What is a Sequence and Why Do I Need One?

This is a question that I find many entrepreneurs are afraid to ask when we start talking about marketing systems to grow their business to the next level.

Most often you’re familiar with a broadcast, which is a message designed to reach many people at the same time with the same message. You may already do this with a newsletter, promotion or business update. With a broadcast every subscriber gets the same message at the same time.

A sequence is a little different and accomplishes other objectives. When you create a sequence you’re building a series of messages that will be sent individually to subscribers based on when they opt in for content.

A great example of this is my video series 5 Days to Finding Fabulous Help for Your Online Business. You could sign up at midnight on Sunday or noon on Thursday but you’d still get video #1 the same hour.

Knowing how to sequence or “drip” content over time is a learned marketing skill and in order to do it well you should understand your audience, have clear outcome goals in mind and be prepared to track and tweak the success of your messages.

There are several types of sequences but to keep it simple they are usually for education or selling. Some might argue that education sequences are just pre-selling and they wouldn’t be wrong.

You might drip out your content over time to teach your leads what you need them to know before they’re ready to work with you. Or, once they purchase you might release content for buyers over 2-3 days or a full year depending on the design of your program.

Other times sequences are built to sell a program, event, package or service. These typically begin with something free to gain your interest and whet your appetite and follow up with asking you to take action getting closer and closer to hitting ‘buy’ and committing to the purchase.

When creating a sequence it might seem simple but one of the bigger mistakes I see entrepreneurs making in these campaign sequences is when they don’t consider what action the reader has to make.

Here are some decisions you can build into your sequence:

open/don’t open the email
click/don’t click the link
register/don’t register for the free content
share/don’t share on social media
visit/don’t visit the sales page
buy/don’t buy the offer
purchase/don’t purchase the upsell offer

At every step along the way you should be asking yourself how your message changes based on the decision the reader makes. It’s for this reason that campaigns can be incredibly complex, with sequences for each decision branch like a choose your own adventure book.

And sequences don’t just include emails! They might involve a live call or webinar, watching a video or reading a page, sequences might send out physical cards or gifts to leads, or give them a call from a live person or pre-recorded message.

So now that you know what a sequence is you may be thinking “this is way too much work! Why would I want to create one of those?”

Quite simply it’s because sequencing and campaigns that are built correctly work, and they convert a lot more followers into fans and leads into clients than doing it all on your own. Especially when it comes to growing your business to reach more clients, you’d go crazy trying to manually track who got what email on what day, and it would be impossible to track if they read or clicked unless you asked every single person.

Systems aren’t just about taking action, they’re also about automating as much as possible to save time, effort and money. Undoubtedly when working on marketing systems we begin with sequences to deliver content and sell to leads.

Are you using sequencing in your business? You don’t need a complex software system to create automated sequences! If you need support with sequencing and marketing systems check out our programs for online entrepreneurs.