Nurturing prospects is an expected practice in digital marketing.
With today's tools, it's easy to build email sequences that last for weeks, months or (for the particularly ambitious) years at a time.
We're told that we need to make repeated "touches" of a prospect before they'll be willing to buy from us. It could take 7, 15, 35 messages or interactions before we finally win them over to make a purchase.
And while that may be true... what about the prospects who are ready to buy right now?
Sure, it might be a big mistake to overlook the prospects who need to be nurtured but it can be equally bad to not make it easy for those who want to buy to just go ahead and do it.
Take Ebay.com for instance.
Ebay was all about online auctions...at first.
Their entire business was built around it - they were the place to go if you wanted to get a great online deal.
But as Ebay's popularity grew, a portion of their audience wanted to bypass the whole auction process and just 'buy now'!
While scoring an amazing deal via an auction was what initially attracted people to Ebay, some potential customers were more than willing to pay more and get the whole thing over with right away.
- They'd rather not wait 7 or more days for the auction to end.
- They'd rather not have their bid beaten at the last possible instant from a competitor willing to pay a scant few cents more.
So in their wisdom, Ebay (despite being built around the concept of an online auction) asked themselves "why make them wait? Let them buy now!"
Hence the debut of the "buy now" button.
But wait a second....shouldn't we be nurturing leads more?
Guys like Dean Jackson talk about how as much as 85% of your prospects aren't ready to buy today, no matter how good your offer happens to be.
But why not appeal to both?
This is where the idea behind the Hurry Up and Wait Sequence comes from.
This is an automation sequence that allows some prospects to take their time while also allowing those who want to "jump the queue" to skip ahead; truly the best of both worlds.
If you want to learn how to create a sequence like this with ActiveCampaign, check out the walk-through video below.
Hurry Up and Wait Transcription
Okay, welcome to the "hurry-up-and-wait" automation sequence discovery inside of ActiveCampaign. So this is an automation strategy that you can use to do a pretty cool thing if it makes sense for your particular business, so let's jump right on into this.
So for the overview here, first of all, why would you need "Hurry up and Wait" sequence. What the heck does it do? How does it work? What ifs and uh frequently anticipated questions (because I don't know what your questions are). I'm going to anticipate what they might be and next steps.
So first of all, why would you need to have a hurry up and wait sequence?
Well if you have a situation where you have prospects coming to your site, then if you've ever felt like you wanted to give them a quick path to convert versus a slow nurture... then the "Hurry up and Wait" process is perfect for you.
I had a client recently that requested this type of a setup.
He would have a video demonstration on his site that people could opt in for so he wanted to follow up the video demonstration with some emails that would further sell, uh the service but if somebody didn't have any questions and he wanted to jump ahead he didn't really think it made sense to make them wait seven days, uh and go through seven emails, ...but for those who did need that additional nurturing, he wanted that to be there.
So that's where we came up with this concept of the Hurry Up and Wait, so that you could get both, uh prospects to have the experience that they need.
So what does it do? It allows your prospects to choose their own pace, It allows you to speed up conversions because you're giving them a quicker way to convert and it also allows you to identify the prospects most likely to convert now because they're going to be the ones that jump ahead and it's not very difficult to set up.
So what does it do exactly?
Well the hurry up process allows the hottest prospects, those who don't want to wait to skip to tomorrow's email instantly and if they happen to complete the goal which in this case, it was to book a call then they would skip the rest of the emails.
So there was seven emails in total, they would skip that now on the wait side. It allows the full sequence to be delivered to prospects who need further nurturing. So they're not ready yet. They need the full seven days to hear what you have to say and get warmed up to the idea.
So how does it work? Well, I'm going to give you a hint here.
It makes heavy use of the 'wait until feature' inside of ActiveCampaign. So I'm going to just jump in to show you how it looks.
What if somebody hits a link by accident? It just means they're going to get an email quicker.
What if somebody doesn't convert in the end? Then it just ends... the sequence just ends the goal that I have set up here. It just lets them pass through so if they go through the full seven days...and they don't opt in, then they just... this just adds... we don't do anything else at this point in time with them.
And uh, yeah, that's, that's essentially it you can... you can again you can customize it you can take the notify, um step out if you want. You don't have to send 7 emails, you can send to... you can send 20 so it's completely customizable depending on what your needs are.
So next steps. Um, if you would like to get further details on the "Hurry-up-and-Wait sequence, if you'd like some help with that, feel free to reach out at Automation Engage...
...and there's a few little ninja tricks that can really make this even less work in terms of using the skip links. And another little hint for you is um, the UTM tracking that I showed, there's a way we're using that to kind of help streamline the process and add some additional insight into how things are working with this setup.
So if you would like to get access to all of that just click on the link down below should take you over to automation engage and you can get more details. So thanks for watching and check out more automation strategies for ActiveCampaign to come.
If you'd like some help putting together a "Hurry Up & Wait" sequence in your online business, reach out to me here.
Want more automation walk-throughs like this? Let me know in the comments below.