Favorite Email Marketing Funnel Resources

Hey there, welcome to this week’s video training. I’m Heather Stephens from Wise Owl Marketing. And today we are talking about some of my favorite funnel resources.

This is the beginning of a series of videos I’ll be doing, talking about the tools that I use in my business; the ones I recommend to my clients and why. This is really great for you because it’s going to save you a ton of time, money, headache, tech overwhelm, all that good stuff. So today we’re talking about email marketing tools. I’m going to share with you my two top favorites in today’s video.

Why You Need an Email Platform for Your Marketing Funnel

Let’s start off first by talking about why you should invest in an email marketing platform. Well, you want more clients, right? The sad part is most of the people who visit your website, they’re not ready to buy yet. And so what we want to do is give them some kind of a freebie in exchange for their email address, so that we can collect their email and continue to market to them over time.

You’ll need an email marketing platform as a way of collecting those emails easily and automated on your website. What this is going to do is to build know, like, and trust, so that they’re ready to work with you. It will also help you convert more of those leads into clients and sales. The coolest part about email marketing is there are so many benefits to it. It’s easy and affordable, so there’s no excuses to not be building your list. And your list is really the heartbeat of your business.

If you have a thriving, active, engaged list, you have a thriving, active and engaged business. So we want to make sure that you are growing your email list. And with the fact that it’s easy and affordable, there’s really no excuses not to be doing that. It’s also really, really high ROI. ROI stands for return on investment. And some of the latest statistics out there say that for every dollar companies spend on email marketing, they get $38 back in return on sales. That is a fantastic ROI.

It also converts better than social media. So, so many businesses I see out there start promoting on social media. They’re posting to their Instagram and their Facebook and they’re hustling in groups and they’re doing all the things, but they’re not growing an email list. Well, these statistics are probably going to make you a little sad, but hopefully they make you wake up and realize how important it is to be using email in your business.

90% of email gets delivered. About 20% gets opened. Okay, that’s all right, not great, wish it was more. But hey, I’ll take it any day, over the 2% of Facebook followers that will actually see your update in the newsfeed. How about the average click through rate in emails? The average click through rate, it’s going to vary based on your niche, based on the relationship you have with your audience, based on your headline and a lot of different things. But the average is 3%, well the average click through rate on Twitter is 0.5%.

You can see that email marketing is really a great platform to be using to connect with your audience. And it’s going to give you more engagement and connection and action from your list, than engaging with them on social media would.

My Two Favorite Tools for Email Marketing

My two favorite tools, I’m going to talk to you about today are Mailchimp (which is a great tool for beginners) and ActiveCampaign (which is a great tool for beginners and more established businesses). We’ll talk about the pros and cons of each of them. I’m going to share with you which plan I recommend that you start with, if you’re just getting started. And then I’m going to give you some bonus tips at the end of the video. So you ready?

Mailchimp

All right, MailChimp, first of all, let’s start with the recommended plan. I recommend that you sign up for the standard plan, which is about $15 a month if you’re just getting started with up to 500 subscribers.

The reason I recommend this plan is they do have a free version, but it’s not going to give you the bells and whistles you need to set up automations and do some more things that are going to save you some time and help you increase conversions for those leads that you’ve worked so hard to get to opt in. So definitely worth the $15 a month at the standard plan.

Okay, so let’s talk about the pros of Mailchimp. First of all, it’s super easy to use. You’re going to love it. It’s perfect for beginners. They have a really fantastic blog RSS, so like your blog feed to email features, so they will automatically send your blogs out for you in a really beautiful laid out template. They have a bunch of prebuilt templates. They’ve got a drag and drop editor, so it makes making changes to your emails super simple. You can see exactly what it’s going to look like while you’re building it. They have really simple automations, which is great for those beginners just getting started and dipping their toe into that automated world.

They do have send time optimization, which means they’re going to give you the option to send the email at whatever time is going to be best for your lead in order to get them to open and click. They offer A/B testing, which means you can send out an email with two different headlines for instance, and see which subject line gets more clicks. They also offer chat and email support at the paid level, which is totally worth it because when you get in and you start setting things up, you’re bound to have a question now and again and it’s really nice to be able to get the support to help you through that and save you some time.

The cons to Mailchimp – The automations they offer are pretty basic and they don’t offer really sophisticated segmentation, meaning you can’t send to a really segmented section of your list, based on behaviors and things like that. They offer some, but it’s pretty basic, what they have.

They also offer tagging, which is like kind of the new trendy thing right now in the email marketing that a lot of companies are promoting. But with Mailchimp it’s manual. So if you have a new client, you’ve got to manually go in and add that client tag to their email contact, which to me, it would never get done because I would never remember to do that. So the manual tagging for me is definitely a deal-breaker. But if you’re just brand new in business and you only have a few clients, it might be a good affordable option for you.

Also, Mailchimp is list-based. And this is fine and dandy, until you have people subscribing to multiple lists. So we were talking a few minutes ago about the segmentation. A lot of different business owners will then create different lists. Like they’ll have a client list, and they’ll have like a lead list, and maybe a blog subscriber list, and maybe a list for different lead magnets that they’re offering. So that they can segment it out and send personalized messages to each one.

Well, the fact that it’s list-based, if you’ve got a contact on multiple lists, you’re paying for that contact multiple times with Mailchimp. So it’s really not efficient budget wise. It’s more affordable, but it’s not efficient in the long run because chances are if someone likes one thing that you promote, they’re probably going to want to opt in for the other thing that you promote and then you’re going to end up paying more.

The other thing with it being list-based is you can’t send the same email to multiple lists. It asks you at the beginning which list you want to create this email for? And so it makes it a little clunkier and a little more difficult to do that.

They also don’t offer SMS subscriber sending. So people can’t get added to your list through an SMS text, and you can’t send them any messages either. They don’t have a built in CRM or sales pipeline. So with ActiveCampaign (we’ll talk about that in a minute) they have an entire sales pipeline, so you can basically walk people through your sales funnel. So maybe they start off as a lead and they book a strategy session (or a discovery call, or clarity call, or whatever you call it). They might sign up for that and then maybe based on that call you move them to the proposal stage, or you move them into one of your groups, or your packages, and so you can move them along a sales pipeline and trigger different automations or things along the way. So when they get moved into the client pipeline for instance, if they pay you, then you could automatically put them into a client onboarding nurture sequence. Mailchimp doesn’t offer that and it’s really kind of a downer. You can use other programs for it, but then that means you’re using more programs and paying for more programs.

They also don’t offer lead scoring. Lead scoring is when you land on a sales page of mine and I want to give you some points for landing on that sales page and then you opt into like three different things, and I’m going to give you points for those opt-ins. What that does is, it identifies to me which of the leads in my list are really active and looking for help, so that I might be able to reach out to them personally and say, “Hey, I noticed you’re interested in these things. I’d love to talk with you about them. Let’s hop on the phone.” So you can do that with ActiveCampaign, but not Mailchimp.

And also no site tracking. So there’s no way in Mailchimp to be able to say, “Hey, someone just visited this product. Let’s send him an email in a half hour if they haven’t bought.” There’s no way to do that in Mailchimp.

ActiveCampaign

All right, you ready to talk about ActiveCampaign? So they have a bunch of different levels. You can get started with them at $15 a month for up to 500 subscribers, which is the same price as Mailchimp and it’s going to give you more bells and whistles.

But I recommend, if you can afford it, their pro plan, which at the time of this video is $70 a month. If you can afford that, it’s going to give you so much more flexibility and marketing muscle in order to help you basically convert more of those leads you’ve worked hard to get into the clients or the customer stage.

The pros of ActiveCampaign. Again, it’s easy to use. Both platforms are easy to use. If you’re really used to one, there’s going to be a learning curve moving to the other one, but that’s okay. You’re smart, you can figure it out.

ActiveCampaign is really great for beginners. It’s also awesome for established businesses and it’s really easy to scale your business with ActiveCampaign. So if you want to clone automations and do things like that in order to easily grow your business, you totally can. Again, they’ve got prebuilt templates, they’ve got a drag and drop editor just like Mailchimp does.

But they have a really awesome visual funnel builder. So you can go in and create automatic automations by dragging these little pieces around on a screen and create your “if this, then that” conditions. So if they clicked on this link, then send them this message. You can do all of that really visually and it’s super easy to see and follow. This allows you to create really sophisticated automations that just aren’t possible with Mailchimp.

You can also clone automations. So let’s say you do a blog post each week with a downloadable. You can then go ahead and clone last week’s automation and set up a new one for this week. Go in and change your context or change your texts, change your link and you’re ready to go.

You can also do automatic tagging. So remember I said if someone becomes a client with Mailchimp, you got to go in and add that client tag to their contact with ActiveCampaign. It’ll connect with like your WooCommerce and your other ecommerce platforms. So that if someone does become a client, you can automatically tag them as a client and basically put them in your client onboarding and take them out of any marketing emails they might be in.

With this tagging, it gives you a really, really granular segmentation. So I can go in and say, “I want to send it to people who’ve downloaded these two, but not this one.” So that’s really cool, that you can do that. They do offer A/B testing, they have chat and email support.

They do offer SMS subscriptions and sendings, which is really cool. Like if you get interviewed on a podcast, you could invite people to subscribe through an SMS or through a message or thing on your website. And you can reply back to them through that as well. You can have the lead and contact scoring, which I talked to you about when I was telling you what Mailchimp doesn’t have.

The other thing is, is you don’t have to pay more. They can be on any list that they want to be on and because it’s based on contacts, not based on the lists, you’re not paying extra for them regardless of how many things they’re subscribed to.

They have the built-in CRM in the sales pipeline, they have the site tracking. So if you visit a product on my website, I can follow up in a half hour with a message and say, “Hey, here’s a 10% off coupon for that thing you were just looking at, if you want to go ahead and get it now.”

They also have site messaging, which is a slightly additional cost, but allows you to put one of those little talk buttons at the bottom of your website and be able to chat with someone and gather leads that way.

The cons of ActiveCampaign – Well, it’s more expensive. As your list grows, it’s a pricier platform to use. They have a blog RSS feature, but it’s really clunky. It’s nowhere near as pretty as what Mailchimp has. They offer some time optimization but only on the professional and enterprise levels. So if you want to spend big bucks for that, you can, otherwise you’re not going to be able to get that with ActiveCampaign. But you can with Mailchimp, so there are some cons to using it.

My Pick

So my favorite, and I’m sure you can probably guess right now, is ActiveCampaign. And here’s why.

It’s going to save you so much time in your business. These automations, you can really increase the conversions that you’re getting after opt-in because you can send messages that are really personalized based on the leads, what actions they have or have not taken.

You can also clone automations. So if you have a certain automation set up for one lead magnet funnel, you can clone it and set one up for another lead magnet funnel really easily.

The other thing I absolutely love about this is it allows me to clone automations that I’ve set up into my client’s account, saving them tons of time, tons of headache, tons of learning curve. They can go in and just change the emails and it’s ready to go.

ActiveCampaign also integrates with a lot of other platforms, so it’s really, really convenient to use.

So I promised you some bonus tips. Some other reasons why I love ActiveCampaign is they offer a free two week trial. So you can try them out and see what you think before you end up paying them anything.

They offer a free migration service. So if you’re on something like Constant Contact or you’re on Mailchimp and you want to upgrade to ActiveCampaign, they’ll move everything over for you for free.

And if you do the pro plan, which is that $70 a month plan I was telling you about, you also get one hour a month of one-on-one training to help you learn the platform. Not all platforms offer this and not all people who use ActiveCampaign are even aware that they get that. So it’s a cool tip. Make sure you’re taking advantage of that.

If you do go with ActiveCampaign. I do have a tell a friend link, you can go to (wise-owl-marketing.com/activecampaign) to get your 14-day free trial with that and to give it a test drive.

Stay Tuned for More!

Stay tuned because we’ll be doing more of these funnel favorites in upcoming videos. We’ll be talking about what scheduler to use, which payment platforms to use, things like that in order to really help you simplify your life and automate your business.

And again, the goal: you want to be able to help more people and make an impact, you want to be able to enjoy your life and just really be able to do more with less.

So anyway, there is my training for today. Please go ahead and like and subscribe and comment and share and all that good stuff. I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.

Try Out Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign

If you’re ready to jump right in, here are my “refer a friend” links for both platforms.

Remember, Mailchimp does have a free version, if that’s what you’re looking for. But don’t forget, that the basic paid version has so much more to offer.

While ActiveCampaign may be more expensive, it has options that MailChimp can’t touch. That’s why it’s my personal favorite. If you want the link to start your two-week free trial, here you go.