Obviously everyone has their own idea of how many follow-up emails is too many, and how many is too little. I’ve seen sequences as high as 30! What I’m going to do is show you what my philosophy is and what I’ve found works with both my funnels and funnels I’ve built for clients.
Typically, my go to numbers are a minimum of 3, and a max of 6 with some exceptions of course. It’s all going to depend on 2 main factors:
There’s people out there who truly believe in hammering their list with offers, and hoping that they either buy or unsubscribe. This mentality couldn’t be more detrimental to a growth strategy. You’re basically saying that you only have time for buyers, and you aren’t interested in cultivating relationships and helping to nurture prospects until they are ready to take action.
There’s a reason people don’t feel comfortable going to car lots… its this mentality. You’ve probably heard this cliche before of “pressure makes diamonds”. People LOVE to throw around these cliches and then hang their hat on it like its true 100% of the time.
Yes, in some situations pressure can be a good thing… but why would you want to hammer people to buy your product or service… thats how you get a bad reputation, a high refund rate, and it ultimately adds friction into your flywheel.
Now, before we dive in I just want to preface this with the fact that I’m only talking about follow-up email sequences here ok?
I’m not talking about nurture sequences or anything like that. By “follow-up email sequence” I mean the emails you’re sending someone who enters your funnel and doesn’t convert. These emails are specifically trying to get them to take that conversion action.
So first and foremost, the traffic temperature or the audience awareness level is going to play a key role here. Marketing and sales is really relationship building. So think about cold traffic as meeting a completely random person in a bar or something like that. When they give you their number and you reach out for the first time, how many text messages are you going to send?
If you send too many too soon, you’re going to come off as pushy and someone who needs a lot of attention right? And if you never follow up with them, or if you wait too long, they could forget about you completely or become disinterested.
Well, if you’re following up with someone who just gave you their email for the first time, just like in a lead generation funnel, you’re typically going to want to send 1 email a day for maybe 5 days. After that, you’ll move them over to a nurture sequence. Any more and you’re just risking them never opening another email of yours. That’s why we have nurture sequences after all.
That’s one side of the equation. The complete other side might be If you’re following up with someone who just finished a webinar, and you have a limited time offer. In this case you’re going to increase the number of emails you send. For example, on the last day you might have as many as 3 or 4 as the countdown starts to run out.
One to say its the last day, you have 12 hours left don’t miss out, 1 hour left get in while you can, and maybe a last chance email.
So it’s really going to depend on the situation. For the most part, you can get away with more emails the warmer the audience or the traffic is.
If your follow-up email sequence is to buy a tripwire or an upsell after lead magnet optin… I wouldn’t recommend doing much more than maybe 4 or 5 follow up emails. Anymore than that and you’re going to overwhelm them.
Remember about how that looks in a relationship right? If at that point they don’t take action… 1 more email isn’t going to make the difference. By that point they’ve said they need more nurturing. They either need more time or more information. That’s when you’ll want to transition them over to a nurture sequence.
Sometimes, the offer can play a role as well, and thats when you’re going to see the higher number of emails in a sequence. A great example is if you’re trying to get a warm lead to buy a high ticket offer, and the offer has an expiry date, or some kind of limit, you’re going to get away with a few more emails. If it’s something you offer on an ongoing or an evergreen basis, you wont get away with as many.
Event funnels are another great example. With live events, someone might opt in to show interest 6 months out. So in that case you’ll obviously want to send them at minimum an email a week, with a higher number in the last week before the event. But remember, this is a very specific scenario.
It’s really important that you don’t send too many. When you do, or when every email you send has some sort of offer in it, people will stop opening up your emails. There’s a number of high level influencers, and even marketing experts that send me so many emails that I rarely open them because 99% of them are a sales offer.
This is especially true when companies start to really scale. Eventually you have so many different avenues for someone new to interact with your business and your automations start piling up. If you’re not careful you’ll end up sending multiple emails a day simply because you’re not segmenting your subscribers correctly. Thats why it’s really important to go through your funnels every 6 months to a year to stay on top of those things and make sure that your new leads and customers are getting the exact experience you want them to have.
People make decisions based on one of or a combination of these 3 things…
Every follow-up email sequence should have at least 1 email based on each of these premises. And if you have a positive case study or testimonial, then that would be the 4th I would say you should have. If you don’t have any, then you should have at least 1 gain, 1 logic, and 1 fear based email.
You can really tell when someone has no idea what to write for their emails when every follow-up email basically has the same message said in a similar way. That’s why I always recommend people start with the gain, logic, & fear emails to give them an idea of how you can write emails that draw off different types of decision makers.
So they key takeaway here is to consider how the pace of your follow up sequence is going to affect the relationship you have with your leads for each specific funnel, and to also consider the action you want them to take, based on strong that relationship is with you and your company.
So at the end of the day, I believe each email sequence should have a minimum of 3 emails, and aim to have no higher than 6 unless the situation calls for it like an offer that’s expiring, or if its for a live event or something like that.
This is why having a flywheel based marketing strategy is so important. You can stop thinking about leads that go through a follow-up email sequence and don’t take action as lost opportunities. With a flywheel they simply move to a nurture sequence and given valuable content that helps strengthen that relationship until they are ready to become a customer or client.
If you want to learn more about the Flywheel Marketing Method, you can watch a free training here.
If you’d rather work with me directly to build your Marketing Flywheel you can book a free call here.
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