Evergreen Marketing — How To Experiment With Automated Campaigns

If you ask the Instagram ads, an evergreen marketing strategy will save your life. It will clear your acne, clean your house and get your entire family out of debt. Needless to say, it seems like “evergreen marketing” is the latest mythical, top-secret strategy in the entrepreneurship industry.

But what is this evergreen thing all about? The truth is, it’s not as complicated (nor as foolproof) as it sounds.

They name “evergreen marketing” comes from the evergreen tree. Evergreens, as they’re called, grow and hold onto their green leaves all year. They don’t turn orange and lose leaves in autumn, nor do they go dormant in winter.

So in essence, an evergreen marketing strategy is one that aims to attract, nurture and make offers to people all year round. The strategy, which acts like a hypothesis, asks you to experiment with an automated marketing system.

In this article, I'll offer you the structure of that experiment. We'll do it the old fashioned, science fair way — with materials, procedures and results. But before we get into it, let’s get a few core principles out of the way first:

1. The objective of all marketing is to build relationships and trust.
2. Everything we do is an experiment. Strategies are our hypotheses, they attempt to direct the action we take and then make sense of the results.
3. If you think about it, nothing is really ever all that complicated.

If that sounds good to you, let's go ahead and drop into... 

The Evergreen Marketing Experiment

Hypothesis: If we create an automated system to attract, nurture and make offers to people all of the time, then we will increase our number of sales.

Materials:

1. Offer. We need something to sell. It goes without saying that if you’re marketing something all year round, it should probably be available for purchase all year round as well. If you’re launching a product or service for the first time, an evergreen strategy is probably not the right move — a live launch is probably more your style. Evergreen marketing is great for telling people, on autopilot, about an offer you’re confident in.
2. Lead Magnet. We need a way to signal to potential customers that we exist. Depending on where they are in the buying process, they may or may not even know they “need” what we’re selling. Either way, we need a way to capture their interest — to get their information before they disappear from our lives forever. More often than not, this is going to be...
3. Email. We gotta stay in touch. If you know they’re ready to buy (aka a warm lead) this communication might be very direct. If this is the first they’re hearing of any of this, we’ll want to take a bit more time building trust with something like a welcome sequence.
4. Forms. Forms are how we collect contact information, so they’re important (but often neglected) in this process.
5. Pages. Forms live on pages. Pages don’t have to be complicated — you’re reading this on a page — but there do tend to be quite a few pages in the evergreen marketing process. A landing page is the page where you collect the email address. Sales page is where you make the offer. Thank you page is where you...well, you get it.
6. Copywriting. Aha! You almost thought I forgot didn’t you!? Well, I didn’t. Copywriting is the lifeblood of this whole process. Everywhere you look, there is copywriting. In fact, you’re reading copywriting right now. Gotcha.

Procedure:

Gathering these materials, we then put together an experiment to test our hypothesis. Is it true that creating an automated marketing system will increase my number of sales? There’s only one way to find out.

Our experiment is to first test whether a system like this makes sense at all — to put together the least complicated automated marketing strategy and see what happens. Luckily for you, I’ve just outlined the least complicated evergreen strategy above, but let's go over it again here. 

The Least Complicated Evergreen Marketing Strategy

You’ll want a lead magnet, something that attracts your ideal client or customer to your work. You’ll want a landing page where you talk about that lead magnet, and a form on that page where they submit their information.

Once you’ve got their name and email, you’ll want to enroll them into an automated email campaign — most likely a welcome sequence followed by a sales sequence.

(There are lots of classes, Notion templates and support threads helping you do this in our membership The Study.)

Once we’ve set up this basic system, we are going to continue to experiment, determining over time which variables work best to achieve our desired results.

Variables may include:

• What lead magnet would your ideal client or customer be most attracted to?
• What subject line will get the most opens and clicks?
• How soon should we start “selling”?

Like any strategic marketing decision, putting this experiment together requires a fundamental understanding of what I call Offer Design — the who, what, where, when and why of your product or service.

It’s harder than you’d think to nail down this messaging, which is why Offer Design is what I most often help clients get to the bottom of when we work together 1:1. If you want to brainstorm what that might look like for your business, let’s set up a chat.

Understanding automated email campaigns

There’s a chance you’re reading this thinking “Sure, that sounds great...but what the hell is an automated email campaign?” If so, this section is for you.

In the classes I teach at The Study, our business membership site, I often jokingly refer to automation as “hiring a robot.” In marketing, hiring a robot often means linking together a handful of softwares. (I do everything in Kajabi.)

As we discussed earlier, once your potential customer fills out a form on a landing page, you’ll want to enroll them into an automated campaign. Most modern email marketing tools should make this pretty easy.

In Kajabi, for example, I’d create a landing page from within the “Pages” section. On that page, I’d drop in an “Opt-In Form” block.

Once I add the Opt-in Form block, I’ll want to actually create the form itself. It’s important that we have specific forms for each lead magnet, because we want to be able to speak directly to people based on the actions they’ve taken.

I tend to stick with name and email for lead magnet forms, but you’d technically be able to collect any information you might want — birthdays, company names, etc. might be relevant, depending on what you’re selling and to whom.

Now here’s where the fun happens. We need this form to talk to our email campaign. Basically, when someone fills out this form, we need our system to run over to the emails and yell “Go!”

This is where automation comes in. Automation, in marketing, can often be expressed in “When/Then” statements. When someone submits their name and email to this form, then subscribe them to this campaign.

In this particular example, when someone submits the form to watch Internet Business 101, then they are subscribed to a welcome sequence — three emails sent over a week diving deeper into the topics covered in the workshop.

Once they complete that welcome sequence, we do the same exact type of automation, but now our “When/Then” statement changes: When someone receives the last email in the welcome sequence, then subscribe them to the sales sequence.

However! This part of the automation also requires an “If.”

Because we have no interest in selling people something they already own, we now actually want to say: When someone receives the last email in the welcome sequence, then subscribe them to the sales sequence if they do not already have access to The Study.

Essentially, you can think of this like a big Choose Your Own Adventure type of map. Each automation is a decision your system is helping you make. Your marketing system should be able to look at the data you have about the people on your list and determine what messages they receive, and when. That is how an evergreen marketing campaign works.

Now What?

So now you know what an evergreen marketing strategy is. You understand its significance and how it works. You know that the only way to really know whether or not it’ll work for you is to experiment and see, and you know that’ll only work if you have an offer that’s available all the time.

The question now is: What on Earth do I do next?

If you ask me, I’d say go grab a coffee or a tea. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb and open up a blank page. Think of your dream client or customer — the person that comes to mind when you think, “Holy shit, if they bought my stuff I’d be over the moon.”

Write that person a letter. Tell them why you care so much about helping and/or delighting them with the offers you’ve designed.

The more you get in the habit of writing this type of love letter, the more you’ll build your copywriting muscle. When you feel like you’ve got enough to say, hop back up to the top of this page and put together your least complicated evergreen campaign.

And when in doubt, don’t forget you can always ask for help.