WTF is an automated customer journey and why do you need to worry about it? How does marketing automation apply to email marketing, and why on earth are we still using the term 'customer journey' when we mean something else entirely? Grab yourself a hot cuppa and sit comfortably because you're about to find out the answers to these (and even more) questions that are keeping you up at night!Ready? Let's do this. SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:27) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (5:02) What's a customer journey (or buyer's journey?)(9:02) What is an email marketing journey?(12:59) Attraction stage - growing your email list.(17:20) Consideration stage - educating your email list.(21:31) Think about your 'core content' strategy.(25:23) Purchase stage - selling to your email list.(28:02) Selling automatically with email marketing.(35:18) How can you automate the email customer journey?(37:02) Subject line of the week.What's the customer journey (or buyer’s journey)? You see, we're talking about the 'customer journey' or 'buyer's journey' here today, but it's probably the wrong phrase. It's what all the marketing books call it, but we're very much talking about someone coming into your world and joining your email list here (and all that comes after). So this makes them a subscriber or a prospect, not necessarily customers (not just yet). The 'customer journey' technically only kicks in when someone buys from you, but we're looking at what happens before this.So what you're about to read is to do with taking someone from the stage of awareness (finding out you exist) all the way to the purchasing stage (when they buy from you and become actual customers). But everyone calls it 'customer journey', so let's go with that. What is an email marketing customer journey?When you add email marketing into the mix, you can think of the journey someone goes through from being a stranger, then a subscriber, and eventually a customer. We have a very trackable, direct response journey that takes people from strangers to customers using emails, and that happens in 3 phases:Awareness or attraction, which, in the world of email is about building and growing your list. Consideration. This is about educating your email list. And purchase, which is about making the right offers and getting the sale.While these sound like very separate steps, they're not! And they can't be - they shouldn't be viewed in that way. Because when someone joins your list, you can't just leave them for a while with the promise to be back with some consideration content later. It doesn't work that way. So don't create standalone pieces of content that each sits in one stage - you want each element to work together.By using email marketing, you can merge awareness into consideration and then consideration into purchase very easily. Because as soon as people give us their email addresses and join our list, we can give them consideration content and make offers with every email they get. The reason why marketers get results when putting subscribers through an email marketing journey is that they are foreshadowing the final outcome and ultimate destination - i.e. to sell! And in order to do that, you have to attract the right email subscribers who are going to buy from you. So use the right language to bring them in!It's also worth...