Email sequences are fantastic for staying in touch with potential customers, building trust, and converting prospects who would otherwise have gone to a competitor. In short, it involves sending out a number of pre-set emails over a period of time to achieve a specific goal, such as selling your services or staying top-of-mind with a business opportunity.

You have probably experienced email loops yourself as a consumer, for example after downloading a guide or starting a free trial period. In the days that follow, you receive emails with a specific goal, often to get you to buy one of the company's products or services. 

But how do you plan and set up an email loop? In this post, we'll show you the 7 steps to get started and succeed with your emails.

Step 1: Who are you talking to?

The first important step is to understand your target audience: their desires, needs, and problems. This step is absolutely essential in order to later write emails that build trust and convert. In this step, you want to identify:

• Who is your target audience?
• What problems do they have?
• How can your product or service help them?
• What objections do they have to buying, e.g., lack of time or technical ignorance?

An easy way to find out is to talk to your sales department; they have a good understanding of who your customers are and what they need help with.

Step 2: What do you want to achieve?

The next step is to define what you want to achieve with your email loop. Do you want to convert potential prospects? Stay top-of-mind in a long sales process? 

Email loops will look different depending on what you want to achieve with them, and defining your goal allows you to create content that best fulfills it. The best thing to do is to create several email loops if you have several different goals, as this greatly increases your chances of actually succeeding.

Step 3: Plan your content

What kind of content does your email loop need to contain in order to best achieve your goal? If it's about converting customers who have already started a discussion, success stories can be useful. If the contact is instead a website visitor who has only downloaded a guide, it may be better to focus on how your product can solve their problems. 

Write down what kind of information the contact needs to achieve the goal you set in the previous step.

Step 4: Design your email sequence

Now it's time to decide what information should be included in each email in the sequence. It's always a good idea to start with a welcome email and then try to plan the content so that it is interesting and easy to understand for your prospects. 

If you want to explain how your product solves their problems, start by showing that you understand their problems and then provide the solution in subsequent emails, not the other way around. If you want to stay top-of-mind, it can be a good idea to ensure that each success story shows a unique result and not just that they increased sales, for example. 

Also, remember your goal with the sequence, what you want to achieve, and plan the content based on that.

Step 5: Write your emails

Once you have planned the entire loop, it's time to write the content. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Use the right tone for your target audience. If you are targeting banks, you should use a professional tone, whereas if you are targeting small business owners, the tone can be more relaxed to create a more personal relationship.
• Spend time on the subject line. That's what gets the contact to open the email in the first place.
• Ensure that the email is easy to read and free of unnecessary content. Stay on topic and only write about what the email is about, not things that are irrelevant.
• Make it appear to be from a real person. Set the From address and From name to a real person, not a generic info@foretag.se email. 

Step 6: Set up your email automation

To save time and ensure that no emails are missed, you should set them up in an automation. There, you can set which email should be sent and when, so that you can be sure that a contact receives them at the right time. 

The time interval between each email is determined by the type of email sequence. If it is a shorter sequence aimed at converting interested leads, you can send out a new email every day or every other day. If, on the other hand, it is a sequence designed to keep your company top-of-mind during a longer sales process, once a month may be more appropriate. 

Step 7: Test and adjust

Now you're done, and all you have to do is keep track of how the loop is performing. Are the contacts opening it? Are they clicking on the links you added to the email? Are some emails performing better than others? 

It's important to test and adjust, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Low open rate. If you have a low open rate for an email, the easiest thing to do is to try a new subject line. Can you make it more interesting? Easier to understand? Adjust it and see if the open rate improves.
• Low conversion rate. If you have a low conversion rate, there are a few things you can consider. Do you have a clear call to action, i.e., what you want them to do? Have you written the email in such a way that it clearly shows that you understand their problem and how you can solve it? 
• Low click-through rate on links. If your prospects don't seem to be clicking on the links in the email, you can check whether it's easy to understand what they lead to (is it a blog post? A video?) and why they should click (will they learn something? Will you help them?).

Also, remember that an email loop is not a "set it and forget it" strategy. It requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment to achieve the best results. Be patient, keep testing and adjusting, and over time you will start to see your emails generating more leads and conversions for your business.