If you really want to impact your email marketing strategy, pay close attention!
When it comes to email marketing, most direct selling companies do the following:
First of all, they send email messages to ALL distributors. Mostly, these are special announcements such as new products, conventions, holidays, product promotions, reminders for auto-ships, etc.
If 10% of the audience opens that email, then they send the same email next time to the same people, looking for a higher open rate.
And that’s OK. An email is better than no email at all.
However…
Sending emails this way is not the best practice for direct selling companies who want to focus on user experience.
If you really want to make an impact on your distributors, here’s the workflow that you might want to follow:
When Sending Emails to Your Distributors
Think Backwards
How will they feel when they get the email?
Would they like to get the same email multiple times?
Of course not.
The only email they love to receive multiple times is their commission notification!
Anything else is just filling up their inbox with more noise. If they considered your email “noise” the first time, what makes you think it will be any less annoying to them the second time?
Before you click the “send” button, make sure they won’t get frustrated from viewing the same content again, or from seeing content that is irrelevant to them. Avoid becoming a nuisance and strive to always send them something of actual value.
For example, if they already received an email about the holiday hours of operation, and if they open the email, why would you want to send it again? It’s little more than spam at that point.
Why send an email about updating their profile for payout if they already did this a year ago?
If you send irrelevant emails, you’re training people to ignore you.
An Email Workflow for Direct Selling
The keyword here is “segments.”
A really good workflow for direct selling is segmenting the right people with the right message.
Let’s say that your new users need to update their payment profile in order to get paid. Instead of sending an email to your full database, you segment new users and only send the email to that certain group, thus creating a better experience.
Why would old users need to see the same email over and over?
An even better workflow is to create an automation for this task.
If a new distributor signs up, then the system sends an automatic email to update their profile.
If the new distributor updates their profile, the emails that reference this automatically stop.
If the new distributor doesn’t update, have the system automatically send them an email X days later.
Another example:
Let’s say that you tell your marketing team to send an email to everybody telling them that they should have their auto-ships active if they want to get paid.
Well, instead of blasting everybody, you segment people who don’t have their auto-ship set up for the month, that way the people who do have it active don’t get that email.
If you want to take it to another level
then build an automation out of this
You set your email system to automatically run this type of workflow for you and send an email every X days to all people with no auto-ship set up. That way, you did the heavy work one time, but enjoy the benefits throughout the year.
There are so many things that you can do with email:
- You can send an email encouraging people to upgrade from a basic pack to a higher pack.
- You can send an email to people who purchased X product but haven’t purchased Y product yet.
- Congratulate people who sponsored X number of distributors this month.
- Target partners who made X amount of sales.
- Contact customers who haven’t purchased in the last 30, 60, or 90 days.
- Upsell people who only purchased one product.
The possibilities are endless
The best thing is that with new technology you can automate all these processes. We know that it’s a lot of work and you might be constrained by your commission engine provider, but there’s always a workaround—always. Maybe you could do some push notifications for direct selling, for example.
If you have any questions, please go now to krato.com
Brian Palmer
Krato CEO
