Get off the content treadmill with an evergreen email newsletter [ConvertKit Product Update]
As online creators learn more about email marketing there is a standard journey they go through in setting up their email marketing and automation.
- Beginner — Sending broadcast emails for each individual piece of content as they are published.
- Intermediate — Automated emails that welcome subscribers to the newsletter, pitch a single product, then drop them into live broadcast newsletters along with the rest of the audience.
- Advanced — A fully automated email newsletter that runs without any weekly involvement from the creator. This also includes pitching products when a subscriber expresses interest, rather than on a set schedule.
Today, let’s dive into the advanced automations so that you can fully automate your content and go on a guilt free vacation!
Advanced: An evergreen newsletter
The first step is to set up an evergreen newsletter that has all your best content laid out week-by-week.
Before we do that you need to change your mindset to separate the publish date from the value of the article. Just because you wrote something a year ago doesn’t make it less valuable than something you wrote this week. In fact, new subscribers are often missing out on your best content because it’s buried in the archives in favor of whatever is newest.
Instead we’re going to craft a newsletter sequence that’s a few months long and highlights all your best content. Then you can add new articles to the end as they are published (or, even better, in the order that makes the most sense for a reader to experience them).
In this case I used a sequence for each month to keep my automation streamlined. To see all the emails in that sequence simply click on it to open it inline (this is one of the most delightful aspects of ConvertKit’s visual automations feature).
Next I have all the send days for each sequence unchecked, except for Monday so that each subscriber will only get one email per week.
Note: If you want some emails to still go to all your subscribers at the same time you could set two different schedules. For example, on Mondays your automated email newsletter could send to each person based on how long they’ve been subscribed. Then on Thursdays you could send a broadcast to everyone at the same time. This would be perfect for announcing an upcoming speaking gig, a sale, or anything else that is time- specific.
Gathering interest in your product or service
Once we have our evergreen newsletter in place we want a way to determine if a subscriber is interested in our product. The idea is to pitch them only when they want to hear about it, rather than on the same schedule as everyone else.
To do that we’re going to add tags to subscribers when they take a few different actions.
1. Clicking a link in an email
Throughout my evergreen newsletter emails I like to tag people who click on particular links. So if you click through to a podcasting tutorial, I might tag you as being interested in my podcast course.
Or in our example, if you click through to an article on self-publishing your book we’d tag you as being interested in purchasing Nathan’s (our founder) book Authority.
Now we can separate the subscribers who are most ready for a pitch from those who are just casually reading the content.
2. Visiting the product sales page
The next way we should mark a subscriber as interested is if they visit the sales page for that product.
Wait, what?
Yep, we’re tracking all the pages a subscriber visits through the ConvertKit WordPress plugin. It starts by checking a simple box in your ConvertKit settings to pass the subscriber ID back along with your outbound links.
Then inside your WordPress blog you can select the tag you want added when they visit that particular page:
Auto-pitch a product
When pitching a product you’ll use a simple two-part automation. First it is triggered when the “Interested: Authority” tag is added. Then we need to remove subscribers from our evergreen newsletter. This will stop them from receiving your weekly newsletter during the product pitch.
Then at the end of the pitch we need to put them back in the evergreen newsletter automation. This is for the subscribers who receive the pitch, but don’t end up purchasing.
All our pitch emails are included inside the “Pitch: Authority” sequence. So this works great and looks nice and condensed whether you have 2 emails or 12 to pitch your product.
How to Handle Purchasers
Now for everyone who purchased Authority, the e-commerce integration (in this case Gumroad) will add the “Purchase: Authority” tag. That triggers an event that pulls them forward to the next phase of our automation (events always pull a subscriber forward to that point in the automation).
Here we can send them content about getting the most from their purchase. Pulling them forward also means they’ll skip the rest of the pitch emails and be put back in the evergreen newsletter automation.
Once they complete the “After purchase content” sequence they’ll be added back to the evergreen newsletter.
Move subscribers back to the main sequence
Once the subscriber is back in the main sequence ConvertKit will automatically skip over all the sequence emails they’ve received before and let them pick up right where they left off.
Later on you could have a trigger to pitch another product, which would work just like the pitch automation above.
Then as you publish more articles you can just add them to the end of your evergreen newsletter automation. That way you’re extending your evergreen funnel rather than trapping yourself on the content treadmill through one-off broadcast emails.
This entire setup is perfect for automating everything so you can focus on creating new content or products, but what if you have something that you want everyone to see at the same time, no matter where they are in your automations?
That could be a book launch, a new podcast, or some other big announcement.
Sometimes you want to make a one-time pitch to all subscribers. Here’s how.
The first, and most obvious option is to just send a broadcast email on a day other than the day your evergreen newsletter sends. If you are only automatically sending once or twice per week then you can send a second or third email on special occasions.
The second option is to jump into your email template used by your automated emails and add a little banner to the top or bottom.
This is effectively what Tim Ferriss did when his new Tribe of Mentors book was released. He added a pre-roll message to every one of his podcast episodes mentioning the new book and asking everyone to go get it. It didn’t matter if you were listening to an episode recorded 2 years ago or the one that went live last week, you heard about the new book.
Focus on creating new work
With this setup you will have much more free time to focus on learning new skills and creating new work. Best of all, if you take a couple weeks off for the holidays, your audience won’t even notice!
Here are a few articles from our knowledgebase that will help you take advantage of all of these new features inside of ConvertKit:
