How to Achieve a 90% Engagement Rate on Email Campaigns

Email Automation can convert leads into revenue, the trick is in the “how”.

At Accelo, we use a series of automated emails that have helped us increase our lead to demo rates by over 200%. As a result, our sales team arrive at the office every morning ready to sell and leave with a full calendar of meetings for the following day. Here’s how:

The Process

Email 1, Day 0: When a prospect starts a trial or contacts us with interest in a demo, they receive a  “Welcome” email. A key highlight of this email is that we focus its content around what the prospect needs. Instead of asking for a demo meeting right away, we ask “I’d love to know what problem you're hoping to solve with our product at Company X?”

Email 2, Day 0: After the prospect has had some time to play with the platform we send a second email that comes from the Sales Account Executive who will be managing this lead. In the email, instead of asking if they can look up their calendar and provide us with times available, we present two options to the prospect:

• Option A: “Want to do a one-on-one demo together?” If the prospect is keen then he can click a link where he’ll see the AE’s availability and pick a time that works best for them.
• Option B: “If you’d rather take a DIY approach, here are the guides you need to to get going.” It’s important to know that the user will most likely gather questions about the platform once they’re in it, so encouraging our users to go in and “play” with the platform more often than not results in even more meaningful conversations once the demo meeting is set up.

Email 3, Day 2: We know and understand that timing is everything and there are many things that can get in the way of that initial interaction so we follow the previous email with a friendly message reminding the user to “feel free to book something that suits you directly on my calendar here.”

Then we wait… and after 3 days…

Email 4, Day 6: At this point, we can tell with a fair amount of certainty that having a demo might not be the prospects’ main priority, so we go to task into what we call Building Urgency, where we present to the prospect an estimate of how much money they could be losing by not leveraging what our platform has to offer.

This email is one of our most popular in this journey and usually does the trick to finally set up that demo call.

Then we wait some more…

It’s important to note that at this point in the process, Accelo has an average engagement rate of 82% and more than half of our qualified leads have proactively  booked a demo - but I still have some prospects in my pipeline that don’t seem interested in a demo, but hey, I paid good money for that lead so I’m not about to let them go.

Email 5, Day 8: In this email, we focus on providing value, not that we don’t do that on the others, but in this one, that’s the main goal so we provide links to walkthrough videos that will help the prospect get more acclimated with Accelo. These include:

• Tour Video: an awesome run-through of Accelo by our product expert, John, with lots of real-world examples.

• Video Library: shorter bite-sized videos; perfect if you want to learn about just the bits that most interest you.

Email 6, Day 10: Our trial period lasts 7 days, and in most scenarios, this time is more than enough to get a sales process started but not everyone's timeline is the same and we acknowledge that by offering to extend their trial for a week or more. Surprisingly, this offer is enough to start conversations with a prospect that hasn't even had one direct interaction with us before but have been doing their thing and “playing” with the platform.

At the end of this process we see an engagement rate of over 90% with the qualified leads that have entered the pipeline, and over 65% conversion rate from email to demo.

If you found this helpful and would like some more tips and tricks on email automation, check this out.