One of our main email drip campaigns is our free Startup Sales Success Course. It's an educational email course for anyone who sells a startup or SaaS product.
Today, we're pulling back the curtain to give you an insider's view of our objectives, why we've structured this drip email course the way we did, and what results we're getting. Almost 10,000 people have taken this particular course so far, and it's been a great lead nurturing and sales enablement tool for us.
We Sell Software, But We're Not "Just" a Software Company
It's important to understand that we've never considered ourselves just "a SaaS company." Even though we're making money with our sales CRM, we're ultimately helping entrepreneurs and salespeople be more successful.
Our software is simply the most powerful part of this quest. It fuels the financial engine that allows us to grow and have a bigger impact as a company. We also help founders succeed by sharing sales advice and supporting them to become better at closing deals through sales office hours and other means.
It goes back to the mission that started our sales consultancy: Never again should a great company fail because of a lack of sales.
What is This Drip Campaign About?
The drip emails are another way we support founders, and they're available to everyone, not only our paying customers. If you read each of these emails and take action, after a month, you'll have mastered the fundamentals of startup sales, no matter whether you have previous selling experience or not.
We created this email series after taking Patrick McKenzie's awesome Hacking Lifecycle Emails for Software Companies course. The underlying idea was to make our sales messaging itself valuable. That way, when prospects consume our sales materials, they get value—even if they don't buy!
If you provide enough value upfront, it's much more likely that people will want to buy from you. So we wanted to help people become more successful at sales. You've probably seen this picture from UserOnboard before:
But it's not just your product—it's also your sales and marketing material that should turn potential customers into awesome people who can do rad shit.
Aim to make your customers more successful through every interaction with your company.
This is why we're trying to get website visitors to sign up for our email drip course.
Promote Your Free Offers just Like Your Paid Offers
We prominently feature this signup page for the course in plenty of marketing materials (including the main navigation of our website, guest posts, YouTube videos, presentations, links in the signatures of our emails, podcasts, etc.).
We also feature an opt-in format at the end of each blog post, which is another great source of signups:
And another call to action on our homepage:
As you can see, I put my face on it. Apparently, putting the face of the course creator next to an opt-in page helps increase conversions, although some team members (not to be named and shamed here) wonder whether MY face helps or hinders conversion.
The important thing is to realize that you have to promote and "sell" your free drip campaign just as much as you'd sell a paid course or product.
The Sequence of Drip Emails
So let's review them in detail:
Email 1 (Day 1): "Do you have what it takes for Startup Sales Success?"
Open rate: 62 percent
This email is about helping readers build a solid foundation in startup sales. It answers some common questions founders often ask me, and I know that many people who sign up for this course are interested in learning these things.
A Personal Tone
More than just the content, it also sets the tone for the whole course. It's conversational; I speak directly to the reader and repeatedly offer to help, provide feedback, and invite the reader to send me an email.
Read the P.S. It again reinforces that our Startup Sales Success course isn't meant to just be consumed. It's meant to be much more interactive. I ask you to engage and to make a commitment, because I want to make sure you actually get real value out of it.
It's Not a Pitch Fest
Notice something else?
I'm not pitching Close here because people who sign up for a startup sales success course don't sign up to receive a series of promotional emails for our sales CRM.
Don't worry, though. This newsletter does help us move the sale along. It's a powerful lead nurturing machine, a true win-win for both the subscribers and us.
Email 2 (Day 3): "The 7 Deadly Sales Sins that startups commit"
Open rate: 55.9 percent
I briefly refer back to the first email just to refresh the readers' memory. Then, I share the most common mistakes people commit in startup sales because these are often easy wins. Simply stopping making any of these can lead to dramatically better results from your sales efforts.
It provides the largest amount of value to the widest possible audience with the minimum amount of effort, so I begin with that. More in-depth and specific sales tactics will follow later in this email drip campaign.
My Trademark Signature Line
You might also notice that I ended the email with "Happy Selling!" again. It's small, but it sets me apart from overly formal sales gurus or corporate sales training and makes it more personal.
The customer support team at MindValley has experimented with cheesy subject lines and found that their Experience Managers get better ratings when they use them compared to conventional subject lines like "Sincerely" or "Kind regards."
Many developers recognize Patrick McKenzie by his trademark "Howdy" or "Hiya," which is how he consistently opens his communications.
We live in an age when everything gets automated, and thus, we appreciate a personal touch, even if it's (ironically) delivered as part of an autoresponder series.
Email 3 (Day 5): "How to develop a predictable & scalable sales model"
Open rate: 56.1 percent
This email is pure, hard-hitting, and super-valuable information. Whereas the first two emails were more general and broad, this one is nuts and bolts. Both complete sales newbies and seasoned sales veterans often respond to this email, praising the value of what I shared with them.
Notice also that the first thing I'm "selling" here is not our product—it's a book by someone else.
Why do I do this?
Why don't I pitch our product first or my book?
If I were talking with a friend, I'd recommend she read that book first. And when I wrote the newsletter, I imagined writing it for a valued friend.
Finally, I pitch our sales CRM. I do so softly, with no hard sell, simply pointing out that our software is perfectly suited to implement what I just advised you to do.
The P.S.
Now, let's discuss why I'm including a P.S. in each of these emails. The P.S. is generally the second most read part of an email after the cold email's subject line and opening.
More people will read your P.S. than they read your actual body copy of your email!
This goes back to the days of printed mail order. However you feel about receiving physical junk mail, these direct marketers were the true pioneers of data-driven marketing, and they measured the effectiveness of every element of their sales letters.
One experiment found that 79 percent of people who opened a direct mail piece would read the P.S. first.
Use a P.S. in your emails to highlight what's important or reinforce a call to action.
Email 4 (Day 9): "Close More Deals. Make More Sales."
Open rate: 49.7 percent
I start with a quick recap of lessons learned so far.
There's no Such Thing as a Shy Sales Pitch!
Then, after I tell the reader that he's about to read a sales pitch, I launch into a long sales pitch.
Most marketers try to camouflage a sales pitch as something else, sending their prospects a series of advertorials. I do the opposite: I flat-out tell them about it.
I advise the reader to read this email not just as a prospective customer of our sales software but also as a student of the selling profession. He should read it from a meta perspective and see what he can learn from this pitch. Even if he's not in the market for a sales platform, he still gets value out of it.
One thing you should know about this email is that it's our most effective drip email in the entire campaign! No other email drives as many signups for our software as this one.
(I already talked about this email in a recent post titled Short vs. long drip emails: What works best for drip marketing campaigns).
Email 5 (Day 11): "Sales scripts & how to handle customer objections"
Open rate: 55.1 percent
After all these long emails, we keep it short and sweet. Two templates are super useful if you're eager to start selling. (And notice the stellar click rate here! People WANT these templates!)
You probably also notice that we include testimonials at the end of each drip email. Testimonials are simply social proof elements that make your statements more believable.
"Words from a customer’s mouth are much, much more trustworthy than a similar statement from a business owner or salesman." —Neil Patel, The Definite Guide to Copywriting (if you want to use testimonials, I encourage you to check out the section on leveraging testimonials, and the four different ways how you can utilize them).
These testimonials mostly reinforce the value of this email course.
We could have included testimonials about our sales software in there (which is what we ultimately make money with), but we decided against this because at this point in the buying circle, it's more important to keep them engaged with the course and demonstrate the value of actually using the materials.
Think about it: how many email courses have you signed up for and never completed?
If someone has already invested time in the course, I want to make sure he keeps reading my emails and puts the advice to good use so he'll get the most out of it. It's my job to sell him on this and motivate him to stick with it.
Email 6 (Day 14): "How to give a demo that actually sells!"
Open rate: 49.7 percent
This is another long email, but it addresses an important issue for many of our subscribers: giving product demos that sell. Too many founders and startup sales reps get this completely wrong.
Sidenote: Little Mistakes aren't the End of the World
You might also notice that we didn't have our "Happy Selling!" signature. I wish I could give you some great explanation as to why we changed it here, but the truth is that we just forgot it.
Like many startups, we operate with the "done is better than perfect" mode, and many things slip through the cracks. When writing this post, we noticed this error and fixed it, but I decided to include it simply to show you that it's okay to make mistakes.
There are a ton of things we could do better and improve upon. Still, as a startup, you constantly have to weigh: is it worth spending another hour fixing ______ [insert minor issue] when we could also be doing _____ [insert initiative that has the potential to really move the needle]?
Email 7 (Day 17): "The power of the follow up..."
Open rate: 49.5 percent
One of my favorite posts in this sequence is about the power of follow-up. It's a simple but incredibly valuable lesson, and the whole purpose of this email is to convince the reader to follow up more. Simply doing that can often lead to completely different results in their lives.
Email 8 (Day 20): "The most important lesson I ever learned in sales"
Open rate: 48.7 percent
In this drip email, I tell one of the most formative stories of my sales career.
We haven't discussed the power of storytelling yet, and this isn't the time or place to explore this topic in much detail. Let's just say that storytelling is a potent engagement tool if done well.
If you haven't done so yet, I encourage you to check out Alex Turnbull's post on how storytelling helped them to get 300 percent more people to read their content.
Email 9 (Day 23): "Startups: Why You Need To Call Your Customers"
Open rate: 47.3 percent
I've been advising startups for many years to pick up the phone and call their users more often.
It's one of the cornerstones of my sales philosophy, and I truly believe that startups can gain a lot from this.
Yet, it's also the most commonly rejected piece of advice I share with founders—they always give me a hard time, tell me why they won't do this, and give a long list of reasons why it's not the right thing for them. 99% of the time, it's just an excuse because calling users is uncomfortable and a bit scary, and it doesn't scale.
So, I try to make a solid case for why they should be doing this.
Email 10 (Day 26): "[video] A Crash Course in Sales Hacking & Deal Closing"
Open rate: 46.6 percent
After all those text-heavy emails, I share something to sit back and watch: a video of a talk I gave at a startup event in Europe. There are three reasons why I am sharing the video:
- It's a great addition to the lessons shared so far in this email drip campaign, not just because the talk's content complements the content from the emails but also because it's presented in a different medium.
- It establishes me further as an expert on startup sales (anyone who stands in front of hundreds of smart and talented founders for almost an hour and can keep the audience engaged must have some genuine knowledge to share)
- When the subscriber can watch and hear me rather than just read my written words, it's simply more engaging and leaves a deeper impression. (I now do a lot of video posts on this blog, but when we put the newsletter together, this wasn't the case yet, so seeing me in a video was very rare).
Email 11 (Day 29): "The Virtual Close"
Open rate: 45.4 percent
In this email, I share a sales tactic I use in almost every sales conversation before closing a deal. This is an extremely valuable lesson because so many founders trip up over a misconception about the sales process (I had to learn this the hard way).
Email 12 (Day 32): "How to Respond to Discount Inquiries"
Open rate: 44.7 percent
This email was actually a very popular blog post. We posted it on HackerNews and got a ton of traffic from it. There's a reason for this: startups constantly get discount requests, and with this post, we finally offered them a solid gameplan on how to respond when someone asks for a discount.
Email 13 (Day 35): "Book: The Ultimate Startup Guide To Outbound Sales (50% discount)"
Open rate: 44.8 percent
This email is a straightforward pitch for my startup sales book. It's currently where our startup sales course ends, and if a subscriber has followed along thus far, there's a good chance that he will find the book valuable.
From Name
All emails are sent from "Steli from Close <steli@close.io>." We've experimented with naming the sender "Close" or "Steli Efti," but the combination of first name + company name has so far shown the best open rates (by a few percent points).
Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers wrote a great post on deciding what From name you should use in your emails, in particular, the section titled "Whom should your webinar invitation come from?"
Open and Click Rates
Don't read too much into the numbers. Obviously, some emails are designed to get a click, some just to be read, and some to get an actual reply. (Unfortunately, we don't have the numbers for replies.) We've provided them to give you more insight into this drip email course.
What are Your Ideas for Improving This Drip Campaign?
We'll soon expand the course and add more lessons. Let us know if you have ideas for improving this email drip campaign.
