Customer Journey Templates

The most common questions we hear from people trying out marketing automation are “Where do I start?” and “How do I do this?”

In the past, you’d need to learn how to use complex software, figure out when to send, and create content from scratch while staring at a blank page. Now, you don’t have to do that anymore. With Autopilot’s customer journey guides, you get one-click access to tried and tested customer journeys to customize or use as-is. The following four guides are live in Autopilot today:

Automate your customer onboarding
Nurture your contacts with 4 emails
Send a customer feedback survey
Reactivate cold leads with the 9-word email

These guides were crafted by our in-house marketing team and are the fruit of over ten years of tinkering and experimenting. Now they’re yours.

1. Automate your customer onboarding

Let’s say you’re a SaaS business, named something like oh I don’t know…BigDataSocial.io. People are flocking to your hot new app and when they sign up for your service they need to a) know how to get started and b) feel welcomed. That’s where the “Automate your customer onboarding” guide comes in.

In this journey, your users receive a friendly welcome text message and an email with specific action steps to take after signing up. Two days later, a second email is sent introducing a direct point of contact and offering to schedule a consultation call. Being contacted on multiple channels delights and surprises users while the introduction to a real person adds a human touch.

Here’s one of the included design templates:

The guide is ready to go with two email marketing templates and a texting template - all you have to do is replace the content to fit your business.

But what do you do if the person falls off the map or never becomes a paying customer? That’s where the next guide comes in.

2. Nurture your contacts with 4 emails

Imagine there’s 1,000 people sitting in your marketing database who haven’t spent a dime on your products or services yet, but have given you access to their inbox. How do you nudge these leads towards becoming sales ready? By sharing the treasure trove of valuable insights you’ve learned over the years using the “Nurture your contacts with 4 emails” guide.

Here’s what it looks like:

The journey is four lead nurturing emails sent ten days apart with a personalized outreach email if a user engages by clicking a call-to-action. For the nurture emails, ten days apart is the best frequency to send while staying top of mind without making a dent in unsubscribe rates.

Here’s one of the templates from the guide:

In the template above, the call-to-action links to an already written blog post and draws people in who want to learn more. Or in other words, nurtures them toward a sale. The most effective nurture emails are short and include links to your most popular content, including blog posts, ebooks, videos, website pages, or future content you create.

With the “Nurture your contacts with 4 emails” guide, you’ll stay top of mind with people as they make the journey from stranger to customer. The coolest part? Once you set up your nurture machine you can use it over and over again with new leads.

Up next is a guide to help you get valuable and insightful customer feedback.

3. Send a customer feedback survey

Do you know what your customers think about you? Or if they’d recommend you to their friends? The “Send a customer feedback survey” guide helps you find out. This guide uses a proven technique, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), to gather feedback from your customers and set a baseline for long-term improvement.

In this journey, you send the NPS survey email to a group of established customers (we suggest at least 90 days old) along with a re-send 48 hours later for those who do not open the original email. The re-send increases email open rates every single time and is one of the few easy ROI wins you’ll stumble across.

Here’s the included email template:

With this email, all that you have to do is set up a survey with SurveyMonkey and modify the content to fit your business. Be sure to replace George’s picture with your CEO’s picture (unless your CEO is a giraffe too).

4. Reactivate cold leads with the 9-word email

This journey brings back cold leads from the dead with the magical 9-word email. What is this magical 9-word email, you ask? It is a fast and easy way to find low-hanging fruit (sales leads) while also testing the quality of your marketing database.

It’s this simple:

Subject: –first name–…

“Are you still looking at getting [insert your service/product]?”

Here are a few examples:

“Are you still looking at getting your kitchen renovated?”
“Are you still looking at improving your home security?”
“Are you still looking at buying a new patio?”

After sending this email to her stagnant list, one woman got 750 responses after emailing 1200 people (a 62.5% response rate!). The reason it works is it’s short, personal, and expects a reply.

And the journey looks like this:

The key is to add your existing cold leads and contacts that you want to reactivate into a “Cold leads” list. Then modify the 9-word email with your own content and let it works its magic.

This is just the start…

Guides remove the barriers to getting started with marketing automation and help you implement best practice customer journeys with just a few clicks. No more wondering when to send, what to send, or why to send.

There are tons more guides to come. We’re excited to make more ourselves, and even more excited to see Autopilot’s community of marketers create and share guides with each other.

What type of guides would you like see in the Autopilot Guide Book? Let us know in the comments.