Turn Email Subscribers Into Customers

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Respond to the behavior of your subscribers

We’ve discussed the analytics and audience blocks for email automation.

Understanding these will help you build things to have subscribers get the right messages that make the most sense at the right time.

Which sparks the question…

How we respond to our subscribers’ actions?

Activities.

Activities are the events or behavior of your subscribers.

Your subscribers can have two types of activities: positive and negative.

Positive Activities are actions your subscribers take that align with your goals.

For example, they might buy a product, click a link, or sign up for a webinar. These are good signs – they show that your subscriber is engaged and interested.

Negative Activities, on the other hand, are about what your subscribers don’t do.

These might include not buying a product, not clicking on a link, or not signing up for something. It’s not necessarily bad, but it tells us they might need a different approach.

Here’s how to use these activities:

  • For a Positive Activity: When a subscriber does something good, like buying a product, you change their path. Stop sending them sales sequences and start sending helpful stuff like customer onboarding sequences.
  • For a Negative Activity: If a subscriber doesn’t take the action you hoped for, like not buying after a sales sequence, you can follow up differently. Maybe send an email asking for feedback or offering more help.

By understanding these activities, you can tailor your emails to fit exactly what each subscriber needs at that moment.

How to send a sales email when the subscriber is ready?

Let’s show how this works with the example from the last example.

You have a new subscriber coming in.

You store which lead magnet they opt-in from, and if it’s a specific one, we send them the sales sequence to buy the course.

ConvertKit Setup

  1. Send the new subscriber a 5-email sales sequence.
  2. If the subscriber buys on the 3rd email, we don’t want to continue sending the sales sequence and send them customer onboarding sequence.
  3. If the subscriber doesn’t buy after the sales sequence, we want to email them three days later asking what stopped them.

In ConvertKit, the positive activity is the purchase. With an event node, at any point a subscriber within an automation meets the condition of the event, they’ll be automatically pulled to that position in the automation.

Even if the subscriber has two more emails in the sequence, they’ll be removed from the sequence and put right at that point in the automation.

Unfortunately, not everyone will buy.

In those cases, we have to assume that they made it through the sales sequence (and the delay to see the final email and make the purchase).

If they flowed through, it’s safe to assume that an email asking why they didn’t purchase wouldn’t seem out of place to the subscriber. Plus, it’ll give you some answers as to why.

You can stack activity blocks.

However, the order is critically important.

Since the event pulls your subscribers forward, you’ll want to have the negative activity block (in this case, the non-purchase) above the positive activity.

Otherwise, customers will get emails asking why they didn’t buy.

Thinking about your automations in blocks makes the ideas you have more straightforward to build.

It also allows you to think about each piece individually.

You can then move blocks stacked together to sell into a single automation. This gives you the flexibility to have a single sales automation while having many different ways a subscriber is passed into it.