Aseem Badshah
However, as a small business or a scrappy startup, you may not have a full-fledged email marketing system in place, or maybe you’ve done so well building your business on inbound leads and referrals that you haven’t invested in lead nurturing yet.
Either way, follow these steps for a completely free way to make the most of the email addresses and lead data available to you in Socedo.
Step 1: Import Leads into a Free Email Software
Keeping track of your leads in a spreadsheet isn’t going to cut it if you really want to convert them. Start by choosing an email marketing software. There are dozens of options out there, many with free starting packages.
We recommend signing up for a free version of MailChimp. It’s easy to use, including a range of automation features, and it also has the benefit of being the highest rated email tool in its category on G2 Crowd.
The free plan allows you to add up to 2,000 email addresses, or contacts. When you’re ready for more emails, you can upgrade to the Growing Business plan, which starts at $30 per month and scales up depending on how many contacts you’re going to add.
Pro Tip: Remember that not every lead you export from Socedo will be a perfect fit or ready to buy, so you’ll want to clear out disqualified leads over time. You can also delete your unsubscribed leads, which will help limit the number of contacts and thus the cost of MailChimp.
Export a CSV of your leads from Socedo on the campaign Reports page.
Create a List in MailChimp for your Socedo leads. You can upload all of your Socedo export emails in one place. Just start with one List to get the ball rolling.
Step 2: Create a Nurture Campaign
Create a Campaign in Mailchimp to nurture your Socedo leads. Start with a simple Automation campaign that sends when a new lead is added to the list you created.
We recommend your first touch be a plain-text email, short, with a single call-to-action. Keep it light; you can even reference that you’re reaching out because they were tweeting about your industry. See the email below that we send to leads found via our Socedo campaign that targets marketing operations and analytics professionals.
Mailchimp’s free plan also comes with out-of-the-box HTML email templates. Use these in your ongoing nurture emails to give your brand consistency and add images. Populate your general nurture Campaign with 3-5 emails, with content and CTAs that will entice your target audience, and schedule these emails about one week apart. Here’s one of our most popular nurture emails that perform about 50% better for opens and clicks and 25% better for conversions than our typical emails.
Pro Tip: Create multiple Lists and Campaigns for different personas, or one for each Socedo campaign, so you can send the most relevant content.
Step 3: Add New Leads Automatically
Now that you’ve set up the basics, let’s take it one step further and automate this process end-to-end, using a couple more free tools.
Sign up for HubSpot’s free CRM. You’ll be able to keep track of your leads, log sales activity, and most importantly, use Socedo’s integration, so you don’t have to manually export your leads. Turn on the integration in the Campaign Settings page of Socedo.
When Socedo finds a new lead with an email address from your campaign, it will automatically sync the contact into your HubSpot CRM database nightly.
Finally, sign up for Zapier and use this pre-built Zap to automatically add each new contact that Socedo syncs into HubSpot directly into your Mailchimp list. If you built your nurture Campaign with an Automation trigger to send to new list members, then new leads will start receiving emails from you right away!
