Testing and Optimising Your Follow-Up Sequences

Marketing follow-up is both a creative and a scientific endeavour. The creative part is setting up your sequences. (I explain my recommended sequences here.) The scientific part is keeping a hawk-like eye on how people move through them!

In particular, you want to measure how many new subscribers take you up on your offer. You should also track which 'offer points' are most successful. Eventually, this will give you an 'average days to sale' figure. Knowing this metric will let evaluate the effectiveness of different traffic sources.

Within your sequences, some email marketing tools will allow you to ‘A/B test’ your sequences within the tool. In other tools, you may be able to clone an entire sequence, and then use a separate trigger for your ’B’ version. If all else fails, you can spread two versions of your opt-in form across your website! That won’t give you a true A/B test, but it’s better than nothing.

The following is a list of testing ideas across the full Lead Incubator system (see the link above):

• Test Different lead magnets
• A/B test your lead magnet landing page
• Test different form call to action button wording
• A/B test your TY1 page (thank you 1: your print offer)
• Beef up your 'mailing pack' when you mail out your book. (Think: how can you show up differently or add more value? Can you try a different envelope or jiffy bag colour?)
• Make a different print offer (e.g. a different microbook)
• Add more or different letters, postcards and folded A3 newsletters to your mail follow-up sequence (M2)
• Add audio/video into your orientation sequence (E20)
• Extend the core story sequence (E3), potentially up to 30 emails
• Change the email frequency (from once a day to once every other day, or maybe twice a day!)
• Test a different offer
• Test the wording of your offer

As a rule of thumb, test your offer before testing your creative. Personally, I wouldn’t bother testing email design elements, fonts, and layouts, although you could consider these. I recommend using black, readable text, on a white background, with no ‘designed’ elements except perhaps your footer. But again this is a rule of thumb, so you might test this against a more visual layout.

In determining whether you have a winner, feed your number of opt-ins and number of ‘conversions’ into a statistical significance calculator. (There are various free ones online). Once you hit 95% statistical significance, you can declare a winner and log the results of your experiment.

Maintain a testing log, or else you will forget what you have learned! This could be a simple Word document or Google Sheet.

At micro level (within each sequence) you should monitor the open rate of each email (comparing each email to the others in the sequence).

This approach to testing comes full circle from my Google Ads work. You wouldn't ever launch an ad campaign without measuring and testing it. So the same goes here. If anything, you have even more variables to test than in a Google ad!

So however you go about it, get testing. The more people you add to your sequences, the faster you'll dial things in. You'll build a marketing system that pre-sells the people entering your world, so they understand your unique genius and only want to work with you.

To get the Lead Incubator system structure, enter your details at https://storysellinglab.co.uk/lead-incubator-blueprint/

Rob