop months back.

Once you have the list of people that you’d like to message it’s time to work on the actual sequence and delivery method.

The (Re)Connection Sequence

Message 1 – Would you like to join {INSERT COMMUNITY}

Email is a great way to build a community you run on LinkedIn and/or Facebook.

And with your first message to a prospect after month(s) or years, you can’t dive straight into your offer.

You need to warm them back up to yourself and reintroduce yourself as providing value and being an authority.

We often recommend our clients utilize this first email to invite their prospects to their Authority Leadership Platform.

If you don’t have a group, you could use this to invite them to a community you belong that makes sense for them.

You’ll want the group you run (or the 3rd-party group you invite them to) to be hyper-focused on how these prospects identify themselves or based on what they care about.

If you sell Branding Services to Small Business Owners, don’t make the mistake of sending them to a group only about Branding.

That’s a group for you.

It’s not the main focus of your prospects.

For more information on proper positioning of an Authority Leadership Platform – check out this post.

Message 2 – Teaser for new content

For the second message, you still want to provide value and engage with the prospect.

What we recommend here is to find a piece of content that you’ve already created or are considering creating and you’ll tease it out here.

You won’t be just simply sharing a link in this message.

But instead, try to dive into the need a prospect has for your service and look to get them to engage in your messaging.

Here’s an example that we have used in our automated sales process before:

subj: firstname – curious about your thoughts on this…

{firstname},

Based on your role at {company}, I was hoping I could get your quick feedback on a brand-new report we're considering publishing.

Are you interested in learning more about the key factors of a LinkedIn profile that leads to more connections, leads, and appointments?

Hit reply and let me know if you’d be interested in the idea.

Thanks,

Josh

Message 3 – Offer the report/content

In this email that we send a couple weeks later, we follow-up with our prospects whether they responded to the second message or not.

We aim for the email offer of the report to be positioned as something that is new or exclusive for them.

You’ll want to make sure that you aren’t just offering them the name of the report, so be clear about the outcome they can receive by downloading this report.

Think, “What is the end-game for people who take this advice?”

“How does this correlate with the pain point your prospects have and the solution and outcome you can create?”

And be sure to share the answers to these questions with your prospect in this email.

subj: want a free LinkedIn profile assessment?

Hi {firstname},

Just wanted to follow-up on a message I shot over a couple weeks back.

My team is rolling out some new processes with regards to our LinkedIn profile assessments, and I'd love to get you in line for one of these.

The report will ask you a couple easy questions about your current profile and from that we'll put together an A-to-Z gameplan to turn that dusty, old profile of yours into a lead gen center.

As we're rolling this out, I'm only sharing it with a few of my hand-picked contacts and just ask that you not share this link out with the general public.

Here's the link to take the assessment:

<<ENTER LINK>>

Let me know if you have any questions, comments or feedback.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Josh

Message 4 – Follow-up on Report Offer

Always follow-up.

If this is an important piece of content that can help nurture your prospects, make sure they have a chance to see it.

Message 5 + 6 – Call Offer Related to the Report

Relate your phone call offer to the report you’ve been messaging the prospect about recently and how they can implement it in their life or business.

This is key!

Right now they know you for this report. And you want to give them the opportunity to learn more about how to implement the content.

Keep it consistent.

You don’t want to just jump straight to your offer of how great you or your service are.

Tie it into the purpose of the sequence.

How to Increase Your Response Rate with an Automated Sales Process

Email is busy.

There is more and more of it.

And email providers have created safeguards to put promotional material into spam folders.

If you want to get more results, more opens, and better responses, you have to think about how your email is delivered.

Is it a cold, newsletter style?

Or does it look and feel like a personal outreach?

An email sent from one person to another?

Those are the types of emails that get opened. That get replied to. And most importantly, that get results.

If you’d like access to all of the scripts in the (Re)Connection Sequence, as well as more training on how to automate your sales process, and make sure more of your emails actually get opened and read by your list, be sure get a 14-day Free trial of Connect 365 – our automated sales machine – today.