Are you tired of trying to keep all your doTERRA prospect emails in a spreadsheet, on sticky notes, in a Google Doc – or even worse not even having email addresses? You can save yourself tons of work and increase your results by automating the whole process by setting up an email database with email marketing software.

Please note that this part of my FREE How to Sell doTERRA Online Training. If you haven’t already, click here to see the complete training.

The basic idea is that you collect email addresses from your prospects in person, on Facebook, on your blog – really anywhere you want. Then as you add each person that individual person gets sent a sequence of emails in an order that you set up ahead of time.

So say on day one – person #1 gets email #1

On day two – person #2 gets email #1 and person two doesn’t get an email

and so on until day seven – person #1 gets email #2 and person #32 gets email #1

You set the emails up in an order that make logical sense of how you would like them to be introduced to the product. You can even have multiple sequences and multiple lists for different kinds of prospects.

So how do you get all this setup? The first step is to choose an email provider, then set up a form to collect the email addresses, put the form where you want to collect the emails, then set up the emails that will go out and then tweak things until it’s perfect, so basically forever.

Step #1 – Choose an Email Provider

Why you need email marketing software

It’s very important right from the beginning to set up a way to collect email addresses from your readers and send them emails. You need an email marketing service to do this with.

You can’t just send emails from your private email account to a whole bunch of people or they will get marked as spam. Plus, that would take forever and people need to be able to unsubscribe so you will be compliant with spam laws.

Plus, with email marketing providers you can do things like have a form on your blog to collect the addresses, manage contacts and see which emails they have received, schedule emails, have multiple groups of subscribers (such as prospects and people on your current team), add images to emails and even do more advanced things like do drip emails, which sends a sequence of emails in order after each person subscribes or tag people based on links they click or other behaviors.

Your email list will prove to be a very important asset to you and you will want one right from the beginning.

For now, start by choosing which provider you will use. I recommend you choose one of the following:

MailerLite

This is a good provider to start with because it is free for up to 1,000 subscribers and their free plan includes all the features, such as autoresponders, sophisticated webforms, reporting and full support options – which is just insanely awesome.

They have a good explanation here of how their email automation works. Best of all, their pricing is the best I have seen in the industry.

ConvertKit

I’m super in love with ConvertKit because it’s so easy to use. I have tons of forms, campaigns and tags. I can do cool things like when someone first signs up for my email list, I can ask them to choose one of six options that best describes them and when they click the link, it automatically signs them up for an automation/drip sequence and tags them and unsubscribes them from the sequence they were on.

And then, later on, say they click a link to sign up for doTERRA but don’t actually sign up, I can start them on another sequence that’s a bit more aggressive since I know they are interested but not quite ready to sign up.

And I can create segments, which are filters, so I can say things like I want to know people who signed up before this date, clicked the enroll link, are in this sequence and have read this blog post.

Then I can send an email just to those people. It’s a very cool, fun and easy to use program. I’ve tried several other email marketing programs and looked into a lot more complex programs, but ConvertKit is the best, hands down.

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Step #2 – Set Up a Form to Collect the Email Addresses

There are a ton of different ways and places you can collect email addresses. With the services mentioned above, you can add any emails you already have by hand or import them from a spreadsheet or .txt file or even just copy and paste them. All the services offer a way to create a basic form to collect email addresses.

It can be as simple as choosing a basic look and copying and pasting some code into a widget on the sidebar of your blog or adding a tab in Facebook. Or they will host the form for you and you can have a link so if a prospect clicks on the link, they will go to a form and put their email to sign up for your mailing list.

Email collection forms can also get really fancy and expensive, but I’ve found they really don’t need to be and that location is way more important than what they look like.

Step #3 – So where’s the best place to put the form?

I’ve done a ton of testing over the years and hands down I get the most email signups with my form is in my header. You may be able to see it in my header right now. If not, it’s because ConvertKit hides the form if you are already signed up for my email list.

It’s a good idea to put it in a few other places on your blog too. And if you really want to increase signups you can do something like have a lead magnet, so say something like if you sign up for my mailing list I’ll send you this free pdf.

A good example of a leader magnet that doTERRA has already created for you are doTERRA’s eBooks, which any compliant blog is ok to link to or download and send to a reader in their first or multiple emails.

Step #4 – Set up the Emails

You will probably want to set up some automated emails that send on a drip, like I talk about at the beginning of this article. There are tons of strategies and experts out there to tell you what emails to set out when, but the main idea is to kind of teach them a class over a series of emails, kind of like:

Email #1 – Hi. Nice to Meet You. I’m Rebecca.

Email #2 – I personally started using doTERRA when . . .

Email #3 – Some of my favorite ways to use doTERRA are . . .

Email #4 – Here’s a free printable gift for you

Email #5 – Here are some answers to common questions people have

Email #6 – Here are some common excuses people have to not sign up

Email #7 – Here’s why you should sign up

Of course, all of these emails should have a way for them to sign up or to go to your blog for more information, but most of the emails should focus on being educational, not pushy.

Then you will also want to send out occasional broadcast emails, or the kind where you send out the same email to everyone on your team all at once. So an example of this would be one at the beginning of the month telling them about any promotions doTERRA is having that month.

Here are more posts on my blog of some important steps to take next:

10 Best Tips on How to Build An Email List Fast