Activation: Turns Followers into Subscribers

Course content (32 lessons)

Email marketing is an invaluable marketing tool that creates a personalized path towards a sale. It’s also a helpful tool to understand your customer’s journey and interactions with you. On Instagram, you can’t tell if a follower has been with you for three years or three minutes. With email marketing you can see in your analytics every interaction your potential customer has with your content.

Here’s an overview of the key aspects of activation:

When a customer subscribes to your email list it’s a key indicator that they’re activated
You can encourage customers to subscribe to your email list with a content upgrade.
Examples of content upgrades include: a PDF, an email series, an audio/video recording, access to an exclusive webinar/event
To ensure you’re getting as many people to sign up as possible, consider building a specific landing page on your store designed for people coming from Instagram. You can build this page inside your Shopify store and share a PDF as a free digital product.

RESOURCES:

Beacon.by: A helpful tool to create content upgrades (they have a $0 ‘free forever plan’ and advanced plans are $49 and $99 USD/month)
JustUno: A website conversion tool that you can use to grow your business. It is specifically helpful for email upgrades on Instagram. JustUno is free to start (and it remains free when you have up to 5K visitors to your site per month).
Sell on Instagram*: Grow your sales with shopping on Instagram. You’ll learn more about this in the next lesson!
Klaviyo is a popular option for email marketing for ecommerce.

EXAMPLE OF A CONTENT UPGRADE:

At SkinnyMe Tea, the team created a free 14-day booty challenge and promoted it across multiple Instagram accounts — the team received 8,000 new emails in the first 24 hours of promoting this. These are exceptional results, though remember the key here is providing real value to the customer.

FURTHER LEARNING:

Shopify Blog: 4 Little-Known Ecommerce Email Campaigns You Can Steal to Grow Faster
Shopify Guide: How to Grow Your Ecommerce Business with Email Marketing (this guide is most helpful if you’re new to email marketing)
Drew Sanocki’s Double Your Ecommerce Series: Subscribe to Shopify Course instructor Drew Sanocki’s email list to learn tactics for doubling your ecommerce with email marketing

* Note that throughout the course the term “Shoppable Posts” is used, which is the same feature as “Selling on Instagram.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] You may not be a huge fan of email but the data doesn't lie. Email generates a lot of sales. Instagram and social media in general is a great way to develop and maintain a relationship between your brand and the audience. What it isn't great at doing is advancing each follower down the sales funnel. Ultimately you have to post the same picture to all your followers at the same time. You don't know, if they've been following you for three years or three minutes.
You don't know, if they're about to make a purchase or if they're just learning about your product for the first time. Email solves this problem. It allows you to create a sequence. To tell a story over time and intentionally pull your audience through from interest to evaluation to purchase. Each person encounters your brand slightly differently. Email does a better job of creating a more personalized path toward a sale. This is a part of the nurturing strategy.
Not only building a relationship between the brand and follow via Instagram, you'll also developing them into a potential customer via email. I've included a number of resources below to help you develop a successful email marketing campaign. And I encourage you to do so alongside your Instagram account. The number one strategy you can use to drive email subscriptions from Instagram is what's called the content upgrade.
There are a lot of different terms out there but ultimately you're trading their email address for a high value piece of content like an e-book or a free course. This is called a content upgrade strategy. I've included a few examples from my businesses in the resources below. The content upgrade strategy built into your Instagram profile is a surefire way to start building that email list. To ensure you're getting as many people to sign up as possible consider building a specific landing page in your store designed for people coming from Instagram.
By acknowledging where they're coming from, this usually increases how many people sign up. You can build that page inside your Shopify store and share a PDF as a free digital product. Remember, once you reach 10,000 followers, you can drive more traffic to a free using the Instagram stories links, rather than simply asking followers and visitors to subscribe, give them a good reason and provide value.
Over time your Instagram will build an audience and offer an amazing way to purchase products instantly. For those not ready to purchase right away, your email strategy will help guide followers through the funnel toward purchase or while Instagram continues to build trust. That said, here's something I'm really excited to share with you shoppable posts. Now you don't have to rely on email to take your followers over the finish line to purchase your product.
Shopify now lets you tag products directly inside Instagram, making it easier for followers to make the purchase with just a few clicks. I'll show you how this works in the next lesson.

Activation: Turns Followers into Subscribers

Course content (32 lessons)

Overview

01 |How to Build An Engaged Following on Instagram

02 |How to Create Content that Converts Followers to Customers

03 |⌛ Halfway There... ⌛

04 |How to Create an Instagram Sales Funnel

05 |How to Make more Sales with Influencer Marketing

Here’s an overview of the key aspects of activation:

RESOURCES:

EXAMPLE OF A CONTENT UPGRADE:

FURTHER LEARNING: