Inbound Marketing & welcoming people to your world is crucial to the building of a strong relationship with your future customers – and it’s easy.

You’ve created your landing page, added in your lead magnet (reason to opt-in), connected the opt-in form to your list. Often the onboarding process stops there – we’ve got the opt-in. That’s all we need -right?

Wrong.

Welcoming people to your community is a not-to-be-neglected step in Inbound Marketing. Make sure people come in knowing who you are and how you are relevant. It’s all about the value you bring and how you go about delivering it.

From Lead Magnet forward (in an ideal marketing world) begins the process of onboarding and building your relationship with that customer.

It’s known as onboarding people to ‘The List’. The net outcome of onboarding people to your list is that they will feel much more connected to you. Much less likely to feel like you’re spamming them and much more likely to feel the value that you bring – and thus be more likely to pay attention to your stuff!

Developing a strong connection with the people on ‘The List’ is MARKETING GOLD. Why?

• The List allows you to connect with your prospects and customers without media cost – just you and them… one to one…
• The list allows you to build Lookalike Audiences in Facebook™’s Ad Manager. If you are not sure what this is, take a look through this blog on Facebook™ Custom Audiences.
• The List is a large part of your Goodwill. It has significant value if and when you sell your business.
• The List is a marketing asset you have control over – not a platform that may not exist at some time in the future.
• The list is an important commitment by the prospect to allow you to communicate directly with them.

How you welcome them into your world and onboard them will determine how willing the prospect will be to purchase from you further down the line. That’s right – one of the main roles of holding people on a list is to maintain the contact and foster the connection.

Travel your prospects from ‘warm’ audience status to ‘hot’ – with appropriate sequencing and trust building

Prospects new to your list are warm audiences. Your next communications to them are the best tool you have for travelling them from ‘warm’ to ‘hot’ and then on to ‘raving fans’. Do not underestimate the power of this one to one communication They’ve agreed to take up your lead magnet. They may not realise that you now have permission to contact them. Rule Number One, therefore, is to let them know what to expect from you during the on-boarding sequence.

Let them know there will be huge value in reading your emails, let them know what you’re about, let them know you are THRILLED to have them in your universe, and what they can expect from you.

Developing the trust – not selling the stuff!

Remember, people buy from people that they feel they know, like and trust. Your onboarding sequence is designed to deliver exactly those three things. It is NOT designed to sell stuff. That comes later. Much later. Build the value and the trust first.

To onboard a customer, you do need more than one communication. Some send 2, some send 5 and some sent 21 or more (15 is common where someone has signed up for a 14 day free trial period for example). It really depends on the nature of your business and of your lead magnet. Plan what you would like the person to get most value from and use that information – one message per email, each time revealing more about yourself and how you roll. Be authentic – be you.

What and how you write is determined by your business values & positioning. I like things to be reasonably informal because that’s how I work – corporate life was never the right place for me, and I like them to be informative simply due to the nature of my business.  Emails should be very short paragraphs – single sentences even, easy to read (person to person style) and ideally should link back to some more detailed form of reference on your website, so you can see how engaged the reader was.

Whatever you need to say to the client coming in, say it your way – make them welcome, and mean what you say.

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Also, join our From Zero to Digital Superhero Facebook™ Group – we have lots of fun, and we learn heaps too. Just complete this form, and I’ll onboard you! (I’m fairly slack with my outgoing emails, to be honest – I’m much too busy doing other people’s!

Julie x